Page:Psychology of the Unconscious (1916).djvu/77

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CONCERNING TWO KINDS OF THINKING
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as the training in judgment that the constant use of it affords. In each case, effective judgment is the common judgment.

"Here the object is to point out that it is secured by the development of a function whose rise is directly ad hoc, directly for the social experimentation by which growth in personal competence is advanced as well—the function of speech.

"In language, therefore, to sum up the foregoing, we have the tangible—the actual—the historical—instrument of the development and conservation of psychic meaning. It is the material evidence and proof of the concurrence of social and personal judgment. In it synomic meaning, judged as 'appropriate,' becomes 'social' meaning, held as socially generalized and acknowledged."

These arguments of Baldwin abundantly emphasize the wide-reaching limitations of thinking caused by language.12 These limitations are of the greatest significance, both subjectively and objectively; at least their meaning is great enough to force one to ask one's self if, after all, in regard to independence of thought, Franz Mauthner, thoroughly sceptical, is not really correct in his view that thinking is speech and nothing more. Baldwin expresses himself more cautiously and reservedly; nevertheless, his inner meaning is plainly in favor of the primacy of speech (naturally not in the sense of the spoken word); the directed thinking, or as we might perhaps call it, the thinking in internal speech, is the manifest instrument of culture, and we do not go astray when we say that the powerful work of education which the centuries have given to directed thinking has produced, just through the peculiar development of thinking from the individual subjective into the social objective, a practical application of the human mind to which we owe