Josiah Royce

“ If already within one's own field of work this dependence of the individual upon the work and the reports of his fellows is so extended, what shall be said of the unexplored oceans of truth that lie for each man beyond the shores of his own domain,—oceans of whose lands and wonders he hears frequent, if fragmentary, reports from other men. Yet, in just these oceans of truth lies the universe, the external world, as each man conceives it, so soon as he thinks of what belongs beyond his personal range. ”

“ It is an old observation, that without faith in one's fellows nobody can even stir in this our everyday world. A thorough-going doubter of the data revealed by the social consciousness would have no place in our human universe. For every man the streets of his city are fairly paved for him with reports about what is true in social, legal, commercial, physical, medical, and moral matters. Leave out the substance of all such reports from the beliefs of our supposed doubter, and he could not stir beyond his threshold without sinking in a mire of unconquerable mysteries. ”

“ You will at once observe that all the knowledge embodied for you in the words, the structure, and all the essential traditions of your mother-tongue, and of every other language that you know, will at once vanish. In other words, as pure and naked private Ego, you will be speechless. Language, as you first learned it, was never for your consciousness, your independent invention. ”

“ Thus, then, I insist, neither vividness, nor intrusive resistance to our will, nor peculiarly insistent relation to our muscular experiences, nor regular recurrence, suffice to define the notes of externality as we now are aware of them. It is social community that is the true differentia of our external world.
If I am right, then, a child never gets his belief in our present objective world until he has first got his social consciousness. ”

“ One conscious being may have in his mind any content you please, however fleeting, incommunicable, ineffable, or insane. But if he is to regard given facts which are represented in his own experience as existent also for beings external to himself, his notion of what his social relations to these beings are, will inevitably determine in some measure, and perhaps very deeply, the sorts of facts which he can regard as thus verifiably objective and common in their character. ”

“ I do not often say to myself when thinking of my fellows: 'Yonder people behave as I do, hence they must be alive as I am.' The normal social consciousness runs rather thus: 'When I imitate these people, when I get under the influence of their suggestions, listen receptively to their words, follow their gestures, conform to their customs, accept their authority, well, then I constantly get new ideas, and these new ideas are as such the revelations of yonder minds. ”

“ Evidently, in the first place, even a comparatively small finite number of objects or events can appear as subjectively indeterminate or countless, when this number is represented in and by a given conscious being who is unable to count it, or who will not count it. To perceive multitudes and aggregates as such, and yet to be wholly unaware of what the experienced number is, is very common. The loose change at the bottom of a man's pocket may remain stubbornly countless for his consciousness so long as he merely feels it there, and fears to count lest his spending be checked. ”

“ As a fact, it is much rather a mere restatement in rational fullness of the true spirit of the Kantian deduction, when one seeks to apply Kant's thoughts to the world as viewed on this level of consciousness. In essence the Kantian unity of Apperception and the unity of Experience are nothing but the constantly presupposed unity of our social as distinct from private and inner consciousness. From the point of view of Dualism, the object, as it is in itself, is indeed unknowable, for it the object in itself declines to tell us what its inner life is. ”

“ Pains and passions are vivid, but we all nevertheless refer them to the inner world. Grief may be intrusive, involuntary in its coming, vivid, and persistent. Yet we call it still an internal fact, unless, as at a great funeral, where many mourners weep together, the community of the sorrow makes it for the time seem like a vast physical presence. ”

“ And, oddly enough, everything in the psychology of childhood and of the natural man indicates that it is not, as usually supposed, my idea of myself that is in advance in my own development, but my idea of other selves. Everything I say indicates that my idea of myself, as empirical Ego, is on the whole a social product, due, strangely enough, to my ideas of other people. Self-consciousness, as Hegel loved to point out, is, in fact, always a mutual affair. ”

“ The child that has begun to possess the social consciousness is for the first time in the presence of a supersensual reality. He has objects, viz., the desired ideas of other people,—objects which he continually hopes to win, to imitate, and so far as may be, through representative imitation, to possess. Yet these ideas, these objects, are now conceived as beyond him, and as existent apart from him, so that their esse and their percipi have parted company, as the esse and percipi of the objects of his world of possible private experience never would or could have done. ”

“ And it is the social consciousness that defines a most important attribute of externality. None of the qualities of external things, upon which the psychologists who consider the isolated consciousness have insisted, neither the persistence, nor the involuntary intrusiveness, nor the vividness of our perceptions of the external, nor the feeling of resistance which our muscles give us when we touch objects, nor the regularities of our experience of the physical world, seem to me characters sufficient to explain our present consciousness of external reality. ”

“ The inner life is moreover full of permanent possibilities of experience which we still regard, despite their regularity of recurrence, as internal. Sleepiness normally recurs as regularly, as vividly, as intrusively, as irresistibly as the darkness of night. We, however, regard sleepiness as an internal, the darkness as an external fact, because all normal observers can verify darkness together, while as to sleepiness they do not all agree. When one man says "It is night," all his fellows assent. ”

“ Therefore, nearly every child in his movements of cheerful, intellectual life, conceives himself as almost any one,—a coachman, a horse, a giant, a fairy, a king, a bird,—rather than as what we regard as his literal self; and he knows himself chiefly in terms of such imitated play personalities. Even his more prosaic moments are still full of an affected self-hood, just at the very points when he most nearly approaches self-consciousness. ”

“ When once we have discovered this fact, we come to agree that a rainbow cannot, as it is seen, be the real physical thing at all. It must be a show thing, based upon physical realities, whose nature becomes a topic for further investigation. Here, you see, the possibility of mutual verification of our space—localizations—is used in a relatively a priori fashion to distinguish between the internal and the external facts of our experience. If the visible rainbow were an externally substantial object, it would have the same verifiable place for all percipients. ”

“ Can a number that is not determinate, that is neither 1, nor 2, nor n, nor n±r, nor any other determinate number, be regarded as being really embodied in the actual world? Can there be in the external world a countless aggregate? ”

“ We blind ourselves too often to these considerations by reason of a very artificial theory that is customary in popular, and often in technical psychologies, concerning the origin of our belief in the existence of our fellows. Many imagine this belief to be due to a process of induction from a single case,—an induction whereby each man of us first, as it were, supposing himself to be alone in a still dead physical world, says to himself:—'I exist, having this body; I exist, too, in a world of real physical things. Now in my external world there are bodies that move very much as mine does. ”

“ Here in his world he perceives fascinating beings. It is not needful to suppose that he perceives them explicitly as beings in what we call the external world. The distinction between outer and inner is still, at best, only half developed in his mind. But he at least perceives these things as facts imposed upon him; and he perceives, too, that they are fascinating. These beings act, and the child at length finds his own body imitating the acts of these beings, and takes delight in the knowledge of the agreement. ”

“ Problems in the modern Theory of Functions have led to this definition, which, of course, I have neither the right nor the time to judge here. I may say that the criterion of social verifiability, as I have now defined it, seems to me to permit of the acceptance of the objective existence, in our external world, of really countless magnitudes and aggregates, and so of infinite aggregates, in case you can so define them that in theory at least they could possibly be identified by any observer you please, and distinguished from all other objects. ”

“ The child learns to play, to show things, to point at things, and later, to speak of things, and to use things as tools, and as he does so (here is the essential matter) , the child gets an endless flux of new and unexpectedly intelligible ideas about his world,—ideas that are themselves the inseparable accompaniment and meaning of these very imitated activities. All these ideas, I say, the child, by mere association and 'agglutination,' must relate to the perceived beings, whose intelligible activities he has been imitating, when he gets the ideas. ”

“ Well, just so, the infant playing with its fists in the field of vision, or making its first efforts at grasping, is indeed meaning to deal with what we call the external world. But it has as yet no such thought of externality as we have, and it can have no such thought; for our notion of externality involves one great element which cannot be present to the consciousness of the infant until the gradually evolving social consciousness has reached a decidedly advanced stage. ”

“ But since internal phenomena have, indeed, their essence in being perceived, one must then say of such experiences that really indefinable shapes, essentially indefinite sizes and places, have nothing contradictory about them, so far as our inner experience goes, since we constantly experience just such internal things. Why, then, do we so rigidly insist a priori that what is thus a common-place experience in the inner world, does not and cannot hold for the outer world and for the external things? ”

“ But now what I affirm is, that the idea of a real external world, such as the infant has in the first three or four months of life, or such as the extremely unsocial beast of prey may keep for a life-time, must not in the least be confounded with the idea that you and I, ever since we learned to converse freely with our fellows, have possessed of the meaning of externality. ”

“ The axiom that whatever moves must change its place, refers, therefore, only to external physical movements, and refers to them only in so far as, in order to be recognized as external, their characters must be definable as happenings of this or of this type. Could anybody tell what happens when a thing appears to move and yet does not change place, and did this described happening involve other describable physical changes than those of the retina of the eye, then the phenomenon in question would belong to physics instead of merely to psychology. ”

“ In what little I have yet here to suggest as to the psychological importance of imitation as a basis for our developed consciousness, both of ourselves, of our rational powers, whereby we pretend to know truth, and of our external world, I must confess my great indebtedness to the suggestions contained in what my valued friend and colleague, Professor Baldwin, has already published concerning the imitative functions—those so familiar and yet, from the psychological side, so sadly neglected functions, neglected until Tarde and Professor Baldwin began these researches. ”

“ But social communication involves sooner or later differences of opinion, conflict of testimony and frequent evidences of a variety in the experience of different people. At last it comes slowly to one's mind that the experiences of another consciousness, external to mine, cannot themselves be identical with the objects of my experience as mine. The individuals of the social world come to be sharply separated. ”

“ This interest is doubtless in part due to its deep experience of the importance of the persons of its environment for its welfare. They feed it, and supply all its other bodily comforts. By mere association it of course thus learns to regard their faces and movements as peculiarly noteworthy objects. But that, in addition to these results of mere association, there is a genuinely instinctive disposition in the infant, the instinctive disposition of the being destined to social life,—the disposition to react to persons as it reacts to no other objects,—this I cannot very seriously doubt. ”