§ 7. Ideal Construction as a Cooperative Process. — Through language, ideal combination becomes a function not of the individual merely, but of society. It may be confidently asserted that the capacity for ideational thought would be of little use to a solitary animal. Such thinking is essentially a social function. Other animals cooperate in work and play, but only men cooperate in thinking. Where many men are united in striving to realise a common end, each single mind is, so to speak, part of one great collective mind. The ideas occurring to each are communicated to all. What occurs to A, to B, or to C respectively may be valueless: but the ideas of A, B, C, taken in combination, may form a real advance: even in combination they may be futile, yet when they reach the mind of D, they may fall on fertile soil and suggest some feasible plan of action or plausible line of thought.

The debt which the individual owes to social intercourse by means of language is twofold. He is placed by it in possession of data which he could never have acquired by his own personal experience. His thinking is based not only on what he himself has seen, heard, and done, but also on what others have seen, heard, and done. In the second place, he receives from others not merely the results of their observations, but the results of their trains of thought. In both ways his debt to his social environment is immense. His debt is not merely confined to interchange of ideas by means of language. Imitation also plays a large part. In doing or attempting to do what others have done before him, he rethinks the thoughts which have passed through their minds; and he also in the same process acquires novel ideas, inasmuch as imitation is rarely, if ever, exact reproduction of that which is imitated. The actions imitated are usually more or less modified and lead to new results in the case of each imitator. What has been said holds true for the relations of the men of the same generation to each other; but its application to successive generations is even more important. Every child in learning the language of its ancestors assimilates in outline the whole system of ideas, the whole system of conceptual analysis and synthesis, which has been acquired by the mental and bodily activity of past generations. It acquires knowledge by question and answer, and by a gradual divination of the meaning of words, as used in ordinary conversation, far more than by direct personal experience. "The words and sentences that fall upon" the "ear" of a child" and are soon upon his lips, express not so much his subjective experience, as the common experience of his kind which becomes, as it were, an objective rule or measure, to which his shall conform. Why, for example, does a child have no difficulty about the relation of substance and qualities that has given philosophers so much trouble? and why do all children understand or seem to understand it alike, whatever their experience may have been? Why? but because the language put into their mouths, and which they must e'en use, settles the point for them, one and all; involving, as it does, a metaphysical theory which, whether in itself unexceptionable or not, has been found serviceable through all the generations of men."* We use our own private experiences "mainly to decipher and verify the readymade scheme of knowledge that is given to us en bloc with the words of our mothertongue. This scheme is the result of the thinking, less or more conscious, and mainly practical, of all the generations of articulately speaking men, passed on with gradual increase from each to each."*

The educational influence of one human generation on another is by no means wholly dependent upon the use of language. The importance of the part played by imitation cannot be exaggerated. What men have learned to do in the past, the child has to learn to do over again in its own individual case. This is only possible in so far as it attends to the behaviour of its elders, and strives to imitate them. As a matter of fact, the period of childhood is mainly occupied in attempting to reproduce the modes of action current in the society to which the child belongs. Even the play of children is penetrated through and through by this imitative character. Children can take the place of their elders in the next generation only by learning from them those ways of acting which are necessary for the general scheme of social organisation. But in this process they acquire not only bodily dexterities, but also systematic combinations of ideas which they never could have attained by their own unassisted efforts. Besides this, the material environment of human beings is in a large measure a creation of human thought transmitted from one generation to another.