The influence of the social factor in determining self-consciousness is largely bound up with the process of imitation. It is a conspicuous merit of Professor Baldwin that he has brought this point into full prominence. He distinguishes two phases of imitation — the projective and the ejective. In the projective stage, imitation is as yet relatively unsuccessful; the mode of activity imitated and the experiences connected with its exercise are as yet more or less beyond the reach of the imitator; they have not yet become part of his existence. The conception of himself involves a contrast between what he actually is or does, and what he is trying to be or do; and this coincides with the contrast between himself and the person imitated. In so far as this is the case, his conception of the other person is projected/ it contains elements which do not enter into the conception of his own present self, elements which he is only trying to assimilate and incorporate in the conception of himself. On the other hand, when and so far as his imitative efforts have succeeded, this contrast ceases. His conception of himself coincides with his conception of the other person. In thinking of the other person, he simply ascribes his own experiences to the other person, — he ejects, or throws them out into the other person, instead of projecting, or regarding them as something beyond what he has himself actually attained. "For example, last year I thought of my friend W. as a man who had great skill on the bicycle and who wrote readily on the typewriter; my sense of his personality included these accomplishments, in what I have called a 'projective' way. My sense of myself did not have these elements, except as my thought of my normal capacity to acquire delicate movements was comprehensive. But now, this year, I have learned to do both these things. I have taken the elements formerly recognised in W.'s personality, and by imitative learning brought them over to myself. I now think of myself as one who rides a 'wheel' and writes on a 'machine.' But I am able to think of myself thus only as my thought includes the personal accomplishments of W. ... So the truth we now learn is this: that very many of the particular marks which I now call mine, when I think of myself, have had just this origin. I have first found them in my social environment, and by reason of my social and imitative disposition, have transferred them to myself by trying to act as if they were true of me, and so coming to find out that they are true of me. And further, all the things I hope to learn, to acquire, to become, all — if I think of them in a way to have any clear thought of my possible future — are now, before I acquire them, possible elements of my thought of others, of the social 'alter,' or of what, considered generally, we may call the 'socius.'"*

* Prof. Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development, pp. 1011.

To see the full importance of imitation in the development of the idea of Self, we must especially consider the case of children. Children have to learn from their social environment all that is necessary to make them members of the society into which they are born. Unless they are born with the connate aptitudes and impulses for acquiring the ideas and the ways of acting current in the community to which they belong, their existence is resented by the community. They have little chance of survival in savage communities, and even in the more civilised their position is a very uncomfortable one. They are for the most part locked up in prisons or lunatic asylums. The normal child is perpetually engaged in acquiring the habits of thought and action of its elders, and in doing so is constantly developing the idea of Self by a process of imitation. Baldwin notes that the child has two characteristic mental attitudes, corresponding respectively to the "projective" and "ejective" phases of imitation. In the first, he is receptive, submissive, and respectful. In the second, he is aggressive, selfcomplacent, and disdainful or patronising. The two attitudes correspond to different social relations. "The child's sense of himself is . . . one pole of a relation; and which pole it is to be, depends on the particular relation which the other pole, over which the child has no control, calls on it to be. If the other person involved presents uncertain, ominous, dominating, instructive features, or novel imitative features, then the self is 'subject' over against what is 'projective.' He recognises new elements of personal suggestion not yet accommodated to. His consciousness is in the learning attitude; he imitates, he serves, he trembles, he is a slave. But on the other hand, there are persons to whom his attitude has a right to be different. In the case of these the dialectic has gone further. He has mastered all their features, he can do himself what they do, he anticipates no new developments in his intercourse with them ; so he 'ejects' them, as the psychological expression is; for an 'eject' is a person whose consciousness has only those elements in it which the individual who thinks of that consciousness is able, out of his own store of experience, to read into it. It is ejective to him, for he makes it what he will, in a sense. Now that is what the brothers and sisters, notably the younger ones, are to our youthful hero. They are his 'ejects'; he knows them by heart, they have no thoughts, they do no deeds, which he could not have read into them by anticipation. So he despises them, practises his superior activities on them, and tramples them under foot."*

* Op. cit., pp. 1819. Psychological Review, vol. ii., No. 5, pp. 454455.