tion,' which is commonly known as effort.[1] But, granting for the sake of argument (and only for that sake) that effort is adequately characterized as persistent imitation, two facts still stand out. One is that it is not the imitation of others as such, but difficulty in this imitation, resistance to it, which brings out the self-sense. The phenomenon may arise in an attempt to imitate, but when it arises, it is just not imitative. And the second fact is that the final outcome is not imitative either. "He learns a great number of combinations which are not those he is after" (p. 103; italics mine). He thus learns that he can invent, can vary (p. 104). And these two great lessons are much more important, as Mr. Baldwin justly remarks, "than the mere acquisition of the single thing he sets out to do" (p. 104). "The outcome, that is new " (p. 105). One may still persist in calling invention (the consciousness of the new and its worth) imitation; but whether naming it this does more than expose a self-contradiction, I am not so sure. The manifest fact is, that qua imitator, the child would feel dissatisfied with all these new elements as extraneous and misleading, as failures; would insist, if possible, upon eliminating them and getting back to the simple, 'reinstated' content. This would be imitation—but hardly learning. But once more, I am not interested in detecting a merely personal contradiction. This confusion is inherent in any theory which makes a certain identity of content between persons the criterion of sociality.
The same contradictions turn up in another form in the discussion of the origin of sense of personality. We begin with a projective sense of personality; this is made subjective; then this is 'ejected' in turn. At first, the subjective sense of personality is said to arise by imitation of the projective.[2] But the 'projective' is not personal as such (see his earlier book, pp. 18, 119, 335). Hence no amount of imitative reproduction, or absorption of this as 'copy' would ever give a sense of personality. So the ground shifts, and it is through effort that sense of subjective agency arises (p. 8; cf. p. 231; but particularly p. 337 of former book: "the first germinating nucleus of selfhood over against objecthood"). In other words, personality is here referred to
- ↑ Another example of Mr. Baldwin's large use of the category of imitation comes out here. He starts out to show that all learning is through imitation (p. 101); this, too, in spite of the definition of imitation as reinstatement of an old content! When this latter point becomes obvious, he says: "How can the imitative situation [italics mine] instruct the child?" (p. 103). Then, when the situation, in which imitation plays a minor part, is shown to teach the child, the result is triumphantly accredited to 'imitation.'
- ↑ 2 P. 9; see also pp. 31, 87, 99, 417, 503, 505.
