COMMON THOUGHT, SCIENCE, AND REFLECTIVE THOUGHT

7.  Common thought.—­Those who have given little attention to the study of the human mind are apt to suppose that, when the infant opens its eyes upon the new world of objects surrounding its small body, it sees things much as they do themselves.  They are ready to admit that it does not know much about things, but it strikes them as absurd for any one to go so far as to say that it does not see things—­the things out there in space before its eyes.

Nevertheless, the psychologist tells us that it requires quite a course of education to enable us to see things—­not to have vague and unmeaning sensations, but to see things, things that are known to be touchable as well as seeable, things that are recognized as having size and shape and position in space.  And he aims a still severer blow at our respect for the infant when he goes on to inform us that the little creature is as ignorant of itself as it is of things; that in its small world of as yet unorganized experiences there is no self that is distinguished from other things; that it may cry vociferously without knowing who is uncomfortable, and may stop its noise without knowing who has been taken up into the nurse’s arms and has experienced an agreeable change.

This chaotic little world of the dawning life is not our world, the world of common thought, the world in which we all live and move in maturer years; nor can we go back to it on the wings of memory.  We seem to ourselves to have always lived in a world of things,—­things in time and space, material things.  Among these things there is one of peculiar interest, and which we have not placed upon a par with the rest, our own body, which sees, tastes, touches, other things.  We cannot remember a time when we did not know that with this body are somehow bound up many experiences which interest us acutely; for example, experiences of pleasure and pain.  Moreover, we seem always to have known that certain of the bodies which surround our own rather resemble our own, and are in important particulars to be distinguished from the general mass of bodies.

Thus, we seem always to have been living in a world of things and to have recognized in that world the existence of ourselves and of other people.  When we now think of “ourselves” and of “other people,” we think of each of the objects referred to as possessing a mind.  May we say that, as far back as we can remember, we have thought of ourselves and of other persons as possessing minds?

Hardly.  The young child does not seem to distinguish between mind and body, and, in the vague and fragmentary pictures which come back to us from our early life, certainly this distinction does not stand out.  The child may be the completest of egoists, it may be absorbed in itself and all that directly concerns this particular self, and yet it may make no conscious distinction between a bodily self and a mental, between mind and body.  It does not explicitly recognize its world as a world that contains minds as well as bodies.