Note 2 — Chapter I · SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL ASPECTS OF MIND

There is much interest and significance in the matter of children’s first learning the use of “I” and other self-words—just how they learn them and what they mean by them. Some discussion of the matter, based on observation of two children, will be found in Human Nature and the Social Order; and more recently I have published a paper in the Psychological Review (November, 1908) called A Study of the Early Use of Self-Words by a Child. “I” seems to mean primarily the assertion of will in a social medium of which the child is conscious and of which his “I” is an inseparable part. It is thus a social idea and, as stated in the text, arises by differentiation of a vague body of personal thought which is self-consciousness in one phase and social consciousness in another. It has no necessary reference to the body.