(1903)The Genetic Function of Movement and Organic Sensations for Social Consciousness
Margaret Floy Washburn
Vassar College
A useful psychological distinction, though one that has not received much attention so far, is that between a genetic element and a concrete element. By the latter, we mean a process discoverable in our present mental life by introspection, and incapable of further analysis by the method that discovered it; for instance, the sensation red. The simplicity possessed by a process of this type, as it does not necessarily correlate itself with simplicity of underlying physiological process, is also quite probably not the descendant of equal simplicity in the past of mental development. Such a process, simple as it is from the very outset of the individual life, may be in its mental origin far back in the past of the species a fusion of elements now undiscoverable by direct introspective analysis, yet in some cases to be inferred on other grounds, such as for instance the known history of a sense organ. Elements of this historic significance, primitive ingredients at an earlier stage of mental phylogenesis, may be termed genetic elements; a familiar instance would be the Spencerian `nervous shock,' interpreted as the psychic aspect of a nervous shock. As regards their qualitative character, it is evident that in some cases genetic elements may, indeed must, have been entirely unlike anything now experienced as a concrete element. In other cases, the genetic elements that long ago became indistinguishably blended into a process not now analyzable, may have been of a quality not different from concrete elements known at this present stage of mental life.
Now the importance of taking account of the concept of genetic elements becomes apparent whenever we attempt to trace the development of any process in the individual mind. It is impossible, assuming only the mental structures discover-
( 74) -able by our present introspection, to give it continuous and coherent explanation of individual mental growth. There are breaks; the effect is more than the causes; the whole is greater than the structural parts we thought went to compose it. A striking example is to be found in the problem of the rise of social consciousness in the individual. By social consciousness, it is generally agreed, is meant 'ejective' consciousness, the reference of a certain mental process to another mind. Clear, fully realized social consciousness is a late product both in individual development and in the history of the animal mind; its existence in the lower animals is more than doubtful, and its defects in the human child are responsible for the cruelty often displayed by children. The most familiar attempt to explain its rise in the individual child is Professor Baldwin's appeal to imitation. The child, he tells us, early becomes interested in the movements of the persons around him, as possessing much pleasure-pain importance in his life. This interest in and attention to the movements of others leads by virtue of an inborn connection between visual and motor centers to imitation of these movements, whereby the child gets certain experiences. It is thus enabled to interpret the movements it watches, to realize their inner aspect, and to get some consciousness of the mental life of others along with the development of its own. This account of the process of awakening in the social consciousness seems fundamentally probable, but equally evident is the fact that it describes an awakening, not a construction. Given a tendency to project certain mental states into other minds, to refer them outward in all ejective as well as an objective sense, then imitation of movement offers all opportunity; but if you make the child's inference from its own experience to that of others an explanation of the tendency, you are evidently assuming the thing to be explained. How does the child come to have any power at all of thinking of experience as belonging to other minds? Nothing that we can find in our own conscious life at the present time will bridge the gap. We can only say that it is a part of the child's inherited mental constitution to give, when furnished the proper clues, a social interpretation to certain aspects of its experience. Imitation is the only congenital factor here that Professor