In this social interest probably arise the germs--but only the germs--of the sense of personality. Some, indeed, go so far as to urge that we learn to know ourselves only through knowing others. The genetic order, so far as there is an order, is, they say, not first the ego and then the alter, but first the mother and companions and then through them the self. Or, to put this point of view in a less questionable form, it is only through the reaction of one on the other that the two are differentiated. Be this as it may, it is only through the action of environment on the organism, and the reaction of the organism on the environment in behaviour, that experience becomes polarized into subject and object. Let it be clearly understood that for the animal, in all probability, subject and object are not clearly distinguished, and set over against each other in the antithesis of thought. Only late in mental development are the self and the world distinguished in subtle analysis as different aspects of the common experience in which both have their inseparable being. Animals, and perhaps the majority of mankind, never trouble themselves about object and subject as clearly realized products of conception and reflective thought. For these concepts are exceedingly subtle. And here, too, the external aspect of experience has the precedence, so far as there is precedence. A healthy lad from the moment he gets up in the morning till the moment he goes to bed, lives chiefly in the objective aspect of experience, an aspect which is in us chiefly associated with the products in consciousness of the leading senses of sight and hearing. But the subjective aspect creeps in when he is hurt, when he is hungry, when he is fatigued. He does not argue about the matter, or formulate it in definite terms. He just dimly feels that the interest has somehow shifted. Still more dimly does the animal feel that, apart from external interests which prompt nine-tenths of its behaviour, chiefly through the senses of sight, hearing, and smell, there are also matters in which the interest has somehow shifted to his own body. For the germ of self is essentially an embodied self. And perhaps the emotions, which ring through the system for some time after the external cause has been removed, serve in some degree to aid in this dimly felt shifting of interest.