How, then, do we actually learn the existence of feeling purposive experience outside our own? The answer is obvious. We learn it by the very same process by which we come to the clear consciousness of ourselves. It is a pure blunder in the subjectivist psychology to assume that somehow the fact of my own existence as a centre of experience is a primitive revelation. It is by the process of putting our purposes into act that we come to be aware of them as our purposes, as the meaning of our lives, the secrets of what we want of the world. And, from the very fact of our existence in a society, every step in the execution of a purpose or the satisfaction of a want involves the adjustment of our own purposive acts to those of the other members of our social whole. To realise your own ends, you have to take note of the partly coincident, partly conflicting, ends of your social fellows, precisely as you have to take note of your own. You cannot come to the knowledge of the one without coming by the same route and in the same degree to the knowledge of the other. Precisely because our lives and purposes are not self-contained, self-explaining wholes, we cannot possibly know our own meaning except in so far as we know the meaning of our immediate fellows. Self-knowledge, apart from the knowledge of myself as a being with aims and purposes conditioned by those of like beings in social relations with myself, is an empty and senseless word. The recent psychological studies of the part which imitation plays in all learning make this result still more palpably manifest. For they reveal the fact that, to an enormous extent, it is by first repeating without conscious aim of its own the significant purposive acts of others that a child first comes to behave with conscious significance itself. It is largely by learning what others mean when they utter a word or execute a movement that the child comes to know his own meaning in using the same word or performing the same movement. Thus we may confidently say that the reality of purposive significant experience which is not my own is as directly certain as the reality of my own experience, and that the knowledge of both realities is inevitably gained together in the process of coming to clear insight into my own practical aims and interests. The inner experience of my fellows is indubitably real to the same degree as my own, because the very existence of my own purposive life is meaningless apart from the equal existence of theirs.[122]