[2] 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. CHAPTER II SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL ASPECTS OF MIND—CONTINUED. MORAL ASPECT OF THE ORGANIC VIEW—IT IMPLIES THAT REFORM SHOULD BE BASED ON SYMPATHY—USES OF PRAISE AND BLAME—RESPONSIBILITY BROADENED BUT NOT LOST—MORAL VALUE OF A LARGER VIEW—ORGANIC MORALITY CALLS FOR KNOWLEDGE—NATURE OF SOCIAL ORGANIZATION. So far as the moral aspect is concerned, it should be the result of this organic view of mind to make the whole teaching and practice of righteousness more rational and effectual by bringing it closer to fact. A moral view which does not see the individual in living unity with social wholes is unreal and apt to lead to impractical results. Have not the moral philosophies of the past missed their mark, in great part, by setting before the individual absolute standards of behavior, without affording him an explanation for his backwardness or a programme for his gradual advance? And did not this spring from not discerning clearly that the moral life was a social organism, in which every individual or group of individuals had its own special possibilities and limitations? In general such systems, pagan and Christian, have said, “All of us ought to be so and so, but since very few of us are, this is evidently a bad world.” And they have had no large, well-organized, slow-but-sure plan for making it better. Impracticable standards have the same ill effect as unenforcible law; they accustom us to separate theory from practice and make a chasm between the individual and the moral ideal.