whether by way of cooperation and assistance or rivalry and
competition. Mind as a concrete thing is precisely the power to
understand things in terms of the use made of them; a socialized
mind is the power to understand them in terms of the use to which
they are turned in joint or shared situations. And mind in this
sense is the method of social control.

3. Imitation and Social Psychology. We have already noted the
defects of a psychology of learning which places the individual
mind naked, as it were, in contact with physical objects, and
which believes that knowledge, ideas, and beliefs accrue from
their interaction. Only comparatively recently has the
predominating influence of association with fellow beings in the
formation of mental and moral disposition been perceived. Even
now it is usually treated as a kind of adjunct to an alleged
method of learning by direct contact with things, and as merely
supplementing knowledge of the physical world with knowledge of
persons. The purport of our discussion is that such a view makes
an absurd and impossible separation between persons and things.
Interaction with things may form habits of external adjustment.
But it leads to activity having a meaning and conscious intent
only when things are used to produce a result. And the only way
one person can modify the mind of another is by using physical
conditions, crude or artificial, so as to evoke some answering
activity from him. Such are our two main conclusions. It is
desirable to amplify and enforce them by placing them in contrast
with the theory which uses a psychology of supposed direct
relationships of human beings to one another as an adjunct to the
psychology of the supposed direct relation of an individual to
physical objects. In substance, this so-called social psychology