osion to be set off, against which we should
guard ourselves? In one case, his action means to run toward him; in the
other case, to run away. In any case, it is the change he effects in
the physical environment which is a sign to us of how we should conduct
ourselves. Our action is socially controlled because we endeavor to
refer what we are to do to the same situation in which he is acting.

Language is, as we have already seen (ante, p. 15) a case of this joint
reference of our own action and that of another to a common situation.
Hence its unrivaled significance as a means of social direction. But
language would not be this efficacious instrument were it not that
it takes place upon a background of coarser and more tangible use of
physical means to accomplish results. A child sees persons with whom he
lives using chairs, hats, tables, spades, saws, plows, horses, money in
certain ways. If he has any share at all in what they are doing, he is
led thereby to use things in the same way, or to use other things in a
way which will fit in. If a chair is drawn up to a table, it is a sign
that he is to sit in it; if a person extends his right hand, he is to
extend his; and so on in a never ending stream of detail. The prevailing
habits of using the products of human art and the raw materials of
nature constitute by all odds the deepest and most pervasive mode
of social control. When children go to school, they already have
"minds"--they have knowledge and dispositions of judgment which may
be appealed to through the use of language. But these "minds" are the
organized habits of intelligent response which they have previously
required by putting things to use in connection with the way
other persons use things. The control is inescapable; it saturates
disposition. The net outcome of the discussion is that the fundamental
means of control is not personal but intellectual. It is not "moral" in
the sense that a person is moved by direct personal appeal from others,
important as is this method at critical junctures. It consists in
the habits of understanding, which are set up in using objects in
correspondence with others, 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 i