Communication and the Emergence of the Self in the Work of George Herbert Mead

James argued in The Will to Believe and Varieties of Religious Experience that human action is a matter of ends, purposes, goals, and ideas, as well as instincts, drives, discharges, and impulsions. Dealing with experience from the standpoint of society, for George Herbert Mead, meant from the standpoint of communication as necessary to the social order. The self and society originates and develops in communication. C. H. Cooley and Mead argued that the locus of reason was in interaction between the self and society. Mead believed that the data of symbolic interaction offered sociologists their greatest clue to an understanding of society. The fundamental fact of sociation, and that which distinguishes men from animals, is not communication but the ability of men to become objects to themselves through the use of symbols which men themselves create, as well as use, in communication.