Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.

On the one hand, there are individual actions such as throwing, pushing, touching, rubbing. It is these individual actions that give rise most of the time to abstraction from objects.

The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.

Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior.

During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions.

The child of three or four is saturated with adult rules. His universe is dominated by the idea that things are as they ought to be, that everyone's actions conform to laws that are both physical and moral - in a word, that there is a Universal Order.