STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 351 



cliildren form similar ideas ? We can see from tlie autobiog- 

 raphy of George Sand liow a clever girl, reflecting on the im- 

 pressive experience of the echo, excogitates such a theory of her 

 double existence ; and we know, too, that the boy Hartley Cole- 

 ridge distinguished among the " Hartleys " a picture Hartley and 

 a shadow Hartley. I have not, however, discovered that children 

 are given to working out and seriously believing a theory of the 

 multiple existence of themselves and other things. 



The prominence of the bodily pictorial element in the child's 

 first idea of self is seen in the tendency to confine personal identity 

 within the limits of an unchanged bodily appearance. The child 

 of six, with his shock of curls, refuses to believe that he is the 

 same as the hairless baby whose photograph the mother shows him. 

 How difiierent, how new a being a child feels on a Sunday morning 

 after the extra weekly cleansing and brushing and draping ! The 

 bodily appearance is a very big slice of the content of most peo- 

 ple's self-consciousness, and to the child it is almost everything. 



But in time the conscious self which thinks and suffers and 

 wills comes to be dimly discerned. I have long thought, and 

 nothing that I have read in the way of argument against the idea 

 has shaken my belief, that a real advance toward this true self- 

 consciousness is marked by the approy^riation and use of the dif- 

 ferent forms of language, " I," " me," " mine." * 



As long as the bodily aspect is uppermost in the idea of self, 

 so long is it natural for the child to speak of himself in the third 

 person by his proper name, as he would speak of any other object 

 of perception. The use of the first person seems to mark a clearer 

 distinction of the ego as subject from its polar opposite the world 

 of objects, and this manifestly involves true self-reflection as dis- 

 tinguished from self-perception i. e., perception and recognition 

 of the bodily self. 



Sometimes the apprehension of a hidden self distinct from the 

 body comes as a sudden revelation, as to little George Sand. 

 Such a swift awakening of self-consciousness is apt to be an 

 epoch-making and memorable moment in the history of the child. 



A father sends me the following notes on the development of self- 

 consciousness : " My girl, three years old, makes an extraordinary 

 distinction between her body and herself. Lying in bed, she shut 

 her eyes and said, ' Mother, you can't see me now.' The mother 

 replied, ' Oh, you little goose, I can see you, but you can't see me.' 



* Preyer argues that the child does not at first hear " I," " me," etc., the nurse and 

 mother speaking to him in the third person : " Nurse says so," " Roland must be good," etc. 

 Exactly. But why do the mother and others make the change about this time, and begin 

 to say I and you ? Is it not precisely because the child is making the advance, and showing 

 that he can understand the language of adults ? 



