The Interpretation of Experience 5 7 



part of our intellectual development, that he becomes again like 

 a little child, at one with the world. No longer self-conscious 

 in the adolescent discovery of the sharp contrasts in experience 

 and yet self-unconscious as the child who has not yet discovered 

 himself, and has not defined his distinctions, the individual in 

 this third and highest stage again finds in his experience a unity, 

 having transcended the seeming distinctions between self and 

 the world. Having become self-forgetful, he loses himself in 

 experience only to find that he and his experience are part of the 

 same thing. What he is, is experience in some form or other, 

 and his experience is surely some part of him. He cannot help 

 being part of all he has met. Were he otherwise, he would be 

 nothing. 



The distinctions to be made in experience, then, are not cross- 

 section divisions into faculties, or even into ultimately distinguish- 

 able activities such as thought, and feeling and will, but they are 

 to be considered rather from the genetic point of view and to be 

 regarded as necessary stages in the development from juvenile 

 and naive self-unconsciousness, through a period of intellectual 

 and moral tension in which distinctions and oppositions are para- 

 mount, self against the world, good against evil, desire against 

 conscience, to a third period of conviction and character in which 

 the nature of one's experience, like one's body, becomes unified, 

 fixed and stable in form and function. 



In the process of individual development these three stages 

 discerned by philosophical analysis are not sharply distinguished 

 either by their content or by the particular time at which they 

 predominate. The reason is that we cannot say that all persons 

 who think thus and so are in the unconscious stage, or in the self- 

 conscious stage, or in the last and highest stage of unity with 

 self. For, in the first place, the same stimulus to experience may 

 cause in individuals reactions that have nothing in common in 

 the nature of their content, so that in the same rock the savage 

 may worship a fetich, the explorer may see a convenient shelter 

 against the inclemency of the weather, and the geologist, a long 

 sought specimen adding one lost link in the chain of proof of a 

 scientific hypothesis. And again, in the second place, the same 

 state of mind or the same experience may be caused by very 

 dififerent stimuli, and may be seen by considering the variety of 

 means adopted in the different religions of the world to attain 



