200 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN, 



self as an object of knowledge, and, therefore, as a subject. 

 Hence, the one form of self-consciousness differs from the 

 other in that it is only objective and never subjective.* 



I take it, then, as established that true or conceptual 

 self-consciousness consists in paying the same kind of 

 attention to inward psychical processes as is habitually paid to 

 outward physical processes ; that in the mind of animals and 

 infants there is a world of images standing as signs of 

 outward objects, although we may concede that for the most 

 part they only admit of being revived by sensuous associa- 

 tion ; that at this stage of mental evolution the logic of 

 recepts comprises an ejective as well as an objective world ; 

 and that here we also have the recognition of individuality, 

 so far as this is dependent on what has been termed an 

 outward self-consciousness, or the consciousness of self as a 

 feeling and an active agent, without the consciousness of self 

 as an object of thought, and, therefore, as a subject. 



Such being the mental conditions precedent to the rise of 

 true self-consciousness, we may next turn to the growing 

 child for evidence of subsequent stages in the gradual 

 evolution of this faculty. All observers are agreed that for 

 a considerable time after a child is able to use words as 

 expressive of ideas, there is no vestige of true self-conscious- 

 ness. But, to begin our survey before this period, at a year 

 old even its own organism is not known to the child as part 

 of the self, or, more correctly, as anything specially related to 

 feelings. Professor Preyer observed that his boy, when more 

 than a year old, bit his own arm just as though it had been a 

 foreign object ; and thus may be said to have shown even 



• In the present connection the following very pregnant sentence may be 

 appropriately quoted from Wundt : — " Wenn wir iiberall auf die Empfindung als 

 Ausgangspunkt der ganzen Entwicklungsreihe hingewiesen werden, so miisscn 

 auch die Anfange jener Unterscheidung des Ichs von den Gegenstanden schon in 

 den Empfindungen gelegen sein " ( Vorlesungen iiber die Menschen und Thierseele, 

 i. 287). And to the objection that there can be no thought without knowledge 

 of thought, he replies that before there is any knowledge of thought there must be 

 the same order of thinking as there is of perceiving prior to the advent of self- 

 consciousness — e.g. receptual ideas about space before there is any conceptual 

 knowledge of these ideas as such. 



