SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, 209 



of childhood's experience. Therefore, I have only men- 

 tioned this evidence for what it is worth, in order to remark 

 that it has no important bearing upon our present subject. 

 Whether or not there is in the life of every human being 

 some particular moment between the ages of two and three 

 when the fact of its own personality is revealed to the 

 growing mind, the results of the present analysis are in no 

 way affected. For, even if such were supposed to be 

 invariably the case, it could not be supposed that the 

 revelation were other than low and feeble to a degree 

 commensurate with the still almost infantile condition of all the 

 other mental powers. Nor could it be doubted that this 

 revelation needed to be led up to by that gradual process of 

 receptual evolution with which my analysis has been 

 concerned, and which in the terms of our previous analogy we 

 may liken to the pre-natal life of an embryo. While, on the 

 other hand, as little can it be doubted that such consciousness 

 of self as is then revealed, requires to be afterwards supple- 

 mented by another prolonged course of mental evolution in 

 the conceptual sphere, before those completed faculties of 

 introspective thought are attained, which serve to difference 

 the mind of a full-grown man from that of a babbling child 

 almost as widely as the same interval of time is found to 

 difference the body of an adult from that of a new-born babe, 



In this brief analysis of the principles which are probably 

 concerned in the evolution of self-consciousness, I should like 

 to lay particular stress upon the point in it which I do not 

 think has been sufficiently noticed by previous writers — 

 namely, the ejective origin of subjective knowledge. The 

 logic of recepts furnishes both the infant and the animal with 

 a marvellously efficient store of ejective information. Indeed, 

 we can scarcely doubt that to a very considerable extent this 

 information is hereditary: witness the smile of an infant in 

 answer to a caressing tone, and its cry in answer to a scolding 

 one ; not to mention the still more remarkable cases which 

 we meet with in animals, such as newly-hatched chickens 



