212 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



that language is quite as much the antecedent as it is the 

 consequent of self-consciousness. We have seen that in its first 

 beginnings, or before the child is able to state a truth as true, 

 what I have called rudimentary or pre-conceptual predication 

 is concerned only with existence as objective or ejective : all 

 these propositions, which are made by children during the 

 first two years of their life, have reference to objects of sense, 

 states of feeling, &c. ; but never to self as self, and therefore 

 never to truths as true. But as soon as the protoplasm of 

 predication, or sign-making at this stage of elaboration, 

 begins to mix freely with the protoplasm of judgment, or the 

 logic of recepts at that stage of elaboration, an intimate 

 movement of action and reaction ensues : the judgments are 

 rendered clearer and more comprehensive by being thrown 

 into the formal shape of even rudimentary propositions, 

 while the latter are promoted in their development by the 

 growing powers- of judgment. And when this advancing 

 organization of faculties has proceeded to the extent of 

 enabling the mind incipiently to predicate its own states, the 

 mental organism may be said for the first time to be 

 quickening into the life of true self-consciousness.* 



* In the above sketch of the principles which are concerned in the development 

 of self-consciousness, I have only been concerned with the matter on the side of 

 its psychology, and even on this side only so far as my own purposes are in view. 

 Those who wish for further information on the psychology of the subject may 

 consult V^undt, loc. cit. ; Sully, loc. cit. , and Illusions, ch. x. ; Taine, On 

 Intelligence, pt. ii., bk. iii. ; Chauncey Wright, Evolution of Self- consciousness ; 

 and Waitz, Lehrbuch der Psychologic, 58. On the side of its physiology and 

 pathology Taine, Maudsley, and Ribot may be referred to (On Intelligence^ 

 Pathology of Mifid, Diseases of Memory), as also a paper by Herzen, entitled, Les 

 Modif cations de la Conscience du moi {Bull. Soc. Hand. Sc. Nat., xx. 90). An 

 Essay on the Philosophy of Self consciousness, by P. F. Fitzgerald, is written from 

 the side of metaphysics. On this side, also, we are met by the school of Hegel 

 and the Neo-Kantians with a virtual denial of the origin and development of self- 

 consciousness in time. Thus, for instance, Green expressly says : — "Should the 

 question be asked, If this self-consciousness is not derived from nature, what then 

 is its origin ? the answer is, that it has no origin. It never began because it 

 never was not. It is the condition of there being such a thing as beginning or end« 

 Whatever begins or ends does so for it, or in relation to it " ^^Prolegomena to Ethics^ 

 p. 119). To this I can only answer that for my own part I feel as convinced as 

 I am of the fact of my self-consciousness itself that it had a beginning in time, and 

 was afterwards the subject of a gradual development. " Das Ich ist ein Ent- 

 wicklungsprodukt, wie der ganze Mensch ein Entwicklungsprodukt ist " (Wundt). 



