THE TRANSITION IN THE INDIVIDUAL, 233 



on my notes in this connection) I conclude that the genesis 

 of self-consciousness marks a comparatively low level in the 

 evolution of the human mind — as we might expect that it 

 should, if its genesis depends on the not unintelligible 

 conditions which I have endeavoured to explain in the last 

 chapters. But, if so, does it not follow that great as the 

 importance of self-consciousness afterwards proves to be as 

 a condition to the higher development of ideation, in itself, 

 or in its first beginning, it does not betoken any very per- 

 ceptible improvement upon those powers of pre-conceptual 

 ideation which it immediately follows ? In other words, there 

 is thus shown to be even less reason to regard the advent of 

 self-consciousness as marking a psychological difference of 

 kind, than there would be so to regard the advent of those 

 higher powers of conceptual ideation which subsequently — 

 though as gradually — supervene between early childhood and 

 youth. Yet no one has hitherto ventured to suggest that the 

 intelligence of a child and the intelligence of a youth display 

 a difference of kind. 



Or, otherwise stated, the psychological interval between 

 my cebus and my child (when the former successfully 

 investigated the mechanical principle of the screw by means 

 of his highly developed receptual faculties, while the latter 

 unsuccessfully attempted to solve a most simple topographical 

 problem by means of her lowly developed conceptual 

 faculties), was assuredly much less than that which afterwards 

 separated the intelligence of my child from this level of its 

 own previous self Therefore, on merely psychological 

 grounds, I conclude that there would be better — or less bad — 

 reasons for alleging that there is an observable difference of 

 kind between the lowest and the highest levels of conceptual 

 ideation, than there is to allege that any such difference 

 obtains between the lowest level of conceptual ideation and 

 the highest level of receptual. 



" The greatest of all distinctions in biology," when it 

 first arises, is thus seen to lie in \\.s potentiality rather than in 

 its origin. Self-consciousness is, indeed, the condition to an 



