MENTAL LIFE 



As everybody knows, the new-born child shows as yet 

 no trace of mind or reason or consciousness; these 

 functions are wanting in it as completely as in the 

 embryo from which it has been developed during the 

 nine months in the mother's womb. Even in the ninth 

 month, when most of the organs of the human embryo 

 are formed and arranged as they appear later, there is 

 no more trace of mind in its psychic life than in the 

 ovum and spermatozoon from which it was evolved. 

 The moment in which these sexual cells unite marks 

 precisely the real commencement of individual existence, 

 and therefore of the soul also (as a potential function of 

 the plasm). But the mind proper — or reason, the high- 

 er conscious function of the soul — only develops, slowly 

 and gradually, long after birth. As Flechsig has shown 

 anatomically, the cortex in the new-bom child is not yet 

 organized or capable of functioning. Rational conscious- 

 ness is even impossible for the child when it begins to 

 speak; it reveals itself for the first time (after the first 

 year) at the moment when the child speaks of itself, not 

 in the third person, but as "L" With this self -con- 

 sciousness comes also the antithesis of the individual to 

 the outer world, or world-consciousness. This is the 

 real beginning of mental life. 



In defining the appearance of the individual mind by 

 the awakening of self-consciousness, we make it possible 

 to distinguish, from the monistic physiological point of 

 view, between "soul" (psyche) and "spirit" {p>icnma). 

 There is a soul even in the maternal ovum and the pa- 

 ternal spermatozoon (cf. chapter xi.); there is an indi- 

 vidual soul in the stem-cell (cyttda) which arises at con- 

 ception by the blending of the parent cells. But the 

 mind proper, the thinking reason, develops out of the 

 animal intelligence (or earlier instincts) of the child only 

 with the consciousness of its personality as opposed to 

 the outer world. At the same time the child reaches the 



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