Origin of " Ego Ideas" 171 



which he can pull towards himself; repeated 

 movements such as these lead to the adaptation 

 of the nervous substance of tactile and other 

 centres to impressions made on them through 

 the sense organs; in this way a child begins to 

 appreciate distance and space, and to recognise 

 the fact that his body is something apart from 

 the rest of the world. These rudimentary con- 

 ceptions of his own being, or " Ego ideas," by 

 a child develop rapidly, especially during that 

 period of his existence when he is passing from 

 crawling to walking in the erect position. This 

 fact is confirmed by microscopic examination of 

 sections of the brain at this period of child-life ; 

 the nerve cells and fibres of its cortical sub- 

 stance will then be seen to be more completely 

 developed than they are at an earlier period of 

 life. 1 We conclude that a child's intellectual 

 powers come into effective operation simul- 

 taneously with the development of the struc- 



1 Halliburton 's Handbook of Physiology (Tenth Edition), p. 734. 

 See Quain's Anatomy, p. 178. "A man can think of those things 

 only of which he has learned to think ; and this learning to think 

 of an object is a process of gradual building up of that capacity 

 by successive efforts to think of the object more adequately ; and 

 that which endures between the successive acts of thinking of this 

 object is a potentiality (disposition) of thinking of it again." 

 Psvchology the Study of Behaviour, by William McDougall, 

 p. 81. 



