other feelings, in the relation of the dog, or at least most dogs, to the master; and here again the rule is that the dog a man has brought up is most attached to him. Even later in life, with regard to some people, we feel something of the same sort, though here again the feeling is probably mixed. We like to be with them, their presence is pleasant. And in all these cases the ideas of pleasure and their external connection are fictitious, and the ‘illusion of close association’ is only there for the deluded theorist.
Nor is it merely in the absence or presence of what is dear that the child feels its will negated or affirmed; it does so, too, in the negation or affirmation of the object. Natural sympathy (into the ultimate nature of which we do not enter) no doubt plays a great part here; but, apart from sympathy, there are obvious reasons why the manifested well-being and pleasure, or again the discomfort, of the mother or nurse should be identified by the child with what is enjoyable or painful to itself; and further again, apart both from sympathy and this comparatively ‘artificial’ connection, it must happen that the perceived affirmation or negation of any part of the endeared environment is felt as the assertion or suppression of the self. When we are pained by the loss or spoiling of parts of places where we have been happy, this, I think, does not rest on sympathy; and when some childish possession is destroyed or damaged, and then replaced or repaired, sympathy no doubt may come in, but the diminution or increase of that which is perceived (of course, unreflectingly) as the area of self-assertion, or (if we like the phrase) as ‘the objectification of the will,’ is essentially and immediately connected with our own discomfort or pleasure. The self lives in its contents, rises and falls with its world; things and other persons enter into those contents, and no great advance in perception is needed to know, for instance, that a mother or nurse is pleased or annoyed.
At this point we have reached the stage where moral education begins; not that the child will be a moral being as yet, but it is here we can see the unconscious beginnings of a better and a worse self.
So far the child has felt pleasure or pain in the existence and well-being, or the absence and hurt of what is not self; he has not
