children form similar ideas? We can see from the autobiography of George Sand how a clever girl, reflecting on the impressive experience of the echo, excogitates such a theory of her double existence; and we know, too, that the boy Hartley Coleridge distinguished among the "Hartleys" a picture Hartley and a shadow Hartley. I have not, however, discovered that children are given to working out and seriously believing a theory of the multiple existence of themselves and other things.
The prominence of the bodily pictorial element in the child's first idea of self is seen in the tendency to confine personal identity within the limits of an unchanged bodily appearance. The child of six, with his shock of curls, refuses to believe that he is the same as the hairless baby whose photograph the mother shows him. How different, how new a being a child feels on a Sunday morning after the extra weekly cleansing and brushing and draping! The bodily appearance is a very big slice of the content of most people's self-consciousness, and to the child it is almost everything.
But in time the conscious self which thinks and suffers and wills comes to be dimly discerned. I have long thought, and nothing that I have read in the way of argument against the idea has shaken my belief, that a real advance toward this true self-consciousness is marked by the appropriation and use of the different forms of language, "I," "me," "mine."[1]
As long as the bodily aspect is uppermost in the idea of self, so long is it natural for the child to speak of himself in the third person by his proper name, as he would speak of any other object of perception. The use of the first person seems to mark a clearer distinction of the ego as subject from its polar opposite the world of objects, and this manifestly involves true self-reflection as distinguished from self-perception—i. e., perception and recognition of the bodily self.
Sometimes the apprehension of a hidden self distinct from the body comes as a sudden revelation, as to little George Sand. Such a swift awakening of self-consciousness is apt to be an epoch-making and memorable moment in the history of the child.
A father sends me the following notes on the development of self-consciousness: "My girl, three years old, makes an extraordinary distinction between her body and herself. Lying in bed, she shut her eyes and said, 'Mother, you can't see me now.' The mother replied, 'Oh, you little goose, I can see you, but you can't see me.'
- ↑ Preyer argues that the child does not at first hear "I," "me," etc., the nurse and mother speaking to him in the third person: "Nurse says so," "Roland must be good," etc. Exactly. But why do the mother and others make the change about this time, and begin to say I and you? Is it not precisely because the child is making the advance, and showing that he can understand the language of adults?
