"
Until he has separated his mind from the objects around, and even from
his own conscious states, he cannot perceive himself and obtain clear
memory. No child recalls his first year, for the simple reason that
during that year he was not there. Of course there was experience
during that year, there was consciousness; but the child could not
discriminate himself from the crowding experiences and so reach self-
consciousness. At what precise time this momentous possibility occurs
cannot be told. Probably the time varies widely in different children.
In any single child it announces itself by degrees, and usually so
subtly that its early manifestations are hardly perceptible.
Occasionally, especially when long deferred, it breaks with the
suddenness of an epoch, and the child is aware of a new existence. A
little girl of my acquaintance turned from play to her mother with the
cry, "Why, mamma, little girls don't know that they are." She had just
discovered it. In a famous passage of his autobiography, Jean Paul
Richter has recorded the great change in himself: "Never shall I
forget the inward experience of the birth of self-consciousness. I
well remember the time and place. I stood one afternoon, a very young
child, at the house-door, and looked at the logs of wood piled on the
left.
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