Let us consider now the case of a child; that is, according to our hypothesis, a spirit conscious in itself of the power to form ideas, but which for the first time is about to exercise this power. What will determine him to think, unless it be the pleasant sensation thereby arising, and what can have procured for him the experience of this pleasurable sensation? We have just seen that this, again, could be nothing but thinking, and he is now for the first time to think. Further, what shall invite him to a consideration of the [external] world? Nothing but the experience of its perfection in so far as it satisfies his instinct of activity, and as this satisfaction affords him pleasure. What, then, can determine him to an exercise of his powers? Nothing but the experience of their existence; and all these experiences are now to be made for the first time. He must therefore have been active from all eternity—which is contrary to the case as stated—or he will to all eternity be inactive, just as the machine without a touch from without remains idle and motionless.
§ 9.—The Soul viewed in connection with the Body.
Now let the animal be added to the spirit. Weave these two natures so closely together as they really are closely woven, and cause an unknown something, born of the economy of the animal body, to be assailed by the power of sensation,—let the soul be placed in the condition of physical pain. That was the first touch, the first ray to light up the night of slumbering powers, a touch as from a golden finger upon nature’s lute. Now is sensation there, and sensation only was it that before we missed. This kind of sensation seems to have been made on purpose to remove all these difficulties. In the first case none could be produced because we were not allowed to presuppose an idea; here a modification of the bodily organs becomes a substitute for the ideas that were lacking, and thus does animal sensation come to the help of the spirits inward mechanism, if I may so call it, and puts the same in motion. The will is active, and the action of a single power is sufficient to set all the rest to work. The following operations are self-developed and do not belong to this chapter.
§ 10.—Out of the History of the Individual.
Let us follow now the growth of the soul in the individual man in relation to what I am trying to demonstrate, and let us observe how all his spiritual capacities grow out of motive powers of sense.
a. The child. Still quite animal; or, rather more and at the same time less than animal—human animal (for that being which at some time shall be called man can at no time have been only animal). More wretched than an animal, because he has not even instinct—the animal-mother may with less danger leave her young than the mother abandon her child. Pain may force from him a cry, but will never direct him to the source from which it comes. The milk may give him pleasure, but he does not seek it. He is altogether passive.
His thinking rises only to sensation.
His knowledge is but pain, hunger—and what binds these together.
b. The boy. Here we have already reflection, but only in so far as it bears upon the satisfaction of the animal impulse. “He learns to value,” says Garve,[[20]] “the things of others, and his actions in respect of others, first of all through the fact of their affording him [sensuous] pleasure.”
A love of work, the love to his parents, to friends, yea even love to God, must go along the pathway of physical sense [Sinnlichkeit] to reach his soul. “That only is the sun,” as Garve elsewhere observes, “which in itself enlightens and warms: all other objects are dark and cold; but they too can be warmed and illumined when they enter into such a connection with the same as to become partakers of its rays.”[[21]] The good things of the spirit possess a value with the boy only by transference—they are the spiritual means to an animal end.