[118] In the present connection the following very pregnant sentence may be appropriately quoted from Wundt:—“Wenn wir überall auf die Empfindung als Ausgangspunkt der ganzen Entwicklungsreihe hingewiesen werden, so müssen auch die Anfänge jener Unterscheidung des Ichs von den Gegenständen schon in den Empfindungen gelegen sein” (Vorlesungen über die Menschen und Thierseele, i. 287). And to the objection that there can be no thought without knowledge of thought, he replies that before there is any knowledge of thought there must be the same order of thinking as there is of perceiving prior to the advent of self-consciousness—e.g. receptual ideas about space before there is any conceptual knowledge of these ideas as such.
[119] Sully, loc. cit., p. 376. See also Wundt, loc. cit., i. 289. He shows that this speaking of self in the third person is not due to “imitation,” but, on the contrary, opposed to it. For “a thousand times the child hears that its elders do not thus speak of themselves.” The child hears that its elders call it in the third person, and in this it follows them. But such imitation as we here find is expressive only of the fact that hitherto the child has not distinguished between self as an object and self as a subject. Only later on, when this distinction has begun to dawn, does imitation proceed to apply to the self the first person, after the manner in which other selves (now recognized by the child as such) are heard to do.
[120] Loc. cit., p. 377.
[121] Loc. cit., pp. 435, 436.
[122] Philosophical Discussions, p. 256. See also Animal Intelligence, pp. 269, 270, for the case of a parrot apparently endeavouring to recover the memory of a particular word in a phrase. In the course of an interesting research on the intelligence of spiders (Journ. Morphol., i., p. 383-419), Mr. and Mrs. Peckham have recently found that the memory of eggs which have been withdrawn from the mother is retained by her for a period varying in different species from less than one to more than two days.
[123] Sully, loc. cit., p. 377.
[124] Wundt, loc. cit., ii. 289, 290. He gives cases where such a definite memory of the moment has persisted, and elsewhere states that such is the case in his own experience. The circumstance which here was connected with the sudden birth of self-consciousness consisted in rolling down stairs into a cellar—an event which no doubt was well calculated forcibly to impress upon infant consciousness that it was itself, and nobody else.
[125] See Mental Evolution in Animals, pp. 161-165. Perez records analogous facts with regard to the infant as unmistakably displayed in the fourteenth week (First Three Years of Childhood, English trans., p. 29).
[126] Outlines of Psychology, p. 378.
[127] Vorlesungen, &c., i. 289.