Though these two developments—the birth of an historical sense and the birth of our modern self-consciousness—may seem at first sight to have little connection with one another, yet it is not difficult, on further consideration, to perceive that they are both connected with that other and larger process which has already been pointed to as the story told by the history of the Aryan languages as a whole. If we wish to find a name for it, we should have to coin some such ugly word as “internalization”. It is the shifting of the centre of gravity of consciousness from the cosmos around him into the personal human being himself. The results are twofold: on the one hand the peculiar freedom of mankind, the _spontaneous_[50] impulses which control human behaviour and destiny, are felt to arise more and more from _within_ the individual, as we saw in the semantic change of such words as _conscience_, _disposition_, _spirit_, _temper_, ... in the application to inner processes of words like _dissent_, _gentle_, _perceive_, _religion_, and in the Protestant Reformation; on the other the spiritual life and activity felt to be immanent in the world outside—in star and planet, in herb and animal, in the juices and “humours” of the body, and in the outward ritual of the Church—these grow feebler. The conception of “laws” governing this world arises and grows steadily more impersonal; words like _consistency_, _pressure_, _tension_, ... are found to describe matter “objectively” and disinterestedly, and at the same time the earth ceases to be the centre round which the cosmos revolves. All this time the European ‘ego’ appears to be engaged, unawares, in disentangling itself from its environment—becoming less and less of the actor, more and more of both the author and the spectator. In the eighteenth century the word _outlook_ is used for the first time in the sense in which it has been used here; in the nineteenth _environment_ is introduced by Carlyle. And so it goes on; and as, on the one hand, it is only when that detachment has progressed to a certain point that man becomes able to observe the changes which constitute history, so it is only as he begins to observe them that he becomes fully conscious of himself—the observer.