In this brief analysis of the principles which are probably concerned in the evolution of self-consciousness, I should like to lay particular stress upon the point in it which I do not think has been sufficiently noticed by previous writers—namely, the ejective origin of subjective knowledge. The logic of recepts furnishes both the infant and the animal with a marvellously efficient store of ejective information. Indeed, we can scarcely doubt that to a very considerable extent this information is hereditary: witness the smile of an infant in answer to a caressing tone, and its cry in answer to a scolding one; not to mention the still more remarkable cases which we meet with in animals, such as newly-hatched chickens understanding the different sounds made to them by the hen, being terror-stricken at the voice of a hawk, newly-born mammals knowing the voice of their mother, &c.[125] Moreover, we find that the child, even for a considerable time after it has begun to use words, manifests a strong tendency to regard all objects, whether animate or inanimate, as ejects. This fact is a matter of such general observation that I need not wait to give special instances. I will, therefore, merely observe that the tendency is not wholly obliterated even when the faculty of speech has been fully acquired, and with it a general knowledge of the distinction between objects as animate and inanimate. Mr. Sully, for instance, gives a case of this when he records the saying of a little girl of five—“Ma, I do think this hoop must be alive; it is so sensible; it goes wherever I want it to.”[126] Again, we meet with the same tendency in the psychology of uncultured man. Pages might be filled with illustrations showing that savages all over the world both mentally and expressly personify, or endow with psychical attributes, the inanimate objects and forces of nature; while language, even in its most highly developed forms, still retains the impress of an originally ejective terminology. And, if Professor Max Müller is right in his generalization that the personal pronoun “I” is in all languages traceable to roots equivalent to “This one” (indicative of an accompanying gesture-sign), we have additional and more particular evidence of the originally ejective character of the idea of self. Nor is it too much to say that even civilized man is still under the sway of this innate propensity to attribute to external things the faculties of feeling and willing of which he is conscious in himself. On the one side we have proof of this in the universal prevalence of the hypothesis of psychism in Nature, while on the other side we meet with further proof in the fact of psychological analysis revealing that our idea of cause is derived from our idea of muscular effort.