As thoughts of pleasures and pains repeated in the past and expected in the future grow more distinct, the dissimilarity between these and the permanent abiding self comes to be more fully realized. Passing emotions of fear, anger, vanity, pride, or sympathy, accentuate the difference. But most probably it is the dawning sense of power to resist and overcome rising impulse, and the dim nascent consciousness of responsibility, which lead up to the final revelation, until at last, in some reflective act of memory or choice, or in some vague effort to understand the oft-heard “I,” the great truth is manifested to him: the child enters, as it were, into possession of his personality, and knows himself as a _Self-conscious Being_. The _Ego_ does not _create_ but _discovers_ itself. In Jouffroy’s felicitous phrase, it “breaks its shell,” and finds that it is _a Personal Agent with an existence and individuality of its own_, standing henceforward alone in opposition to the universe.(307) After this stage is reached, the human individual easily distinguishes between the “self” as the _cause_ or _subject_ of the states, and the states as _modifications_ of the self. This distinction is implicit in the concomitant awareness of self which accompanies all exercise of direct cognitive consciousness. It is explicit in all deliberate acts of reflex, introspective self-consciousness. The data from which we form the abstract concepts of substance, nature, individual, person, self, etc., and from which we arrive by reasoning at a philosophical knowledge of the nature and personality of the human individual, are furnished mainly by introspection; but also in part by external observation of the universe around us. Concomitantly, however, with the process by which we become implicitly but immediately aware of the _Ego_ or self as an abiding self-identical person in and through our own mental activity, we gradually form a quasi-objective and historical view of our own personality as one of a number of similar personalities around us in the universe. This view, says Father Maher, gathers into itself the history of my past life—the actions of my childhood, boyhood, youth, and later years. Interwoven with them all is the image of my bodily organism, and clustering around are a fringe of recollections of my dispositions, habits, and character, of my hopes and regrets, of my resolutions and failures, along with a dim consciousness of my position in the minds of other selves.