The prominence of the bodily pictorial element in the child’s first idea of self is seen in the tendency to restrict personal identity within the limits of an unchanged bodily appearance. The child of six, with his shock of curls, refuses to believe that he is the same as the hairless baby whose photograph the mother shows him. How different, how new, a being a child feels on a Sunday morning after the extra weekly cleansing and brushing and draping. The bodily appearance is a very big slice of the content of most people’s self-consciousness, and to the child it is almost everything. But in time the conscious self, which thinks and suffers and wills, comes to be dimly discerned. I believe that a real advance towards this true self-consciousness is marked by the appropriation and use of the difficult forms of language, ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine’. This will be dealt with in another essay. Sometimes the apprehension of the existence of a hidden self distinct from the body comes as a sudden revelation, as to little George Sand. Such a swift awakening of self-consciousness is apt to be an epoch-making and memorable moment in the history of the child. A father sends me the following notes on the development of self-consciousness: “My girl, three years old, makes an extraordinary distinction between her body and herself. Lying in bed she shut her eyes and said: ‘Mother, you can’t see me now’. The mother replied: ‘Oh, you little goose, I can see you but you can’t see me’. To which she rejoined: ‘Oh, yes, I know you can see _my body_, mother, but you can’t see _me_’.” The same child about the same time was concerned about the reality of her own existence. One day playing with her dolls she asked her mother: “Mother, am _I_ real, or only a pretend like my dolls?” Here again, it is plain, the emphasis was laid on something non-corporeal, something that animated the body, and not a mere bit of mechanism put inside it. Two years later she showed a still finer intellectual differentiation of the visible and the invisible self. Her brother happened to ask her what they fed the bears on at the Zoo. She answered impulsively: “Dead babies and that sort of thing”. On this the mother interposed: “Why, F., you don’t think mothers would give their dead babies to the animals?” To this she replied: “Why not, mother? It’s only their bodies. I shouldn’t mind your giving mine.” This contempt for the body is an excellent example of the way in which a child when he gets hold of an idea pushes it to its logical extreme. This little girl by-the-bye was she who, about the same age, took compassion on the poor autumn leaves dying on the ground, so that we may suppose her mind to have been brooding at this time on the conscious side of existence.