Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
Tennyson, In Memoriam, XLV—“The baby new to earth and sky, What
time his tender palm is pressed Against the circle of the breast,
Has never thought that ‘this is I’: But as he grows he gathers
much, And learns the use of ‘I’ and ‘me,’ And finds ‘I am not what
I see, And other than the things I touch.’ So rounds he to a
separate mind From whence clear memory may begin, As thro’ the
frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined.” Fichte
called that the birthday of his child, when the child awoke to
self-consciousness and said “I.” Memory goes back no further than
language. Knowledge of the ego is objective, before it is
subjective. The child at first speaks of himself in the third
person: “Henry did so and so.” Hence most men do not remember what
happened before their third year, though Samuel Miles Hopkins,
Memoir, 20, remembered what must have happened when he was only 23
months old. Only a conscious person remembers, and he remembers
only as his will exerts itself in attention.
Jean Paul Richter, quoted in Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 110—“Never
shall I forget the phenomenon in myself, never till now recited,
when I stood by the birth of my own self-consciousness, the place
and time of which are distinct in my memory. On a certain
forenoon, I stood, a very young child, within the house-door, and
was looking out toward the wood-pile, as in an instant the inner
revelation ‘I am I,’ like lightning from heaven, flashed and stood
brightly before me; in that moment I had seen myself as I, for the
first time and forever.”
Höffding, Outlines of Psychology, 3—“The beginning of conscious
life is to be placed probably before birth.... Sensations only
faintly and dimly distinguished from the general feeling of
vegetative comfort and discomfort. Still the experiences undergone
before birth perhaps suffice to form the foundation of the
consciousness of an external world.” Hill, Genetic Philosophy,
282, suggests that this early state, in which the child speaks of
self in the third person and is devoid of _self_-consciousness,
corresponds to the brute condition of the race, before it had
reached self-consciousness, attained language, and become man. In
the race, however, there was no heredity to predetermine
self-consciousness—it was a new acquisition, marking transition to
a superior order of being.
Connecting these remarks with our present subject, we assert that
no brute ever yet said, or thought, “I.” With this, then, we may
begin a series of simple distinctions between man and the brute,
so far as the immaterial principle in each is concerned. These are
mainly compiled from writers hereafter mentioned.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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