Until he has separated his mind from the objects around, and even from his own conscious states, he cannot perceive himself and obtain clear memory. No child recalls his first year, for the simple reason that during that year he was not there. Of course there was experience during that year, there was consciousness; but the child could not discriminate himself from the crowding experiences and so reach self- consciousness. At what precise time this momentous possibility occurs cannot be told. Probably the time varies widely in different children. In any single child it announces itself by degrees, and usually so subtly that its early manifestations are hardly perceptible. Occasionally, especially when long deferred, it breaks with the suddenness of an epoch, and the child is aware of a new existence. A little girl of my acquaintance turned from play to her mother with the cry, "Why, mamma, little girls don't know that they are." She had just discovered it. In a famous passage of his autobiography, Jean Paul Richter has recorded the great change in himself: "Never shall I forget the inward experience of the birth of self-consciousness. I well remember the time and place. I stood one afternoon, a very young child, at the house-door, and looked at the logs of wood piled on the left. Suddenly an inward consciousness, 'I am a Me,' came like a flash of lightning from heaven, and has remained ever since. At that moment my existence became conscious of itself, and forever." The knowledge that I am an I cannot be conveyed to me by another human being, nor can I perceive anything similar in him. Each must ascertain it for himself. Accordingly there is only one word in every language which is absolutely unique, bearing a different meaning for every one who employs it. That is the word I. For me to use it in the sense that you do would prove that I had lost my wits. Whatever enters into my usage is out of it in yours. Obviously, then, the meaning of this word cannot be taught. Everything else may be. What the table is, what is a triangle, what virtue, heaven, or a spherodactyl, you can teach me. What I am, you cannot; for no one has ever had an experience corresponding to this except myself. People in speaking to me call me John, Baby, or Ned, an externally descriptive name which has substantially a common meaning for all who see me. When I begin to talk I repeat this name imitatively, and thinking of myself as others do. I speak of myself in the third person. Yet how early that reference to a third person begins to be saturated with self- consciousness, who can say? Before the word "I" is employed, "Johnny" or "Baby" may have been diverted into an egoistic significance. All we can say is that "I" cannot be rightly employed until consciousness has risen to self-consciousness. VIII