Page:An introduction to ethics.djvu/100

 CHAPTER VI.

THE MORAL SELF.

§ 1. The Growth of the Self In former chapters, in dealing with the child's instincts, his impulses and desires, and his emotions and sentiments, we have seen that all involve some reference to the self. But we have not yet asked, What is the self? That question we must now try to answer. It will be convenient to begin by describing how the child first comes to recognise the existence of his self.

At first, of course, the child has no distinct notion of its "self." It gradually comes to realise that its body belongs to it in a peculiar way. It plays with its fingers and toes, and finds that it has more control over them than the fingers of its mother, with which it also plays. It becomes conscious, too, that it has feeling in its fingers and toes. These things belong specially to it; and thus the self comes to mean the body. But gradually this conception of self becomes both extended and narrowed.

On the one hand, the conception of the self is widened. The child comes to regard the persons to whom it is related and the things which come into its possession as part of itself. Its mother and father have a peculiarly intimate relation to it, and they