Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/116

106 and vital manifestation of consciousness commences. Our business now is to point out and illustrate this epoch.

It is a well-known fact that children, for some time after they acquire the use of language, speak of themselves in the third person, calling themselves John, Tom, or whatever else their names may be. Some speak thus for a longer, others for a shorter period; but all of them invariably speak for a certain time after this fashion. What does this prove, and how is it to be accounted for?

In the first place, it proves that they have not yet acquired the notion of their own personality. Whatever their intellectual or rational state may in other respects be, they have not combined with it the conception of self. In other words, it proves that as yet they are unconscious. They as yet exist merely for others, not for themselves.

In the second place, how is the origin of the language, such as it is, which the child makes use of, to be explained? It is to be accounted for upon exactly the same principle, whatever this may be, as that which enables the parrot to be taught to speak. This principle may be called imitation, which may be viewed as a modification of the great law of association, which again is to be considered as an illustration of the still greater law of cause and effect; and under any or all of these views it is not to be conceived that intelligence is by any means absent from the process. The child and the parrot hear those