Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/117

Rh around them applying various names to different objects, and, being imitative animals, acting under the law of causality, they apply these names in the same manner: and now mark most particularly the curious part of the process, how they follow the same rule when speaking of themselves. They hear people calling them by their own names in the third person, and not having any notion of themselves, not having realised their own personality, they have nothing else for it than to adhere, in this case too, to their old principle of imitation, and to do towards themselves just what others do towards them; that is to say, when speaking of themselves they are unavoidably forced to designate themselves by a word in the third person; or, in other words, to speak of themselves as if they were not themselves.

So long, then, as this state of things continues, the human being is to be regarded as leading altogether mere animal life, as living completely under the dominion and within the domain of nature. The law of its whole being is the law of causality. Its sensations, feelings of every kind, and all its exercises of reason, are mere effects, which again in their turn are capable of becoming causes. It cannot be said to be without "mind," if by the attribution of "mind" to it we mean that it is subject to various sensations, passions, desires, &c.; but it certainly is without consciousness, or that notion of self, that realisation of its own personality, which, in the subsequent stages of its existence, accompanies these modifications of