Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/118

108 its being. It is still entirely the creature of instinct, which may be exactly and completely defined as unconscious reason.

It is true that the child at this stage of its existence often puts on the semblance of the intensest selfishness; but to call it selfish, in the proper sense of the word, would be to apply to it a complete misnomer. This would imply that it stood upon moral ground, whereas its being rests as yet upon no moral foundations at all. We indeed have a moral soil beneath our feet. And this is the origin of our mistake. In us, conduct similar to the child's would be really selfish, because we occupy a moral ground, and have realised our own personality; and hence, forgetting the different wounds upon which we and it stand, we transfer over upon it, through a mistaken analogy, or rather upon a false hypothesis, language which would serve to characterise its conduct, only provided it stood in the same situation with us, and like us possessed the notion and reality of itself. The child is driven to the gratification of its desires (prior to consciousness) at whatever cost, and whatever the consequences may be, just as an animal or a machine is impelled to accomplish the work for which it was designed; and the desire dies only when gratified, or when its natural force is spent, or when supplanted by some other desire equally blind and equally out of its control. How can we affix the epithet selfish, or any other term indicating either blame or praise, to a creature which as