Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/549

533 principle of developing human life. In the absolute order of nature, das Ich is, indeed, in advance, since were not man from the start implicitly self-conscious, he would never become explicitly such. But in the order of the phenomenology of consciousness, I in general learn to notice about myself that which my fellows have taught me to notice. I learn who I am, by first imitating what they are. And so I really, if vaguely and dimly, believe in my fellows before I learn explicitly to believe in myself. In their will is my earliest peace, and in this peace my own strength grows, until I later learn to strive myself. Imitation is the primary, originality the secondary, submission is the earlier, rebellion the later, authority is the natural, reflective independence the derived element, in the social and in the cognitive life of man. If one dared to translate into falsely abstract speech the inner life of the naïvely growing childish or savage self, one would find it reasoning, not "Cogito, ergo sum," but rather something of this sort: "You are, you, my master, my warrior comrade, my chief, my fascinating fellow, my mother, my nurse, my big brother,—you think, I can learn to think after you, and so, even as you are, it must be that I am." This, I say, is the order of the natural evolution of self-consciousness, roughly translated into terms that are confessedly too abstract, but that do, I believe, embody the spirit of the process. And it is this fact which, on the whole, justifies Wundt's insistence, in his Ethik upon the Gesammtwille as the primary fact of the human practical consciousness, a fact to which the individual self-will is secondary. The definite concept of the Ego has, in each one of us, a social and imitative origin.

The proof of this proposition is of the most manifold character. I have no time to dwell upon this empirical aspect of the matter here at length. But let me suggest a very simple analytical proof. Let me ask you to try the experiment of seeking for a moment to abstract in thought from all the knowledge whose content you have sometime or other accepted, and first accepted, from other people. You will at once observe that all the knowledge embodied for you in the words,