Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/551

535 as to the nature, office, dignity, rights, duties, capacities, place, and destiny of manhood? These traditions I may, indeed, learn to revise, but the revision comes later. It has its time, and when that time comes such revision may be for me of the most absolute significance. But I am here speaking still of the origin, not of the validity, of our self-knowledge. And I say again: Abstract from all the content that directly or indirectly you first learned from others, and were thus first taught to apply to yourself, and you will abstract from all the ideas concerning yourself that you can now express in language, from all ideas of dignity, of worth, of truth, of duty, as applied to your person, yes, from all ideas of any explicit personal characteristic or possession of your own. For all these ideas, as definite conscious insights, have come to you as results of your social intercourse. Abstract from all these, however, and there would remain, as the core of your idea of yourself, not the Cogito, ergo sum, not the proud sense, I am free, not even the empty identity, I am I, but at most a barren and barbarous longing for something that you now know to be self-consciousness; but that, in your isolation, you would know only as an idiot now knows it. So, then, my conscious idea of myself is derived, is secondary, for instance, to language, to which all my thinking is so deeply indebted, and is thus, oddly enough, a product of social intercourse. Who I am, I have first learned from others before I can observe it for myself.

We blind ourselves too often to these considerations by reason of a very artificial theory that is customary in popular, and often in technical psychologies, concerning the origin of our belief in the existence of our fellows. Many imagine this belief to be due to a process of induction from a single case,—an induction whereby each man of us first, as it were, supposing himself to be alone in a still dead physical world, says to himself:—'I exist, having this body; I exist, too, in a world of real physical things. Now in my external world there are bodies that move very much as mine does. Therefore, they,—these other bodies,—must also be alive and self-conscious as I am.'