Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/288

280 belonged to the life of instinct and sensation merely. When he awoke to a realization of himself and the outer world, he found himself living, as a matter of simple habit, on roots and fruit, to which he had gone, apparently, in imitation of the animals and birds. "During this Part of my Life," he says, "my Rational Faculty laid [sic], as it were, dormant within me. I never made the least Reflection upon my Condition, nor turned my Thoughts to the Contemplation of anything about me." Such, Autonous conceives to be "the thoughtless State of all Persons for the greatest Part of the Childhood, while the Mind is furnishing itself with Instruments to work with."

With Autonous, however, this condition naturally lasts longer than with ordinary children, who from the beginning are associated with older people and have the advantage of the education directly and indirectly given by such intercourse. But it happens that, while all children are more or less inquisitive, Autonous is particularly so; and endowed, moreover, with unusual power of response to the stimuli of surroundings, he soon begins to gather in, from all sides, the rough materials of thought.

Happy accident first stirs him to 'serious Reflection/ One exceedingly hot day he strays 'something further than ordinary' from his cottage; and going to a small lake to quench his thirst, he is surprised 'with the appearance of a creature in the Lake' of a shape very different from anything he 'ever had seen,' which, as he stoops to the water, seems to leap upward to him, as if with a design to seize him. He flies in terror to a neighboring wood; but after a time, his thirst returning, he takes courage again, goes back to the lake and repeats the experiment; but only with the same dreadful result. This, Autonous explains, was the first time he had ever seen his reflection in smooth, still water, having previously drunk from fountains, or from shallow and rapid streams. He is so terribly frightened that for some weeks he hardly dares to leave the cottage, while his sleep is broken by 'fearful Starts and Dreams.' Little by little, the horror wears off, but other effects do not. He has been aroused to a 'sense of myself,' and begins to ask—a trifle prematurely, we fancy—'What am I? How came I Here?' These questions are rather too definitely put, but the incident and its consequences certainly foreshadow in an interesting way some of the speculations of recent anthropologists on the part played by shadows and reflections in the growth of the idea of the other self, or soul. Autonous's thoughts, however, take a somewhat different turn. He later discovers a 'crystal Brook,' in which, to his astonishment, he observes another sky, another dog, another world. By examination, he finds that there is, none the less, a real bottom to this brook; and thus he learns the secret of 'natural Reflection/ Remembering his former fright, he also studies himself very carefully in the water, and concludes