Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/41

Letter 3] effort. Of course I do not deny that this subtle metaphysical idea may have been suggested to us originally by our faculty of touch, and especially the faculty of self-pinching or self-touching. I dare say you have read how men have sometimes caught hold of their own benumbed hand by night, and awakened a household by shouting that they had caught at robber: has it ever occurred to you that, if you never had the power of distinguishing your own hand from anybody else's hand by the sense of touch, you might have gone through life with no sense, or with a very tardily acquired sense, of your own identity? If the monkey who boiled his own tail in the caldron had felt no pain, might he not have been excused for doubting sometimes whether the tail belonged to him? And if his head were equally painless or joyless when he thumped it or scratched it, ought he to be condemned for disowning his own head? And if a monkey, or even a child, could not lay claim to its own head, it seems to me doubtful whether he could ever claim such a separation from the outside world as would necessitate his using the word "I." But, as it is, having this self-pinching faculty, the child soon finds that to pinch a ball, or a bladder, or a sister, is an entirely different thing from pinching himself: and this self-touching faculty confirms the evidence suggested by the bumps and thumps of the external world; all of which lead him to the belief that he has a bodily frame of his own, liable to pain and to pleasure, and largely dependent for pain and pleasure on his own motions, which motions he dimly perceives dependent upon something that appears to be inside himself.

But neither this nor any other explanation of the manner in which the sensations prepare the way for the construction of the idea of the "I," ought to prevent us from recognizing that the idea itself is the work of the