These, which at first are foreign
objects, affect the child's organs of sense always in the same
manner, and thereby become uninteresting after they have lost the
charm of novelty. Now, his own body is that to which the attractive
objective impressions (i. e., the world) are referred, and with the
production by him of new impressions, with the changes wrought by
him (in the experimenting which is called "playing"), with the
experience of being-a-cause, is developed more and more in the child
the feeling of self. With this he raises himself higher and higher
above the dependent condition of the animal, so that at last the
difference, not recognizable at all before birth and hardly
recognizable at the beginning after birth, between animal and human
being attains a magnitude dangerous for the latter, attains it,
above all, by means of language.
But if it is necessary for the child to appropriate to himself as
completely as possible this highest privilege of the human race and
through this to overcome the animal nature of his first period; if his
development requires the stripping off of the remains of the animal and
the unfolding of the responsible "I"--then it will conduce to the
highest satisfaction of the thinking man, at the summit of his
experience of life, to go back in thought to his earliest childhood, for
that period teaches him plainly that he himself has his origin in
nature, is intimately related to all other living creatures.
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