Studies of childhood / by James Sully.

  • James Sully
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of childhood / by James Sully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    personal identity within the limits of an unchanged bodily appearance. The child of six, with his shock of curls, refuses to believe that he is the same as the hairless baby whose photograph the mother shows him. How different, how new, a being a child feels on a Sunday morning after the extra weekly cleansing and brushing and draping. The bodily appearance is a very big slice of the content of most people’s self-consciousness, and to the child it is almost everything. But in time the conscious self, which thinks and suffers and wills, comes to be dimly discerned. I believe that a real advance towards this true self-consciousness is marked by the appropriation and use of the difficult forms of language, ‘ I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine’. This will be dealt with in another essay. Sometimes the apprehension of the existence of a hidden self distinct from the body comes as a sudden revelation, as to little George Sand. Such a swift awakening of self- consciousness is apt to be an epoch-making and memorable moment in the history of the child. A father sends me the following notes on the develop¬ ment of self-consciousness: “ My girl, three years old, makes an extraordinary distinction between her body and herself. Lying in bed she shut her eyes and said: ‘Mother, you can’t see me now ’. The mother replied: ‘ Oh, you little goose, I can see you but you can’t see me’. To which she rejoined: ‘ Oh, yes, I know you can see my body, mother, but you can’t see me'? The same child about the same time was concerned for the reality of her own existence. One day playing with her dolls she asked her mother: “ Mother, am I real, or only a pretend like my dolls?” Here again, it is plain, the emphasis was laid on something non-corporeal, something that animated the body, and not a mere bit of mechanism put inside it. Two years later she showed a still finer intellectual differen¬ tiation of the visible and the invisible self. Her brother
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