Tennyson, In Memoriam, XLV—“The baby new to earth and sky, What time his tender palm is pressed Against the circle of the breast, Has never thought that ‘this is I’: But as he grows he gathers much, And learns the use of ‘I’ and ‘me,’ And finds ‘I am not what I see, And other than the things I touch.’ So rounds he to a separate mind From whence clear memory may begin, As thro’ the frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined.” Fichte called that the birthday of his child, when the child awoke to self-consciousness and said “I.” Memory goes back no further than language. Knowledge of the ego is objective, before it is subjective. The child at first speaks of himself in the third person: “Henry did so and so.” Hence most men do not remember what happened before their third year, though Samuel Miles Hopkins, Memoir, 20, remembered what must have happened when he was only 23 months old. Only a conscious person remembers, and he remembers only as his will exerts itself in attention.
Jean Paul Richter, quoted in Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 110—“Never shall I forget the phenomenon in myself, never till now recited, when I stood by the birth of my own self-consciousness, the place and time of which are distinct in my memory. On a certain forenoon, I stood, a very young child, within the house-door, and was looking out toward the wood-pile, as in an instant the inner revelation ‘I am I,’ like lightning from heaven, flashed and stood brightly before me; in that moment I had seen myself as I, for the first time and forever.”
Höffding, Outlines of Psychology, 3—“The beginning of conscious life is to be placed probably before birth.... Sensations only faintly and dimly distinguished from the general feeling of vegetative comfort and discomfort. Still the experiences undergone before birth perhaps suffice to form the foundation of the consciousness of an external world.” Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 282, suggests that this early state, in which the child speaks of self in the third person and is devoid of _self_-consciousness, corresponds to the brute condition of the race, before it had reached self-consciousness, attained language, and become man. In the race, however, there was no heredity to predetermine self-consciousness—it was a new acquisition, marking transition to a superior order of being.