74. CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE PERSONAL SELF.—In order to form the concept of person, and to find that concept verified in the data of our experience, it is absolutely essential that we be endowed with the _faculty of intelligence_, the spiritual power of forming abstract concepts; and secondly, that having formed the concept of person as a “rational or intelligent subsisting being,” we be capable, by the exercise of _reflex consciousness_, to find in our own mental life the data from which we can conclude that this concept of person is verified in each and every one of ourselves. It is because we are endowed with intelligence that we can form all the abstract notions—of substance, individual, subsistence, existence, etc.,—which enter into and constitute our concept of person. And it is because we can, by means of this faculty, reflect on our own mental operations, and infer from them that each of us is a complete individual rational nature subsisting independently and incommunicably, that we can know ourselves to be persons.
How the human individual forms these concepts and finds them verified in his own “self,” how he gradually comes into conscious possession of the knowledge of his own individual being as an _Ego_, self, or person, are problems for Psychology.(305) It will be sufficient here to point out that there are grounds for distinguishing between the individual’s implicit subjective awareness of his subsistence or “selfhood”—an awareness which accompanies all his conscious mental functions, and which becomes more explicit and definite as the power of introspection and reflex consciousness develops—and the “_abstract quasi-objective notion_ of his own _personality_ habitually possessed by every human being”.(306)
The individual human being _immediately_ apprehends his own existence, and his abiding unity or sameness throughout incessantly changing states, in the temporal series of his conscious activities; but his knowledge of the _nature_ of his own being can be the result only of a long and carefully conducted analysis of his own activities, and of inferences based on the character of these activities. The former or implicit knowledge of the self in the concrete is direct and intuitive. The individual _Ego_ apprehends _itself_ in _its states_. This knowledge comes mainly from within, and is subject to gradual development. Father Maher thus describes how the child comes gradually into possession of it:—