My contention in this chapter will be that, given the protoplasm of the sign-making faculty so far organized as to have reached the denotative stage; and given also the protoplasm of judgment so far organized as to have reached the stage of stating a truth, without the mind being yet sufficiently developed to be conscious of itself as an object of thought, and therefore not yet able to state to itself a truth as true; by a confluence of these two protoplasmic elements an act of fertilization is performed, such that the subsequent processes of mental organization proceed apace, and soon reach the stage of differentiation between subject and object.
And here, to avoid misapprehension, I may as well make it clear at the outset that in all which is to follow I am in no way concerned with the philosophy of this change, but only with its history. On the side of its philosophy no one can have a deeper respect for the problem of self-consciousness than I have; for no one can be more profoundly convinced than I am that the problem on this side does not admit of solution. In other words, so far as this aspect of the matter is concerned, I am in complete agreement with the most advanced idealist; and hold that in the datum of self-consciousness we each of us possess, not merely our only ultimate knowledge, or that which only is “real in its own right,” but likewise the mode of existence which alone the human mind is capable of conceiving as existence, and therefore the _conditio sine quâ non_ to the possibility of an external world. With this aspect of the question, however, I am in no way concerned. Just as the functions of an embryologist are confined to tracing the mere history of developmental changes of living structure, and just as he is thus as far as ever from throwing any light upon the deeper questions of the how and the why of life; so in seeking to indicate the steps whereby self-consciousness has arisen from the lower stages of mental structure, I am as far as any one can be from throwing light upon the intrinsic nature of that the probable genesis of which I am endeavouring to trace. It is no less true to-day than it was in the time of Soloman, that “as thou knowest not how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child, thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit.”