subtly that its early manifestations are hardly perceptible.
Occasionally, especially when long deferred, it breaks with the
suddenness of an epoch, and the child is aware of a new existence. A
little girl of my acquaintance turned from play to her mother with the
cry, "Why, mamma, little girls don't know that they are." She had just
discovered it. In a famous passage of his autobiography, Jean Paul
Richter has recorded the great change in himself: "Never shall I
forget the inward experience of the birth of self-consciousness. I
well remember the time and place. I stood one afternoon, a very young
child, at the house-door, and looked at the logs of wood piled on the
left. Suddenly an inward consciousness, 'I am a Me,' came like a flash
of lightning from heaven, and has remained ever since. At that moment
my existence became conscious of itself, and forever."

The knowledge that I am an I cannot be conveyed to me by another human
being, nor can I perceive anything similar in him. Each must ascertain
it for himself. Accordingly there is only one word in every language
which is absolutely unique, bearing a different meaning for every one
who employs it. That is the word I. For me to use it in the sense that
you do would prove that I had lost my wits. Whatever enters into my
usage is out of it in yours. Obviously, then, the meaning of this word
cannot be taught. Everything else may be. What the table is, what is a
triangle, what virtue, heaven, or a spherodactyl, you can teach me.
What I am, you cannot; for no one has ever had an experience
corresponding to this except myself. People in speaking to me call me
John, Baby, or Ned, an externally descriptive name which has
substantially a common meaning for all who see me. When I begin to
talk I repeat this name imitatively, and thinking of myself as others
do. I speak of myself in the third person. Yet how early that
reference to a third person begins to be saturated with self-