tinguish them from foreign objects as parts
belonging to him; but in this he by no means arrives at the point of
considering, "The hand is mine, the thing seized is not," or "The leg
belongs to me," and the like; but because all the visible parts of the
child's body, on account of very frequently repeated observation, no
longer excite the optic center so strongly and therefore appear no
longer interesting--because the experiences of touch combined with
visual perceptions always recur in the same manner--the child has
gradually become accustomed to them and _overlooks_ them when making
use of his hands and feet. He no longer represents them to himself
separately, as he did before, whereas every new object felt, seen, or
heard, is very interesting to him and is separately represented in idea.
Thus arises the definite separation of object and subject in the child's
intellect. In the beginning the child is new to himself, namely, to the
representational apparatus that gets its development only after birth;
later, after he has become acquainted with himself, after he, namely,
his body, has lost the charm of novelty for him, i. e., for the
representational apparatus in his brain, a dim feeling of the "I"
exists, and by means of further abstraction the concept of the "I" is
formed.

The progress of the intellect in the act of _looking into the mirror_
confirms this conclusion drawn from the above observations.

For the behavior of the child toward his image in the glass shows
unmistakably the gradual growth of the consciousness of self out of
a condition in which objective and subjective changes are not yet
distinguished from each other.

Among the subjective changes is, without doubt, the smiling at the
image in the tenth week, which was probably occasioned merely by the
brightness (Sigismund). Another boy in the twenty-seventh week looked
at himself in the glass with a smile (Sigismund).

Darwin recorded of one of his sons, that in the fifth month he
repeatedly smiled at his father's image and his own in a mirror and
took them for real objects; but he was surprised that his father's
voice sounded from behind him (the child). "Like all infants, he
much enjoyed thus looking at himself, and in less than two months
perfectly understood that it was an image, for if I made quite
silently any odd grimace, he would suddenly turn round to look at
me. He was, however, puzzled at the age of seven months, when, being
out of doors,