ole.
The human child at its mother's knee probably comes first to know it
HAS a 'self' on some fateful day when having wandered afar it goes
lost among alien houses and streets or in the trackless fields. That
appalling experience--the sense of danger, of fear, of loneliness--is
never forgotten; it stamps some new sense of Being upon the childish
mind, but that sense, instead of being destroyed, becomes all the
prouder and more radiant in the hour of return to the mother's arms. The
return, the salvation, for which humanity looks, is the return of the
little individual self to harmony and union with the great Self of the
universe, but by no means its extinction or abandonment--rather the
finding of its own true nature as never before.

There is another thing which may be said here: namely, that the
disentanglement, as above, of three main stages of psychological
evolution as great formative influences in the history of mankind, does
not by any means preclude the establishment of lesser stages within the
boundaries of these. In all probability subdivisions of all the three
will come in time to be recognized and allowed for. To take the
Second stage only, it MAY appear that Self-consciousness in its first
development is characterized by an accentuation of Timidity; in its
second development by a more deliberate pursuit of sensual Pleasure
(lust, food, drink, &c.); in its third by the pursuit of mental
gratifications (vanities, ambitions, enslavement of others); in its
fourth by the pursuit of Property, as a means of attaining these
objects; in its fifth by the access of enmities, jealousies, wars and so
forth, consequent on all these things; and so on. I have no intention at
present of following out this line of thought, but only wish to suggest
its feasibility and the degree to which it may throw light on the social
evolutions of the Past. (1)

(1) For an analysis of the nature of Self-consciousness see vol.
iii, p. 375 sq. of the three ponderous tomes by Wilhelm
Wundt--Grund-zuge der Physiologischen Psychologie--in which amid an
enormous mass of verbiage occasional gleams of useful suggestion are to
be found.

As a kind of rude general philosophy we may say that there are only two
main factors in life, namely, Love and Ignorance. And of these we may
also say that the two are not in the same plane: one is positive and
substantial, the other is negative and merely illusory. It may be
thought at first that Fear an