h I am even now frequently caught spelling to myself on
my fingers, yet I talk to myself, too, with my lips, and it is true that
when I first learned to speak, my mind discarded the finger-symbols and
began to articulate. However, when I try to recall what some one has
said to me, I am conscious of a hand spelling into mine.

It has often been asked what were my earliest impressions of the world
in which I found myself. But one who thinks at all of his first
impressions knows what a riddle this is. Our impressions grow and change
unnoticed, so that what we suppose we thought as children may be quite
different from what we actually experienced in our childhood. I only
know that after my education began the world which came within my reach
was all alive. I spelled to my blocks and my dogs. I sympathized with
plants when the flowers were picked, because I thought it hurt them,
and that they grieved for their lost blossoms. It was two years before I
could be made to believe that my dogs did not understand what I said,
and I always apologized to them when I ran into or stepped on them.

As my experiences broadened and deepened, the indeterminate, poetic
feelings of childhood began to fix themselves in definite thoughts.
Nature--the world I could touch--was folded and filled with myself. I am
inclined to believe those philosophers who declare that we know nothing
but our own feelings and ideas. With a little ingenious reasoning one
may see in the material world simply a mirror, an image of permanent
mental sensations. In either sphere self-knowledge is the condition and
the limit of our consciousness. That is why, perhaps, many people know
so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They
look within themselves--and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that
there is nothing outside themselves, either.

However that may be, I came later to look for an image of my emotions
and sensations in others. I had to learn the outward signs of inward
feelings. The start of fear, the suppressed, controlled tensity of pain,
the beat of happy muscles in others, had to be perceived and compared
with my own experiences before I could trace them back to the intangible
soul of another. Groping, uncertain, I at last found my identity, and
after seeing my thoughts and feelings repeated in others, I gradually
constructed my world of men and of God. As I read and study, I find
that this is what the rest of the race has done. Ma