ut by means of speech the
_conceptual_ distinction of the "I," the self, the mine, is first made
exact; the development, not the origin, of the "I"-feeling is simply
favored.

How obscure the "I"-concept is even after learning the use of the
personal pronouns is shown by the utterance of the four-year-old
daughter of Lindner, named Olga, _die hat mich nass gemacht_ (she has
made me wet), when she meant that she herself had done it; and _du
sollst mir doch folgen, Olga_ (but you must follow me, Olga), the latter
expression, indeed, being merely said after some one else. In her is
noteworthy, too, the confounding of the possessives "his" and "her,"
e. g., _dem Papa ihr Buch auf der Mama seinen Platz gelegt_ (her book,
papa's, laid in his place, mamma's) (Lindner); and yet in these forms of
speech there is an advance in the differentiation of the concepts.

All children are known to be late in beginning to speak about
themselves, of what they wish to become, or of that which they can
do better than others can, and the like. The _ego_ has become an
experience of consciousness long before this.

All these progressive steps, which in the individual can be traced only
with great pains, form, as it were, converging lines that culminate in
the fully developed feeling of the personality as exclusive, as distinct
from the outer world.

Thus much the purely physiological view can admit without hesitation;
but a further unification or indivisibility or unbroken permanence of
the child's _ego_, it can not reconcile with the facts, perfectly well
established by me, that are presented in this chapter.

For what is the significance of the fact, that "to the child his feet,
hands, teeth, seem a plaything foreign to himself"? and that "the child
bit his own arm as he was accustomed to bite objects with which he was
not acquainted"? "Seem" to what part of the child? What is that which
bites in the child as in the very young chick that seizes its own toe
with its bill and bites it as if it were the toe of its neighbor or a
grain of millet? Evidently the "subject" in the head is a different one
from that in the trunk. The _ego_ of the brain is other than the _ego_
of the spinal marrow (the "spinal-marrow-soul" of Pflueger). The one
speaks, sees, hears, tastes, smells, and feels; the other merely feels,
and at the beginning, so long as brain and spinal marrow have only a
loose organic connection and no functional connection at all with e