gressively developing relation to her?
This consciousness, however, is utterly non-ideal, non-mental, purely
dynamic, a matter of dynamic polarized intercourse of vital
vibrations, as an exchange of wireless messages which are never
translated from the pulse-rhythm into speech, because they have no
need to be. It is a dynamic polarized intercourse between the great
primary nuclei in the foetus and the corresponding nuclei in the
dynamic maternal psyche.
This form of consciousness is established at conception, and continues
long after birth. Nay, it continues all life long. But the particular
interchange of dynamic consciousness between mother and child suffers
no interruption at birth. It continues almost the same. The child has
no conception whatsoever of the mother. It cannot see her, for its eye
has no focus. It can hear her, because hearing needs no transmission
into concept, but it has no oral notion of sounds. It knows her. But
only by a form of vital dynamic correspondence, a sort of magnetic
interchange. The idea does not intervene at all.
Gradually, however, the dark shadow of our object begins to loom in
the formless mind of the infant. The idea of the mother is, as it
were, gradually photographed on the cerebral plasm. It begins with the
faintest shadow--but the figure is gradually developed through years
of experience. It is never quite completed.
How does the figure of the mother gradually develop as a _conception_
in the child mind? It develops as the result of the positive and
negative reaction from the primary centers of consciousness. From the
first great center of sympathy the child is drawn to a lovely oneing
with the mother. From the first great center of will comes the
independent self-assertion which locates the mother as something
outside, something objective. And as a result of this twofold notion,
a twofold increase in the child. First, the dynamic establishment of
the individual consciousness in the infant: and then the first shadow
of a mental conception of the mother, in the infant brain. The
development of the _original_ mind in every child and every man always
and only follows from the dual fulfillment in the dynamic
consciousness.
But mark further. Each time, after the fourfold interchange between
two dynamic polarized lives, there results a development in the
individuality and a sublimation into consciousness, both
simultaneously in each party: _and this dual development causes
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