chapter_2_text

c2p29

It is well known that small children often angrily strike an object against which they have stumbled. This has been interpreted as ‘animism’, by which it is meant that the child, by analogy with his experience of himself as a soul-filled body, imagines the things in his surroundings to be similarly ensouled. Anyone who really observes the child’s mode of experience (of which we as adults, indeed, keep something in our will-life) is led to a quite different interpretation of such a phenomenon. For he realizes that the child neither experiences himself as soul-entity distinct from his body, nor faces the content of the world in so detached a manner as to be in need of using his imagination to read into it any soul-entities distinct from his own.

chapter_2_text

c2p14

There is a rule known to physicians that ‘a true diagnosis of a case contains in itself the therapy’. No true diagnosis is possible, however, without investigation of the ‘history’ of the case. Applied to our task, this means that we must try to find an aspect of human development, both individual and historical, which will enable us to recognize in man’s own being the cause responsible for the peculiar narrowing of the scope of scientific inquiry, as described by the scientists cited above.

chapter_2_text

c2p30

In this early period of his life the human being still feels the world as part of himself, and himself as part of the world. Consequently, his relation to the objects around him and to his own body is one and the same. To the example of the child beating the external object he has stumbled against, there belongs the complementary picture of the child who beats himself because he has done something which makes him angry with himself.