Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/548

psychologists and philosophers to regard man as if, after all, he first developed as a more or less self-conscious being, and then secondarily came to regard others besides himself as being also self-conscious persons. As a fact, however, while in the end the developed self-consciousness and the developed social-consciousness, while my mature ideas of myself and my mature ideas of other selves (of my fellows or my guides or of my enemies), while both of these groups of ideas, I say, are inseparable constituents of rational life, so that the Ego can only be understood in relation to other Egos, and the other Egos can only be known by me in relation to my idea of myself,—it is still true that, in the order of development, quoad nos, one of these two classes of ideas, which are later so inseparable, is always one step in advance of the other. And, oddly enough, everything in the psychology of childhood and of the natural man indicates that it is not, as usually supposed, my idea of myself that is in advance in my own development, but my idea of other selves. Everything I say indicates that my idea of myself, as empirical Ego, is on the whole a social product, due, strangely enough, to my ideas of other people. Self-consciousness, as Hegel loved to point out, is, in fact, always a mutual affair. Es ist ein Selbstbewusstsein für ein Selbstbewusstsein. The idea 'I' is inseparable from the idea 'you.' I am I, on the whole, and in every definite aspect of my self-consciousness, in so far as I appeal to my fellow to recognize me. For example: I believe, and in believing conceive myself as demanding the approval of good judges. I esteem myself, and in doing so conceive myself as esteemed by others. But now it is further true, as Hegel did not rightly or sufficiently recognize, that, in the order of my natural development, the one member of this inseparable pair, the 'I' and the 'you,' the one member, I say, that is always one step in advance in the process of consciousness, is the so-called second member, the 'you.' The anthropological side of the speculations of Fichte will never become sound, from the psychological point of view, until they are some day rewritten with 'Das Du' instead of 'Das Ich,' as the