Consciousness of the “I” is not connected with the primitive sway of the instinct for self-preservation any more than with that of the other instincts. It is not the “I” that wishes to propagate itself, but the body, that knows as yet of no “I”. It is not the “I” but the body that wishes to make things, a tool or a toy, that wishes to be a “creator”. Further, a cognosco ergo sum, in however naive a form and however childlike a conception of an experiencing subject, cannot be found in the primitive function of knowledge. The “I” emerges power is only a particular variety of the general magic power from which all effective action is derived. Causality in his world-image is no unbroken sequence but an ever new flashing forth of power and moving out towards its production; it is a volcanic movement without continuity. Mana is a primitive abstraction, probably more primitive than, say, number, but not any more supernatural than it. The memory as it is being trained ranges the grand relational. events, the elemental emotional shocks. The most important for the instinct of preservation and the most noteworthy for the instinct to understand—that is, “that which effects,” stands out most forcibly of all, and becomes independent. The less important, the non-communal, the changing Thou of experiences, retires and remains isolated in the memory, and is gradually transformed into an object and very slowly drawn into groups and classes. As third in the arrangement, terrible when thus separated, at times more ghostly than the dead and the moon, but always more and more irrefutably clear, there arises up tho other, “unchanging” partner, “I”.
Consciousness of the “I” is not connected with the primitive sway of the instinct for self-preservation any more than with that of the other instincts. It is not the “I” that wishes to propagate itself, but the body, that knows as yet of no “I”. It is not the “I” but the body that wishes to make things, a tool or a toy, that wishes to be a “creator”. Further, a cognosco ergo sum, in however naive a form and however childlike a conception of an experiencing subject, cannot be found in the primitive function of knowledge. The “I” emerges round about it. The body comes to know and to differentiate itself in its peculiarities; the differentiation, however, remains one of pure juxtaposition, and hence cannot have the character of the state in which I is implied.
But when the I of the relation has stepped forth and taken on separate existence, it also moves, strangely tenuous and reduced to merely functional activity, into the natural, actual event of the separation of the body from the world round about it, and awakens there the state in which I is properly active. Only now can the conscious act of the I take place. This act is the first form of the primary word I-It, of the experience in its relation to I. The I which stepped forth declares itself to be the bearer, and the world round about to be the object, of the perceptions. Of course, this happens in a “primitive” form and not in the form of a “theory of knowledge”. But whenever the sentence “I see the tree” is so uttered that it no longer tells of a relation between the man—I—and the tree—Thou—, but establishes the perception of the tree as object by the human consciousness, the barrier between subject and object has been set up. The primary word I-It, the word of separation, has been spoken.