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CREATION.
gradually evolved out and developed in the individual. Certainly, if we watch the development of the sense of "I" in the child, we learn that for quite a considerable portion of its infantine existence it talks of itself in the third person and has no clear conception of his personality. Besides, personality is naturally variable. Our ideas are constantly being remodelled and changed. A grown-up man has very little of the personality of the school-boy in him; and even the latter retains but little from that of a still earlier period. When we grow old a still more radical change takes place in us; neither the tastes, nor the pursuits, nor the surroundings of the earlier phases of life have any hold on, or attraction for, us in old age. Our ideas of the self change also with the changes in our circumstances. Personality is the outcome of thought, that is, of discrimination between the self and the not-self. Hence, so long as the child's power of discrimination is not sufficiently developed, it knows no difference between the self and the rest, which constitute the not-self; but with the development of the power of discrimination comes the idea of the appropriating, bodily self, at first dimly, but later with the full consciousness of self, to the exclusion of all the rest that constitute the not-self. So far as the evolution of the idea of self is concerned, Haeckel is quite right in saying:
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"In the important moment when it (the child) first pronounces the word I,' when the feeling of self becomes clear, we have the beginning of self-consciousness, and of the antithesis of non-ego."
Jain Education International
The phenomenon of personality appears perplexing only so long as we do not study it in all its stages of
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