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What, then, is to be said of the mind of an infant, which is still
so small, and buried in such profound ignorance of things, that the
mind of a man which knows anything shrinks from the darkness of it? Is
that too to be believed to know itself; but that,: as being too
intent upon those things which it has begun to perceive through the
bodily senses, with the greater delight in proportion to their
novelty, it is not able indeed to be ignorant of itself, but is also
not able to think of itself? Moreover, how intently it is bent upon
sensible things that are without it, may be conjectured from this one
fact, that it is so greedy of sensible light, that if any one through
carelessness, or ignorance of the possible consequences, place a light
at nighttime where an infant is lying down, on that side to which the
eyes of the child so lying down can be bent, but its neck cannot be
turned, the gaze of that child will be so fixed in that direction,
that we have known some to have come to squint by this means, in that
the eyes retained that form which habit in some way impressed upon them
while tender and soft. In the case, too, of the other bodily
senses, the souls of infants, as far as their age permits, so narrow
themselves as it were, and are bent upon them, that they either
vehemently detest or vehemently desire that only which offends or
allures through the flesh, but do not think of their own inward self,
nor can be made to do so by admonition; because they do not yet know
the signs that express admonition, whereof words are the chief, of
which as of other things they are wholly ignorant. And that it is one
thing not to know oneself, another not to think of oneself, we have
shown already in the same book.
8. But let us pass by the infantine age, since we cannot question it
as to what goes on within itself, while we have ourselves pretty well
forgotten it. Let it suffice only for us hence to be certain, that
when man has come to be able to think of the nature of his own mind,
and to find out what is the truth, he will find it nowhere else but in
himself. And he will find, not what he did not know, but that of
which he did not think. For what do we know, if we do not know what
is in our own mind; when we can know nothing at all of what we do
know, unless by the mind?
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