For now, towards the world around him--the world that is not his mother,
and, actively at least, neither loves him nor ministers to him, reveal
themselves certain relations, initiated by fancies, desires,
preferences, that arise within himself--reasonable or not matters
little:--founded in reason, they can in no case be _devoid_ of reason.
Every object concerned in these relations presents itself to the man as
lovely, desirable, good, or ugly, hateful, bad; and through these
relations, obscure and imperfect, and to a being weighted with a strong
faculty for mistake, begins to be revealed the existence and force of
Being other and higher than his own, recognized as _Will_, and first of
all in its opposition to his desires. Thereupon begins the strife
without which there never was, and, I presume, never can be, any growth,
any progress; and the first result is what I may call the third birth of
the human being.
The first opposing glance of the mother wakes in the child not only
answering opposition, which is as the rudimentary sac of his own coming
will, but a new something, to which for long he needs no name, so
natural does it seem, so entirely a portion of his being, even when most
he refuses to listen to and obey it.
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