"Every child that is coming into being rests, like all life that is coming into being, in the womb of the great mother, the undivided primal world that precedes form. From her, too, we are separated, and enter into personal life, slipping free only in the dark hours to be close to her again; night by night this happens to the healthy person. But this separation does not occur suddenly and catastrophically like the separation from the bodily mother; time is granted to the child to exchange a spiritual connection, that is, relation, for the natural connection with the world that they gradually lose. They have stepped out of the glowing darkness of chaos into the cool light of creation. But they do not possess it yet; they must draw it truly out, they must make it into reality for themself, they must find for themself their own world by seeing and hearing and touching and shaping it. Creation reveals, in meeting, its essential nature as form. It does not spill itself into expectant senses, but rises up to meet the grasping senses.
...[I]t is the instinct [of the child] to make everything into Thou, to give relation to the universe...Little, disjointed, meaningless sounds go out persistently into the void. But one day, unforeseen, they will have become conversation -- does it matter that it is perhaps with the simmering kettle? It is conversation. Many a movement termed reflex is a firm trowel in the building up of the person in the world. It is simply not the case that the child first perceives an object, then, as it were, puts themself in relation with it. The effort to establish relation comes first -- the hand of the child arched out so that what is over against them may nestle under it; second is the actual relation, a saying of Thou without words, in the state preceding the word-form; the thing, like the I, is produced late, arising after the original experiences have been split asunder and the connected partners separated. In the beginning is relation -- as category of being, readiness, grasping form, mould for the soul; it is the a priori of relation, the inborn Thou."
Martin Buber, I and Thou
