Ants everywhere ants!

There is an immense difference between simply carrying the world within us and being aware of it. A madman can sprout ideas that remind you of Plato, and a pious little seminary student rethinks deep mythological correspondences found among the Gnostics or in Zoroaster, but he isn’t aware of them. He is a tree or a stone, at best an animal, as long as he’s not conscious. But as soon as the first spark of recognition dawns within him, he is a human being.
You wouldn’t consider all bipeds you pass on the street human beings simply because they walk upright and carry their young in their bellies nine months! It is obvious how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or angels. How many are ants, how many are bees! Well, each one of them contains the possibility of becoming human, but by only by having an intimidation of these possibilities, partially only even by learning to make himself conscious of them only in this respect are these possibilities his.

= Chunk from "Demian" by Hermann Hesse