CHAPTER XII.

THE SELF.

=The Me and the I.=--Whatever I may be thinking of, I am always at the

same time more or less aware of _myself_, of my _personal existence_. At

the same time it is _I_ who am aware; so that the total self of me,

being as it were duplex, partly known and partly knower, partly object

and partly subject, must have two aspects discriminated in it, of which

for shortness we may call one the _Me_ and the other the _I_. I call

these 'discriminated aspects,' and not separate things, because the

identity of _I_ with _me_, even in the very act of their discrimination,

is perhaps the most ineradicable dictum of common-sense, and must not be

undermined by our terminology here at the outset, whatever we may come

to think of its validity at our inquiry's end.

I shall therefore treat successively of A) the self as known, or the

_me_, the 'empirical ego' as it is sometimes called; and of B) the self

as knower, or the I, the 'pure ego' of certain authors.

A) THE SELF AS KNOWN.

=The Empirical Self or Me.=--Between what a man calls _me_ and what he

simply calls _mine_ the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about

certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about

ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our hands, may be as dear

to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts

of reprisal if attacked. And our bodies themselves, are they simply

ours, or are they _us_? Certainly men have been ready to disown their

very bodies and to regard them as mere vestures, or even as prisons of

clay from which they should some day be glad to escape.

We see then that we are dealing with a fluctuating material; the same

object being sometimes treated as a part of me, at other times as simply

mine, and then again as if I had nothing to do with it at all. _In its

widest possible sense_, however, _a man's Me is the sum total of all

that he_ CAN _call his_, not only his body and his psychic powers, but

his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and

friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and

bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax

and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels

cast down,--not necessarily in the same degree for each thing, but in

much the same way for all. Understanding the Me in this widest sense, we

may begin by dividing the history of it into three parts, relating

respectively to--

_a._ Its constituents;

_b._ The feelings and emotions they arouse,--_self-appreciation_;

_c._ The act to which they prompt,--_self-seeking and

self-preservation_.

* * * * *

_a._ _The constituents of the Me_ may be divided into two classes, those

which make up respectively--

The material me;

The social me; and

The spiritual me.

=The Material Me.=--The _body_ is the innermost part of the material me in

each of us; and certain parts of the body seem more intimately ours than

the rest. The clothes come next. The old saying that the human person is

composed of three parts--soul, body and clothes--is more than a joke. We

so appropriate our clothes and identify ourselves with them that there

are few of us who, if asked to choose between having a beautiful body

clad in raiment perpetually shabby and unclean, and having an ugly and

blemished form always spotlessly attired, would not hesitate a moment

before making a decisive reply. Next, our immediate family is a part of

ourselves. Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our

bone and flesh of our flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is

gone. If they do anything wrong, it is our shame. If they are insulted,

our anger flashes forth as readily as if we stood in their place. Our

home comes next. Its scenes are part of our life; its aspects awaken the

tenderest feelings of affection; and we do not easily forgive the

stranger who, in visiting it, finds fault with its arrangements or

treats it with contempt. All these different things are the objects of

instinctive preferences coupled with the most important practical

interests of life. We all have a blind impulse to watch over our body,

to deck it with clothing of an ornamental sort, to cherish parents,

wife, and babes, and to find for ourselves a house of our own which we

may live in and 'improve.'

An equally instinctive impulse drives us to collect property; and the

collections thus made become, with different degrees of intimacy, parts

of our empirical selves. The parts of our wealth most intimately ours

are those which are saturated with our labor. There are few men who

would not feel personally annihilated if a life-long construction of

their hands or brains--say an entomological collection or an extensive

work in manuscript--were suddenly swept away. The miser feels similarly

towards his gold; and although it is true that a part of our depression

at the loss of possessions is due to our feeling that we must now go

without certain goods that we expected the possessions to bring in their

train, yet in every case there remains, over and above this, a sense of

the shrinkage of our personality, a partial conversion of ourselves to

nothingness, which is a psychological phenomenon by itself. We are all

at once assimilated to the tramps and poor devils whom we so despise,

and at the same time removed farther than ever away from the happy sons

of earth who lord it over land and sea and men in the full-blown

lustihood that wealth and power can give, and before whom, stiffen

ourselves as we will by appealing to anti-snobbish first principles, we

cannot escape an emotion, open or sneaking, of respect and dread.

=The Social Me.=--A man's social me is the recognition which he gets from

his mates. We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of

our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed,

and noticed favorably, by our kind. No more fiendish punishment could be

devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be

turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the

members thereof. If no one turned round when we entered, answered when

we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met 'cut us

dead,' and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and

impotent despair would ere long well up in us, from which the cruellest

bodily tortures would be a relief; for these would make us feel that,

however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk to such a depth as to

be unworthy of attention at all.

Properly speaking, _a man has as many social selves as there are

individuals who recognize him_ and carry an image of him in their mind.

To wound any one of these his images is to wound him. But as the

individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may

practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are

distinct _groups_ of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally

shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups.

Many a youth who is demure enough before his parents and teachers,

swears and swaggers like a pirate among his 'tough' young friends. We do

not show ourselves to our children as to our club-companions, to our

customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and

employers as to our intimate friends. From this there results what

practically is a division of the man into several selves; and this may

be a discordant splitting, as where one is afraid to let one set of his

acquaintances know him as he is elsewhere; or it may be a perfectly

harmonious division of labor, as where one tender to his children is

stern to the soldiers or prisoners under his command.

The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of

the person one is in love with. The good or bad fortunes of this self

cause the most intense elation and dejection--unreasonable enough as

measured by every other standard than that of the organic feeling of the

individual. To his own consciousness he _is_ not, so long as this

particular social self fails to get recognition, and when it is

recognized his contentment passes all bounds.

A man's _fame_, good or bad, and his _honor_ or dishonor, are names for

one of his social selves. The particular social self of a man called his

honor is usually the result of one of those splittings of which we have

spoken. It is his image in the eyes of his own 'set,' which exalts or

condemns him as he conforms or not to certain requirements that may not

be made of one in another walk of life. Thus a layman may abandon a city

infected with cholera; but a priest or a doctor would think such an act

incompatible with his honor. A soldier's honor requires him to fight or

to die under circumstances where another man can apologize or run away

with no stain upon his social self. A judge, a statesman, are in like

manner debarred by the honor of their cloth from entering into pecuniary

relations perfectly honorable to persons in private life. Nothing is

commoner than to hear people discriminate between their different selves

of this sort: "As a man I pity you, but as an official I must show you

no mercy"; "As a politician I regard him as an ally, but as a moralist I

loathe him"; etc., etc. What may be called 'club-opinion' is one of the

very strongest forces in life. The thief must not steal from other

thieves; the gambler must pay his gambling-debts, though he pay no other

debts in the world. The code of honor of fashionable society has

throughout history been full of permissions as well as of vetoes, the

only reason for following either of which is that so we best serve one

of our social selves. You must not lie in general, but you may lie as

much as you please if asked about your relations with a lady; you must

accept a challenge from an equal, but if challenged by an inferior you

may laugh him to scorn: these are examples of what is meant.

=The Spiritual Me.=--By the 'spiritual me,' so far as it belongs to the

empirical self, I mean no one of my passing states of consciousness. I

mean rather the entire collection of my states of consciousness, my

psychic faculties and dispositions taken concretely. This collection can

at any moment become an object to my thought at that moment and awaken

emotions like those awakened by any of the other portions of the Me.

When we _think of ourselves as thinkers_, all the other ingredients of

our Me seem relatively external possessions. Even within the spiritual

_Me_ some ingredients seem more external than others. Our capacities for

sensation, for example, are less intimate possessions, so to speak, than

our emotions and desires; our intellectual processes are less intimate

than our volitional decisions. The more _active-feeling_ states of

consciousness are thus the more central portions of the spiritual Me.

The very core and nucleus of our self, as we know it, the very sanctuary

of our life, is the sense of activity which certain inner states

possess. This sense of activity is often held to be a direct revelation

of the living substance of our Soul. Whether this be so or not is an

ulterior question. I wish now only to lay down the peculiar

_internality_ of whatever states possess this quality of seeming to be

active. It is as if they _went out to meet_ all the other elements of

our experience. In thus feeling about them probably all men agree.

_b._ _The feelings and emotions of self_ come after the constituents.

=Self-appreciation.=--This is of two sorts, _self-complacency_ and

_self-dissatisfaction_. 'Self-love' more properly belongs under the

division _C_, of _acts_, since what men mean by that name is rather a

set of motor tendencies than a kind of feeling properly so called.

Language has synonyms enough for both kinds of self-appreciation. Thus

pride, conceit, vanity, self-esteem, arrogance, vainglory, on the one

hand; and on the other modesty, humility, confusion, diffidence, shame,

mortification, contrition, the sense of obloquy, and personal despair.

These two opposite classes of affection seem to be direct and elementary

endowments of our nature. Associationists would have it that they are,

on the other hand, secondary phenomena arising from a rapid computation

of the sensible pleasures or pains to which our prosperous or debased

personal predicament is likely to lead, the sum of the represented

pleasures forming the self-satisfaction, and the sum of the represented

pains forming the opposite feeling of shame. No doubt, when we are

self-satisfied, we do fondly rehearse all possible rewards for our

desert, and when in a fit of self-despair we forebode evil. But the mere

expectation of reward _is_ not the self-satisfaction, and the mere

apprehension of the evil _is_ not the self-despair; for there is a

certain average tone of self-feeling which each one of us carries about

with him, and which is independent of the objective reasons we may have

for satisfaction or discontent. That is, a very meanly-conditioned man

may abound in unfaltering conceit, and one whose success in life is

secure, and who is esteemed by all, may remain diffident of his powers

to the end.

One may say, however, that the normal _provocative_ of self-feeling is

one's actual success or failure, and the good or bad actual position one

holds in the world. "He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum, and

said, 'What a good boy am I!'" A man with a broadly extended empirical

Ego, with powers that have uniformly brought him success, with place and

wealth and friends and fame, is not likely to be visited by the morbid

diffidences and doubts about himself which he had when he was a boy. "Is

not this great Babylon, which I have planted?" Whereas he who has made

one blunder after another, and still lies in middle life among the

failures at the foot of the hill, is liable to grow all sicklied o'er

with self-distrust, and to shrink from trials with which his powers can

really cope.

The emotions themselves of self-satisfaction and abasement are of a

unique sort, each as worthy to be classed as a primitive emotional

species as are, for example, rage or pain. Each has its own peculiar

physiognomical expression. In self-satisfaction the extensor muscles are

innervated, the eye is strong and glorious, the gait rolling and

elastic, the nostril dilated, and a peculiar smile plays upon the lips.

This whole complex of symptoms is seen in an exquisite way in lunatic

asylums, which always contain some patients who are literally mad with

conceit, and whose fatuous expression and absurdly strutting or

swaggering gait is in tragic contrast with their lack of any valuable

personal quality. It is in these same castles of despair that we find

the strongest examples of the opposite physiognomy, in good people who

think they have committed 'the unpardonable sin' and are lost forever,

who crouch and cringe and slink from notice, and are unable to speak

aloud or look us in the eye. Like fear and like anger, in similar morbid

conditions, these opposite feelings of Self may be aroused with no

adequate exciting cause. And in fact we ourselves know how the barometer

of our self-esteem and confidence rises and falls from one day to

another through causes that seem to be visceral and organic rather than

rational, and which certainly answer to no corresponding variations in

the esteem in which we are held by our friends.

_c._ _Self-seeking and self-preservation_ come next.

These words cover a large number of our fundamental instinctive

impulses. We have those of _bodily self-seeking_, those of _social

self-seeking_, and those of _spiritual self-seeking_.

=Bodily Self-seeking.=--All the ordinary useful reflex actions and

movements of alimentation and defence are acts of bodily

self-preservation. Fear and anger prompt to acts that are useful in the

same way. Whilst if by self-seeking we mean the providing for the future

as distinguished from maintaining the present, we must class both anger

and fear, together with the hunting, the acquisitive, the

home-constructing and the tool-constructing instincts, as impulses to

self-seeking of the bodily kind. Really, however, these latter

instincts, with amativeness, parental fondness, curiosity and emulation,

seek not only the development of the bodily Me, but that of the material

Me in the widest possible sense of the word.

Our =social self-seeking=, in turn, is carried on directly through our

amativeness and friendliness, our desire to please and attract notice

and admiration, our emulation and jealousy, our love of glory,

influence, and power, and indirectly through whichever of the material

self-seeking impulses prove serviceable as means to social ends. That

the direct social self-seeking impulses are probably pure instincts is

easily seen. The noteworthy thing about the desire to be 'recognized' by

others is that its strength has so little to do with the worth of the

recognition computed in sensational or rational terms. We are crazy to

get a visiting-list which shall be large, to be able to say when any one

is mentioned, "Oh! I know him well," and to be bowed to in the street by

half the people we meet. Of course distinguished friends and admiring

recognition are the most desirable--Thackeray somewhere asks his readers

to confess whether it would not give each of _them_ an exquisite

pleasure to be met walking down Pall Mall with a duke on either arm. But

in default of dukes and envious salutions almost anything will do for

some of us; and there is a whole race of beings to-day whose passion is

to keep their names in the newspapers, no matter under what heading,

'arrivals and departures,' 'personal paragraphs,' 'interviews,'--gossip,

even scandal, will suit them if nothing better is to be had. Guiteau,

Garfield's assassin, is an example of the extremity to which this sort

of craving for the notoriety of print may go in a pathological case. The

newspapers bounded his mental horizon; and in the poor wretch's prayer

on the scaffold, one of the most heart-felt expressions was: "The

newspaper press of this land has a big bill to settle with thee, O

Lord!"

Not only the people but the places and things I know enlarge my Self in

a sort of metaphoric social way. '_Ça me connaît_,' as the French

workman says of the implement he can use well. So that it comes about

that persons for whose _opinion_ we care nothing are nevertheless

persons whose notice we woo; and that many a man truly great, many a

woman truly fastidious in most respects, will take a deal of trouble to

dazzle some insignificant cad whose whole personality they heartily

despise.

Under the head of =spiritual self-seeking= ought to be included every

impulse towards psychic progress, whether intellectual, moral, or

spiritual in the narrow sense of the term. It must be admitted, however,

that much that commonly passes for spiritual self-seeking in this narrow

sense is only material and social self-seeking beyond the grave. In the

Mohammedan desire for paradise and the Christian aspiration not to be

damned in hell, the materiality of the goods sought is undisguised. In

the more positive and refined view of heaven, many of its goods, the

fellowship of the saints and of our dead ones, and the presence of God,

are but social goods of the most exalted kind. It is only the search of

the redeemed inward nature, the spotlessness from sin, whether here or

hereafter, that can count as spiritual self-seeking pure and undefiled.

But this broad external review of the facts of the life of the Me will

be incomplete without some account of the

=Rivalry and Conflict of the Different Mes.=--With most objects of desire,

physical nature restricts our choice to but one of many represented

goods, and even so it is here. I am often confronted by the necessity of

standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not

that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed,

and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a

_bon-vivant_, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a

philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a

'tone-poet' and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The

millionaire's work would run counter to the saint's; the _bon-vivant_

and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the

lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such

different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike

_possible_ to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must

more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest,

deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on

which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal,

but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failures are real failures,

its triumphs real triumphs, carrying shame and gladness with them. This

is as strong an example as there is of that selective industry of the

mind on which I insisted some pages back (p. 173 ff.). Our thought,

incessantly deciding, among many things of a kind, which ones for it

shall be realities, here chooses one of many possible selves or

characters, and forthwith reckons it no shame to fail in any of those

not adopted expressly as its own.

So we have the paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only the

second pugilist or the second oarsman in the world. That he is able to

beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing; he has

'pitted' himself to beat that one; and as long as he doesn't do that

nothing else counts. He is to his own regard as if he were not, indeed

he _is_ not. Yonder puny fellow, however, whom every one can beat,

suffers no chagrin about it, for he has long ago abandoned the attempt

to 'carry that line,' as the merchants say, of self at all. With no

attempt there can be no failure; with no failure, no humiliation. So our

self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we _back_ ourselves

to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our

supposed potentialities; a fraction of which our pretensions are the

denominator and the numerator our success: thus,

Self-esteem = Success/Pretensions.

Such a fraction may be increased as well by diminishing the denominator

as by increasing the numerator. To give up pretensions is as blessed a

relief as to get them gratified; and where disappointment is incessant

and the struggle unending, this is what men will always do. The history

of evangelical theology, with its conviction of sin, its self-despair,

and its abandonment of salvation by works, is the deepest of possible

examples, but we meet others in every walk of life. There is the

strangest lightness about the heart when one's nothingness in a

particular line is once accepted in good faith. _All_ is not bitterness

in the lot of the lover sent away by the final inexorable 'No.' Many

Bostonians, _crede experto_ (and inhabitants of other cities, too, I

fear), would be happier women and men to-day, if they could once for all

abandon the notion of keeping up a Musical Self, and without shame let

people hear them call a symphony a nuisance. How pleasant is the day

when we give up striving to be young,--or slender! Thank God! we say,

_those_ illusions are gone. Everything added to the Self is a burden as

well as a pride. A certain man who lost every penny during our civil war

went and actually rolled in the dust, saying he had not felt so free and

happy since he was born.

Once more, then, our self-feeling is in our power. As Carlyle says:

"Make thy claim of wages a zero, then hast thou the world under thy

feet. Well did the wisest of our time write, it is only with

_renunciation_ that life, properly speaking, can be said to begin."

Neither threats nor pleadings can move a man unless they touch some one

of his potential or actual selves. Only thus can we, as a rule, get a

'purchase' on another's will. The first care of diplomatists and

monarchs and all who wish to rule or influence is, accordingly, to find

out their victim's strongest principle of self-regard, so as to make

that the fulcrum of all appeals. But if a man has given up those things

which are subject to foreign fate, and ceased to regard them as parts of

himself at all, we are well-nigh powerless over him. The Stoic receipt

for contentment was to dispossess yourself in advance of all that was

out of your own power,--then fortune's shocks might rain down unfelt.

Epictetus exhorts us, by thus narrowing and at the same time solidifying

our Self to make it invulnerable: "I must die; well, but must I die

groaning too? I will speak what appears to be right, and if the despot

says, 'Then I will put you to death,' I will reply, 'When did I ever

tell you that I was immortal? You will do your part, and I mine; it is

yours to kill, and mine to die intrepid; yours to banish, mine to depart

untroubled.' How do we act in a voyage? We choose the pilot, the

sailors, the hour. Afterwards comes a storm. What have I to care for? My

part is performed. This matter belongs to the pilot. But the ship is

sinking; what then have I to do? That which alone I can do--submit to

being drowned without fear, without clamor or accusing of God, but as

one who knows that what is born must likewise die."

This Stoic fashion, though efficacious and heroic enough in its place

and time, is, it must be confessed, only possible as an habitual mood of

the soul to narrow and unsympathetic characters. It proceeds altogether

by exclusion. If I am a Stoic, the goods I cannot appropriate cease to

be _my_ goods, and the temptation lies very near to deny that they are

goods at all. We find this mode of protecting the Self by exclusion and

denial very common among people who are in other respects not Stoics.

All narrow people _intrench_ their Me, they _retract_ it,--from the

region of what they cannot securely possess. People who don't resemble

them, or who treat them with indifference, people over whom they gain no

influence, are people on whose existence, however meritorious it may

intrinsically be, they look with chill negation, if not with positive

hate. Who will not be mine I will exclude from existence altogether;

that is, as far as I can make it so, such people shall be as if they

were not. Thus may a certain absoluteness and definiteness in the

outline of my Me console me for the smallness of its content.

Sympathetic people, on the contrary, proceed by the entirely opposite

way of expansion and inclusion. The outline of their self often gets

uncertain enough, but for this the spread of its content more than

atones. _Nil humani a me alienum._ Let them despise this little person

of mine, and treat me like a dog, _I_ shall not negate _them_ so long as

I have a soul in my body. They are realities as much as I am. What

positive good is in them shall be mine too, etc., etc. The magnanimity

of these expansive natures is often touching indeed. Such persons can

feel a sort of delicate rapture in thinking that, however sick,

ill-favored, mean-conditioned, and generally forsaken they may be, they

yet are integral parts of the whole of this brave world, have a fellow's

share in the strength of the dray-horses, the happiness of the young

people, the wisdom of the wise ones, and are not altogether without part

or lot in the good fortunes of the Vanderbilts and the Hohenzollerns

themselves. Thus either by negating or by embracing, the Ego may seek to

establish itself in reality. He who, with Marcus Aurelius, can truly

say, "O Universe, I wish all that thou wishest," has a self from which

every trace of negativeness and obstructiveness has been removed--no

wind can blow except to fill its sails.

=The Hierarchy of the Mes.=--A tolerably unanimous opinion ranges the

different selves of which a man may be 'seized and possessed,' and the

consequent different orders of his self-regard, in an _hierarchical

scale, with the bodily me at the bottom, the spiritual me at top, and

the extra-corporeal material selves and the various social selves

between_. Our merely natural self-seeking would lead us to aggrandize

all these selves; we give up deliberately only those among them which we

find we cannot keep. Our unselfishness is thus apt to be a 'virtue of

necessity'; and it is not without all show of reason that cynics quote

the fable of the fox and the grapes in describing our progress therein.

But this is the moral education of the race; and if we agree in the

result that on the whole the selves we can keep are the intrinsically

best, we need not complain of being led to the knowledge of their

superior worth in such a tortuous way.

Of course this is not the only way in which we learn to subordinate our

lower selves to our higher. A direct ethical judgment unquestionably

also plays its part, and last, not least, we apply to our own persons

judgments originally called forth by the acts of others. It is one of

the strangest laws of our nature that many things which we are well

satisfied with in ourselves disgust us when seen in others. With another

man's bodily 'hoggishness' hardly anyone has any sympathy; almost as

little with his cupidity, his social vanity and eagerness, his jealousy,

his despotism, and his pride. Left absolutely to myself I should

probably allow all these spontaneous tendencies to luxuriate in me

unchecked, and it would be long before I formed a distinct notion of the

order of their subordination. But having constantly to pass judgment on

my associates, I come ere long to see, as Herr Horwicz says, my own

lusts in the mirror of the lusts of others, and to _think_ about them in

a very different way from that in which I simply _feel_. Of course, the

moral generalities which from childhood have been instilled into me

accelerate enormously the advent of this reflective judgment on myself.

So it comes to pass that, as aforesaid, men have arranged the various

selves which they may seek in an hierarchical scale according to their

worth. A certain amount of bodily selfishness is required as a basis for

all the other selves. But too much sensuality is despised, or at best

condoned on account of the other qualities of the individual. The wider

material selves are regarded as higher than the immediate body. He is

esteemed a poor creature who is unable to forego a little meat and drink

and warmth and sleep for the sake of getting on in the world. The social

self as a whole, again, ranks higher than the material self as a whole.

We must care more for our honor, our friends, our human ties, than for a

sound skin or wealth. And the spiritual self is so supremely precious

that, rather than lose it, a man ought to be willing to give up friends

and good fame, and property, and life itself.

_In each kind of Me, material, social, and spiritual, men distinguish

between the immediate and actual, and the remote and potential_, between

the narrower and the wider view, to the detriment of the former and the

advantage of the latter. One must forego a present bodily enjoyment for

the sake of one's general health; one must abandon the dollar in the

hand for the sake of the hundred dollars to come; one must make an enemy

of his present interlocutor if thereby one makes friends of a more

valued circle; one must go without learning and grace and wit, the

better to compass one's soul's salvation.

Of all these wider, more potential selves, _the potential social Me_ is

the most interesting, by reason of certain apparent paradoxes to which

it leads in conduct, and by reason of its connection with our moral and

religious life. When for motives of honor and conscience I brave the

condemnation of my own family, club, and 'set'; when, as a Protestant, I

turn Catholic; as a Catholic, freethinker; as a 'regular practitioner,'

homœopath, or what not, I am always inwardly strengthened in my

course and steeled against the loss of my actual social self by the

thought of other and better _possible_ social judges than those whose

verdict goes against me now. The ideal social self which I thus seek in

appealing to their decision may be very remote: it may be represented as

barely possible. I may not hope for its realization during my lifetime;

I may even expect the future generations, which would approve me if they

knew me, to know nothing about me when I am dead and gone. Yet still the

emotion that beckons me on is indubitably the pursuit of an ideal social

self, of a self that is at least _worthy_ of approving recognition by

the highest _possible_ judging companion, if such companion there be.

This self is the true, the intimate, the ultimate, the permanent me

which I seek. This judge is God, the Absolute Mind, the 'Great

Companion.' We hear, in these days of scientific enlightenment, a great

deal of discussion about the efficacy of prayer; and many reasons are

given us why we should not pray, whilst others are given us why we

should. But in all this very little is said of the reason why we _do_

pray, which is simply that we cannot help praying. It seems probable

that, in spite of all that 'science' may do to the contrary, men will

continue to pray to the end of time, unless their mental nature changes

in a manner which nothing we know should lead us to expect. The impulse

to pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the innermost

of the empirical selves of a man is a Self of the _social_ sort, it yet

can find its only adequate _Socius_ in an ideal world.

All progress in the social Self is the substitution of higher tribunals

for lower; this ideal tribunal is the highest; and most men, either

continually or occasionally, carry a reference to it in their breast.

The humblest outcast on this earth can feel himself to be real and valid

by means of this higher recognition. And, on the other hand, for most of

us, a world with no such inner refuge when the outer social self failed

and dropped from us would be the abyss of horror. I say 'for most of

us,' because it is probable that individuals differ a good deal in the

degree in which they are haunted by this sense of an ideal spectator. It

is a much more essential part of the consciousness of some men than of

others. Those who have the most of it are possibly the most _religious_

men. But I am sure that even those who say they are altogether without

it deceive themselves, and really have it in some degree. Only a

non-gregarious animal could be completely without it. Probably no one

can make sacrifices for 'right,' without to some degree personifying the

principle of right for which the sacrifice is made, and expecting thanks

from it. _Complete_ social unselfishness, in other words, can hardly

exist; _complete_ social suicide hardly occur to a man's mind. Even such

texts as Job's, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him," or Marcus

Aurelius's, "If gods hate me and my children, there is a reason for it,"

can least of all be cited to prove the contrary. For beyond all doubt

Job revelled in the thought of Jehovah's recognition of the worship

after the slaying should have been done; and the Roman emperor felt sure

the Absolute Reason would not be all indifferent to his acquiescence in

the gods' dislike. The old test of piety, "Are you willing to be damned

for the glory of God?" was probably never answered in the affirmative

except by those who felt sure in their heart of hearts that God would

'credit' them with their willingness, and set more store by them thus

than if in His unfathomable scheme He had not damned them at all.

=Teleological Uses of Self-interest.=--On zoölogical principles it is easy

to see why we have been endowed with impulses of self-seeking and with

emotions of self-satisfaction and the reverse. Unless our consciousness

were something more than cognitive, unless it experienced a partiality

for certain of the objects, which, in succession, occupy its ken, it

could not long maintain itself in existence; for, by an inscrutable

necessity, each human mind's appearance on this earth is conditioned

upon the integrity of the body with which it belongs, upon the

treatment which that body gets from others, and upon the spiritual

dispositions which use it as their tool, and lead it either towards

longevity or to destruction. _Its own body, then, first of all, its

friends next, and finally its spiritual dispositions_, MUST _be the

supremely interesting objects for each human mind_. Each mind, to begin

with, must have a certain minimum of selfishness in the shape of

instincts of bodily self-seeking in order to exist. This minimum must be

there as a basis for all farther conscious acts, whether of

self-negation or of a selfishness more subtle still. All minds must have

come, by the way of the survival of the fittest, if by no directer path,

to take an intense interest in the bodies to which they are yoked,

altogether apart from any interest in the pure Ego which they also

possess.

And similarly with the images of their person in the minds of others. I

should not be extant now had I not become sensitive to looks of approval

or disapproval on the faces among which my life is cast. Looks of

contempt cast on other persons need affect me in no such peculiar way.

My spiritual powers, again, must interest me more than those of other

people, and for the same reason. I should not be here at all unless I

had cultivated them and kept them from decay. And the same law which

made me once care for them makes me care for them still.

All these three things form the _natural Me_. But all these things are

_objects_, properly so called, to the thought which at any time may be

doing the thinking; and if the zoölogical and evolutionary point of view

is the true one, there is no reason why one object _might_ not arouse

passion and interest as primitively and instinctively as any other. The

phenomenon of passion is in origin and essence the same, whatever be the

target upon which it is discharged; and what the target actually happens

to be is solely a question of fact. I might conceivably be as much

fascinated, and as primitively so, by the care of my neighbor's body as

by the care of my own. I _am_ thus fascinated by the care of my child's

body. The only check to such exuberant non-egoistic interests is natural

selection, which would weed out such as were very harmful to the

individual or to his tribe. Many such interests, however, remain

unweeded out--the interest in the opposite sex, for example, which seems

in mankind stronger than is called for by its utilitarian need; and

alongside of them remain interests, like that in alcoholic intoxication,

or in musical sounds, which, for aught we can see, are without any

utility whatever. The sympathetic instincts and the egoistic ones are

thus coördinate. They arise, so far as we can tell, on the same

psychologic level. The only difference between them is that the

instincts called egoistic form much the larger mass.

=Summary.=--The following table may serve for a summary of what has been

said thus far. The empirical life of Self is divided, as below, into

| MATERIAL. | SOCIAL. | SPIRITUAL.

-----------+-------------------+-----------------------+---------------------

|Bodily Appetites |Desire to Please, |Intellectual, Moral

| and Instincts. | be Noticed, Admired, | and Religious

SELF- |Love of Adornment, | etc. | Aspirations,

SEEKING. | Foppery, |Sociability, Emulation,| Conscientiousness.

| Acquisitiveness, | Envy, |

| Constructiveness.| Love, Pursuit |

|Love of Home, etc. | of Honor, Ambition, |

| | etc. |

-----------+-------------------+-----------------------+---------------------

|Personal Vanity, |Social and Family |Sense of Moral or

SELF- | Modesty, etc. | Pride, Vainglory, | Mental Superiority,

ESTIMATION.|Pride of Wealth, | Snobbery, | Purity, etc.

| Fear of Poverty. | Humility, |Sense of Inferiority

| | Shame, etc. | or of Guilt.

-----------+-------------------+-----------------------+---------------------

B) THE SELF AS KNOWER.

The I, or 'pure ego,' is a very much more difficult subject of inquiry

than the Me. It is that which at any given moment _is_ conscious,

whereas the Me is only one of the things which it is conscious _of_. In

other words, it is the _Thinker_; and the question immediately comes

up, _what_ is the thinker? Is it the passing state of consciousness

itself, or is it something deeper and less mutable? The passing state we

have seen to be the very embodiment of change (see p. 155 ff.). Yet each

of us spontaneously considers that by 'I,' he means something always the

same. This has led most philosophers to postulate behind the passing

state of consciousness a permanent Substance or Agent whose modification

or act it is. This Agent is the thinker; the 'state' is only its

instrument or means. 'Soul,' 'transcendental Ego,' 'Spirit,' are so many

names for this more permanent sort of Thinker. Not discriminating them

just yet, let us proceed to define our idea of the passing state of

consciousness more clearly.

=The Unity of the Passing Thought.=--Already, in speaking of 'sensations,'

from the point of view of Fechner's idea of measuring them, we saw that

there was no ground for calling them compounds. But what is true of

sensations cognizing simple qualities is also true of thoughts with

complex objects composed of many parts. This proposition unfortunately

runs counter to a wide-spread prejudice, and will have to be defended at

some length. Common-sense, and psychologists of almost every school,

have agreed that whenever an object of thought contains many elements,

the thought itself must be made up of just as many ideas, one idea for

each element, all fused together in appearance, but really separate.

"There can be no difficulty in admitting that association _does_ form

the ideas of an indefinite number of individuals into one complex idea,"

says James Mill, "because it is an acknowledged fact. Have we not the

idea of an army? And is not that precisely the ideas of an indefinite

number of men formed into one idea?"

Similar quotations might be multiplied, and the reader's own first

impressions probably would rally to their support. Suppose, for example,

he thinks that "the pack of cards is on the table." If he begins to

reflect, he is as likely as not to say: "Well, isn't that a thought of

the pack of cards? Isn't it of the cards as included in the pack? Isn't

it of the table? And of the legs of the table as well? Hasn't my

thought, then, all these parts--one part for the pack and another for

the table? And within the pack-part a part for each card, as within the

table-part a part for each leg? And isn't each of these parts an idea?

And can thought, then, be anything but an assemblage or pack of ideas,

each answering to some element of what it knows?"

Plausible as such considerations may seem, it is astonishing how little

force they have. In assuming a pack of ideas, each cognizant of some one

element of the fact one has assumed, nothing has been assumed which

knows the whole fact _at once_. The idea which, on the hypothesis of the

pack of ideas, knows, _e.g._, the ace of spades must be ignorant of the

leg of the table, since to account for that knowledge another special

idea is by the same hypothesis invoked; and so on with the rest of the

ideas, all equally ignorant of each other's objects. And yet in the

actual living human mind what knows the cards also knows the table, its

legs, etc., for all these things are known in relation to each other and

at once. Our notion of the abstract numbers eight, four, two is as truly

one feeling of the mind as our notion of simple unity. Our idea of a

couple is not a couple of ideas. "But," the reader may say, "is not the

taste of lemonade composed of that of lemon _plus_ that of sugar?" No! I

reply, this is taking the combining of objects for that of feelings. The

physical lemonade contains both the lemon and the sugar, but its taste

does not contain their tastes; for if there are any two things which are

certainly _not_ present in the taste of lemonade, those are the pure

lemon-sour on the one hand and the pure sugar-sweet on the other. These

tastes are absent utterly. A taste somewhat _like_ both of them is

there, but that is a distinct state of mind altogether.

=Distinct mental states cannot 'fuse.'= But not only is the notion that

our ideas are combinations of smaller ideas improbable, it is logically

unintelligible; it leaves out the essential features of all the

'combinations' which we actually know.

_All the 'combinations' which we actually know are_ EFFECTS, _wrought by

the units said to be 'combined,'_ UPON SOME ENTITY OTHER THAN

THEMSELVES. Without this feature of a medium or vehicle, the notion of

combination has no sense.

In other words, no possible number of entities (call them as you like,

whether forces, material particles, or mental elements) can sum

_themselves_ together. Each remains, in the sum, what it always was; and

the sum itself exists only _for a bystander_ who happens to overlook the

units and to apprehend the sum as such; or else it exists in the shape

of some other effect on an entity external to the sum itself. When H_{2}

and O are said to combine into 'water,' and thenceforward to exhibit new

properties, the 'water' is just the old atoms in the new position,

H-O-H; the 'new properties' are just their combined _effects_, when in

this position, upon external media, such as our sense-organs and the

various reagents on which water may exert its properties and be known.

Just so, the strength of many men may combine when they pull upon one

rope, of many muscular fibres when they pull upon one tendon.

In the parallelogram of forces, the 'forces' do not combine _themselves_

into the diagonal resultant; a _body_ is needed on which they may

impinge, to exhibit their resultant effect. No more do musical sounds

combine _per se_ into concords or discords. Concord and discord are

names for their combined effects on that external medium, the _ear_.

Where the elemental units are supposed to be feelings, the case is in no

wise altered. Take a hundred of them, shuffle them and pack them as

close together as you can (whatever that may mean); still each remains

the same feeling it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless,

ignorant of what the other feelings are and mean. There would be a

hundred-and-first feeling there, if, when a group or series of such

feelings were set up, a consciousness _belonging to the group as such_

should emerge, and this one hundred and first feeling would be a totally

new fact. The one hundred original feelings might, by a curious physical

law, be a signal for its _creation_, when they came together--we often

have to learn things separately before we know them as a sum--but they

would have no substantial identity with the new feeling, nor it with

them; and one could never deduce the one from the others, or (in any

intelligible sense) say that they _evolved_ it out of themselves.

Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each

one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let

each think of his word as intently as he will: nowhere will there be a

consciousness of the whole sentence. We talk, it is true, of the 'spirit

of the age,' and the 'sentiment of the people,' and in various ways we

hypostatize 'public opinion.' But we know this to be symbolic speech,

and never dream that the spirit, opinion, or sentiment constitutes a

consciousness other than, and additional to, that of the several

individuals whom the words 'age,' 'people,' or 'public' denote. The

private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind. This has

always been the invincible contention of the spiritualists against the

associationists in Psychology. The associationists say the mind is

constituted by a multiplicity of distinct 'ideas' _associated_ into a

unity. There is, they say, an idea of _a_, and also an idea of _b_.

_Therefore_, they say, there is an idea of _a_ + _b_, or of _a_ and _b_

together. Which is like saying that the mathematical square of _a_ plus

that of _b_ is equal to the square of _a_ + _b_, a palpable untruth.

Idea of _a_ + idea of _b_ is _not_ identical with idea of (_a_ + _b_).

It is one, they are two; in it, what knows _a_ also knows _b_; in them,

what knows _a_ is expressly posited as not knowing _b_; etc. In short,

the two separate ideas can never by any logic be made to figure as one

idea. If one idea (of _a_ + _b_, for example) come as a matter of fact

after the two separate ideas (of _a_ and of _b_), then we must hold it

to be as direct a product of the later conditions as the two separate

ideas were of the earlier conditions.

_The simplest thing, therefore, if we are to assume the existence of a

stream of consciousness at all, would be to suppose that things that are

known together are known in single pulses of that stream._ The things

may be many, and may occasion many currents in the brain. But the

psychic phenomenon correlative to these many currents is one integral

'state,' transitive or substantive (see p. 161), to which the many

things appear.

=The Soul as a Combining Medium.=--The spiritualists in philosophy have

been prompt to see that things which are known together are known by one

_something_, but that something, they say, is no mere passing thought,

but a simple and permanent spiritual being on which many ideas combine

their effects. It makes no difference in this connection whether this

being be called Soul, Ego, or Spirit, in either case its chief function

is that of a combining medium. This is a different vehicle of knowledge

from that in which we just said that the mystery of knowing things

together might be most simply lodged. Which is the real knower, this

permanent being, or our passing state? If we had other grounds, not yet

considered, for admitting the Soul into our psychology, then getting

there on those grounds, she might turn out to be the knower too. But if

there be no _other_ grounds for admitting the Soul, we had better cling

to our passing 'states' as the exclusive agents of knowledge; for we

have to assume their existence anyhow in psychology, and the knowing of

many things together is just as well accounted for when we call it one

of their functions as when we call it a reaction of the Soul.

_Explained_ it is not by either conception, and has to figure in

psychology as a datum that is ultimate.

But there are other alleged grounds for admitting the Soul into

psychology, and the chief of them is

=The Sense of Personal Identity.=--In the last chapter it was stated (see

p. 154) that the thoughts which we actually know to exist do not fly

about loose, but seem each to belong to some one thinker and not to

another. Each thought, out of a multitude of other thoughts of which it

may think, is able to distinguish those which belong to it from those

which do not. The former have a warmth and intimacy about them of which

the latter are completely devoid, and the result is a Me of yesterday,

judged to be in some peculiarly subtle sense the _same_ with the I who

now make the judgment. As a mere subjective phenomenon the judgment

presents no special mystery. It belongs to the great class of judgments

of sameness; and there is nothing more remarkable in making a judgment

of sameness in the first person than in the second or the third. The

intellectual operations seem essentially alike, whether I say 'I am the

same as I was,' or whether I say 'the pen is the same as it was,

yesterday.' It is as easy to think this as to think the opposite and say

'neither of us is the same.' The only question which we have to consider

is whether it be a right judgment. _Is the sameness predicated really

there?_

=Sameness in the Self as Known.=--If in the sentence "I am the same that I

was yesterday," we take the 'I' broadly, it is evident that in many ways

I am _not_ the same. As a concrete Me, I am somewhat different from what

I was: then hungry, now full; then walking, now at rest; then poorer,

now richer; then younger, now older; etc. And yet in other ways I _am_

the same, and we may call these the essential ways. My name and

profession and relations to the world are identical, my face, my

faculties and store of memories, are practically indistinguishable, now

and then. Moreover the Me of now and the Me of then are _continuous_:

the alterations were gradual and never affected the whole of me at once.

So far, then, my personal identity is just like the sameness predicated

of any other aggregate thing. It is a conclusion grounded either on the

resemblance in essential respects, or on the continuity of the phenomena

compared. And it must not be taken to mean more than these grounds

warrant, or treated as a sort of metaphysical or absolute Unity in which

all differences are overwhelmed. The past and present selves compared

are the same just so far as they _are_ the same, and no farther. They

are the same in _kind_. But this generic sameness coexists with generic

differences just as real; and if from the one point of view I am one

self, from another I am quite as truly many. Similarly of the attribute

of continuity: it gives to the self the unity of mere connectedness, or

unbrokenness, a perfectly definite phenomenal thing--but it gives not a

jot or tittle more.

=Sameness in the Self as Knower.=--But all this is said only of the Me, or

Self as known. In the judgment 'I am the same,' etc., the 'I' was taken

broadly as the concrete person. Suppose, however, that we take it

narrowly, as the _Thinker_, as '_that to which_' all the concrete

determinations of the Me belong and are known: does there not then

appear an absolute identity at different times? That something which at

every moment goes out and knowingly appropriates the _Me_ of the past,

and discards the non-me as foreign, is it not a permanent abiding

principle of spiritual activity identical with itself wherever found?

That it is such a principle is the reigning doctrine both of philosophy

and common-sense, and yet reflection finds it difficult to justify the

idea. _If there were no passing states of consciousness_, then indeed we

might suppose an abiding principle, absolutely one with itself, to be

the ceaseless thinker in each one of us. But if the states of

consciousness be accorded as realities, no such 'substantial' identity

in the thinker need be supposed. Yesterday's and to-day's states of

consciousnesses have no _substantial_ identity, for when one is here the

other is irrevocably dead and gone. But they have a _functional_

identity, for both know the same objects, and so far as the by-gone me

is one of those objects, they react upon it in an identical way,

greeting it and calling it _mine_, and opposing it to all the other

things they know. This functional identity seems really the only sort of

identity in the thinker which the facts require us to suppose.

Successive thinkers, numerically distinct, but all aware of the same

past in the same way, form an adequate vehicle for all the experience of

personal unity and sameness which we actually have. And just such a

train of successive thinkers is the stream of mental states (each with

its complex object cognized and emotional and selective reaction

thereupon) which psychology treated as a natural science has to assume

(see p. 2).

The logical conclusion seems then to be that _the states of

consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with.

Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist; but for psychology

the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous._

=How the I appropriates the Me.=--But _why_ should each successive mental

state appropriate the same past Me? I spoke a while ago of my own past

experiences appearing to me with a 'warmth and intimacy' which the

experiences thought of by me as having occurred to other people lack.

This leads us to the answer sought. My present Me is felt with warmth

and intimacy. The heavy warm mass of my body is there, and the nucleus

of the 'spiritual me,' the sense of intimate activity (p. 184), is

there. We cannot realize our present self without simultaneously feeling

one or other of these two things. Any other object of thought which

brings these two things with it into consciousness will be thought with

a warmth and an intimacy like those which cling to the present me.

Any _distant_ object which fulfils this condition will be thought with

such warmth and intimacy. But which distant objects _do_ fulfil the

condition, when represented?

Obviously those, and only those, which fulfilled it when they were

alive. _Them_ we shall still represent with the animal warmth upon

them; to them may possibly still cling the flavor of the inner activity

taken in the act. And by a natural consequence, we shall assimilate them

to each other and to the warm and intimate self we now feel within us as

we think, and separate them as a collection from whatever objects have

not this mark, much as out of a herd of cattle let loose for the winter

on some wide Western prairie the owner picks out and sorts together,

when the round-up comes in the spring, all the beasts on which he finds

his own particular brand. Well, just such objects are the past

experiences which I now call mine. Other men's experiences, no matter

how much I may know about them, never bear this vivid, this peculiar

brand. This is why Peter, awakening in the same bed with Paul, and

recalling what both had in mind before they went to sleep, reidentifies

and appropriates the 'warm' ideas as his, and is never tempted to

confuse them with those cold and pale-appearing ones which he ascribes

to Paul. As well might he confound Paul's body, which he only sees, with

his own body, which he sees but also feels. Each of us when he awakens

says, Here's the same old Me again, just as he says, Here's the same old

bed, the same old room, the same old world.

And similarly in our waking hours, though each pulse of consciousness

dies away and is replaced by another, yet that other, among the things

it knows, knows its own predecessor, and finding it 'warm,' in the way

we have described, greets it, saying: "Thou art _mine_, and part of the

same self with me." Each later thought, knowing and including thus the

thoughts that went before, is the final receptacle--and appropriating

them is the final owner--of all that they contain and own. As Kant says,

it is as if elastic balls were to have not only motion but knowledge of

it, and a first ball were to transmit both its motion and its

consciousness to a second, which took both up into _its_ consciousness

and passed them to a third, until the last ball held all that the other

balls had held, and realized it as its own. It is this trick which the

nascent thought has of immediately taking up the expiring thought and

'adopting' it, which leads to the appropriation of most of the remoter

constituents of the self. Who owns the last self owns the self before

the last, for what possesses the possessor possesses the possessed. It

is impossible to discover any _verifiable_ features in personal identity

which this sketch does not contain, impossible to imagine how any

transcendent principle of Unity (were such a principle there) could

shape matters to any other result, or be known by any other fruit, than

just this production of a stream of consciousness each successive part

of which should know, and knowing, hug to itself and adopt, all those

that went before,--thus standing as the _representative_ of an entire

past stream with which it is in no wise to be identified.

=Mutations and Multiplications of the Self.=--The Me, like every other

aggregate, changes as it grows. The passing states of consciousness,

which should preserve in their succession an identical knowledge of its

past, wander from their duty, letting large portions drop from out of

their ken, and representing other portions wrong. The identity which we

recognize as we survey the long procession can only be the relative

identity of a slow shifting in which there is always some common

ingredient retained. The commonest element of all, the most uniform, is

the possession of some common memories. However different the man may be

from the youth, both look back on the same childhood and call it their

own.

Thus the identity found by the _I_ in its _Me_ is only a loosely

construed thing, an identity 'on the whole,' just like that which any

outside observer might find in the same assemblage of facts. We often

say of a man 'he is so changed one would not know him'; and so does a

man, less often, speak of himself. These changes in the _Me_, recognized

by the I, or by outside observers, may be grave or slight. They deserve

some notice here.

The mutations of the Self may be divided into two main classes:

_a._ Alterations of memory; and

_b._ Alterations in the present bodily and spiritual selves.

_a._ Of the alterations of memory little need be said--they are so

familiar. Losses of memory are a normal incident in life, especially in

advancing years, and the person's _me_, as 'realized,' shrinks _pari

passu_ with the facts that disappear. The memory of dreams and of

experiences in the hypnotic trance rarely survives.

False memories, also, are by no means rare occurrences, and whenever

they occur they distort our consciousness of our Me. Most people,

probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past.

They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only

have dreamed or imagined they did so. The content of a dream will

oftentimes insert itself into the stream of real life in a most

perplexing way. The most frequent source of false memory is the accounts

we give to others of our experiences. Such accounts we almost always

make both more simple and more interesting than the truth. We quote what

we should have said or done, rather than what we really said or did; and

in the first telling we may be fully aware of the distinction. But ere

long the fiction expels the reality from memory and reigns in its stead

alone. This is one great source of the fallibility of testimony meant to

be quite honest. Especially where the marvellous is concerned, the story

takes a tilt that way, and the memory follows the story.

_b._ When we pass beyond alterations of memory to abnormal _alterations

in the present self_ we have graver disturbances. These alterations are

of three main types, but our knowledge of the elements and causes of

these changes of personality is so slight that the division into types

must not be regarded as having any profound significance. The types

are:

α. Insane delusions;

β. Alternating selves;

γ. Mediumships or possessions.

α. In insanity we often have delusions projected into the past, which are

melancholic or sanguine according to the character of the disease. But

the worst alterations of the self come from present perversions of

sensibility and impulse which leave the past undisturbed, but induce the

patient to think that the present _Me_ is an altogether new personage.

Something of this sort happens normally in the rapid expansion of the

whole character, intellectual as well as volitional, which takes place

after the time of puberty. The pathological cases are curious enough to

merit longer notice.

The basis of our personality, as M. Ribot says, is that feeling of our

vitality which, because it is so perpetually present, remains in the

background of our consciousness.

"It is the basis because, always present, always acting, without peace

or rest, it knows neither sleep nor fainting, and lasts as long as life

itself, of which it is one form. It serves as a support to that

self-conscious _me_ which memory constitutes, it is the medium of

association among its other parts.... Suppose now that it were possible

at once to change our body and put another into its place: skeleton,

vessels, viscera, muscles, skin, everything made new, except the nervous

system with its stored-up memory of the past. There can be no doubt that

in such a case the afflux of unaccustomed vital sensations would produce

the gravest disorders. Between the old sense of existence engraved on

the nervous system, and the new one acting with all the intensity of its

reality and novelty, there would be irreconcilable contradiction."

What the particular perversions of the bodily sensibility may be which

give rise to these contradictions is, for the most part, impossible for

a sound-minded person to conceive. One patient has another self that

repeats all his thoughts for him. Others, amongst whom are some of the

first characters in history, have internal dæmons who speak with them

and are replied to. Another feels that someone 'makes' his thoughts for

him. Another has two bodies, lying in different beds. Some patients feel

as if they had lost parts of their bodies, teeth, brain, stomach, etc.

In some it is made of wood, glass, butter, etc. In some it does not

exist any longer, or is dead, or is a foreign object quite separate from

the speaker's self. Occasionally, parts of the body lose their

connection for consciousness with the rest, and are treated as belonging

to another person and moved by a hostile will. Thus the right hand may

fight with the left as with an enemy. Or the cries of the patient

himself are assigned to another person with whom the patient expresses

sympathy. The literature of insanity is filled with narratives of such

illusions as these. M. Taine quotes from a patient of Dr. Krishaber an

account of sufferings, from which it will be seen how completely aloof

from what is normal a man's experience may suddenly become:

"After the first or second day it was for some weeks impossible to

observe or analyze myself. The suffering--angina pectoris--was too

overwhelming. It was not till the first days of January that I could

give an account to myself of what I experienced.... Here is the first

thing of which I retain a clear remembrance. I was alone, and already a

prey to permanent visual trouble, when I was suddenly seized with a

visual trouble infinitely more pronounced. Objects grew small and

receded to infinite distances--men and things together. I was myself

immeasurably far away. I looked about me with terror and astonishment;

_the world was escaping from me_.... I remarked at the same time that my

voice was extremely far away from me, that it sounded no longer as if

mine. I struck the ground with my foot, and perceived its resistance;

but this resistance seemed illusory--not that the soil was soft, but

that the weight of my body was reduced to almost nothing.... I had the

feeling of being without weight...." In addition to being so distant,

"objects appeared to me _flat_. When I spoke with anyone, I saw him like

an image cut out of paper with no relief.... This sensation lasted

intermittently for two years.... Constantly it seemed as if my legs did

not belong to me. It was almost as bad with my arms. As for my head, it

seemed no longer to exist.... I appeared to myself to act automatically,

by an impulsion foreign to myself.... There was inside of me a new

being, and another part of myself, the old being, which took no interest

in the newcomer. I distinctly remember saying to myself that the

sufferings of this new being were to me indifferent. I was never really

dupe of these illusions, but my mind grew often tired of incessantly

correcting the new impressions, and I let myself go and live the unhappy

life of this new entity. I had an ardent desire to see my old world

again, to get back to my old self. This desire kept me from killing

myself.... I was another, and I hated, I despised this other; he was

perfectly odious to me; it was certainly another who had taken my form

and assumed my functions."[32]

In cases like this, it is as certain that the _I_ is unaltered as that

the _Me_ is changed. That is to say, the present Thought of the patient

is cognitive of both the old Me and the new, so long as its memory holds

good. Only, within that objective sphere which formerly lent itself so

simply to the judgment of recognition and of egoistic appropriation,

strange perplexities have arisen. The present and the past, both seen

therein, will not unite. Where is my old Me? What is this new one? Are

they the same? Or have I two? Such questions, answered by whatever

theory the patient is able to conjure up as plausible, form the

beginning of his insane life.

* * * * *

β. The phenomenon of _alternating personality_ in its simplest phases

seems based on lapses of memory. Any man becomes, as we say,

_inconsistent_ with himself if he forgets his engagements, pledges,

knowledges, and habits; and it is merely a question of degree at what

point we shall say that his personality is changed. But in the

pathological cases known as those of double or alternate personality the

loss of memory is abrupt, and is usually preceded by a period of

unconsciousness or syncope lasting a variable length of time. In the

hypnotic trance we can easily produce an alteration of the personality,

either by telling the subject to forget all that has happened to him

since such or such a date, in which case he becomes (it may be) a child

again, or by telling him he is another altogether imaginary personage,

in which case all facts about himself seem for the time being to lapse

from out his mind, and he throws himself into the new character with a

vivacity proportionate to the amount of histrionic imagination which he

possesses. But in the pathological cases the transformation is

spontaneous. The most famous case, perhaps, on record is that of Félida

X., reported by Dr. Azam of Bordeaux. At the age of fourteen this woman

began to pass into a 'secondary' state characterized by a change in her

general disposition and character, as if certain 'inhibitions,'

previously existing, were suddenly removed. During the secondary state

she remembered the first state, but on emerging from it into the first

state she remembered nothing of the second. At the age of forty-four the

duration of the secondary state (which was on the whole superior in

quality to the original state) had gained upon the latter so much as to

occupy most of her time. During it she remembers the events belonging to

the original state, but her complete oblivion of the secondary state

when the original state recurs is often very distressing to her, as, for

example, when the transition takes place in a carriage on her way to a

funeral, and she has no idea which one of her friends may be dead. She

actually became pregnant during one of her early secondary states, and

during her first state had no knowledge of how it had come to pass. Her

distress at these blanks of memory is sometimes intense and once drove

her to attempt suicide.

M. Pierre Janet describes a still more remarkable case as follows:

"Léonie B., whose life sounds more like an improbable romance than a

genuine history, has had attacks of natural somnambulism since the age

of three years. She has been hypnotized constantly by all sorts of

persons from the age of sixteen upwards, and she is now forty-five.

Whilst her normal life developed in one way in the midst of her poor

country surroundings, her second life was passed in drawing-rooms and

doctors' offices, and naturally took an entirely different direction.

To-day, when in her normal state, this poor peasant woman is a serious

and rather sad person, calm and slow, very mild with every one, and

extremely timid: to look at her one would never suspect the personage

which she contains. But hardly is she put to sleep hypnotically when a

metamorphosis occurs. Her face is no longer the same. She keeps her eyes

closed, it is true, but the acuteness of her other senses supplies their

place. She is gay, noisy, restless, sometimes insupportably so. She

remains good-natured, but has acquired a singular tendency to irony and

sharp jesting. Nothing is more curious than to hear her after a sitting

when she has received a visit from strangers who wished to see her

asleep. She gives a word-portrait of them, apes their manners, claims to

know their little ridiculous aspects and passions, and for each invents

a romance. To this character must be added the possession of an enormous

number of recollections, whose existence she does not even suspect when

awake, for her amnesia is then complete.... She refuses the name of

Léonie and takes that of Léontine (Léonie 2) to which her first

magnetizers had accustomed her. 'That good woman is not myself,' she

says, 'she is too stupid!' To herself, Léontine, or Léonie 2, she

attributes all the sensations and all the actions, in a word all the

conscious experiences, which she has undergone _in somnambulism_, and

knits them together to make the history of her already long life. To

Léonie 1 [as M. Janet calls the waking woman], on the other hand, she

exclusively ascribes the events lived through in waking hours. I was at

first struck by an important exception to the rule, and was disposed to

think that there might be something arbitrary in this partition of her

recollections. In the normal state Léonie has a husband and children;

but Léonie 2, the somnambulist, whilst acknowledging the children as her

own, attributes the husband to 'the other.' This choice was perhaps

explicable, but it followed no rule. It was not till later that I

learned that her magnetizers in early days, as audacious as certain

hypnotizers of recent date, had somnambulized her for her first

_accouchements_, and that she had lapsed into that state spontaneously

in the later ones. Léonie 2 was thus quite right in ascribing to herself

the children--it was she who had had them, and the rule that her first

trance-state forms a different personality was not broken. But it is the

same with her second or deepest state of trance. When after the renewed

passes, syncope, etc., she reaches the condition which I have called

Léonie 3, she is another person still. Serious and grave, instead of

being a restless child, she speaks slowly and moves but little. Again

she separates herself from the waking Léonie 1. 'A good but rather

stupid woman,' she says, 'and not me.' And she also separates herself

from Léonie 2: 'How can you see anything of me in that crazy creature?'

she says. 'Fortunately I am nothing for her.'"

* * * * *

λ. In '_mediumships_' or '_possessions_' the invasion and the passing

away of the secondary state are both relatively abrupt, and the duration

of the state is usually short--i.e., from a few minutes to a few hours.

Whenever the secondary state is well developed, no memory for aught that

happened during it remains after the primary consciousness comes back.

The subject during the secondary consciousness speaks, writes, or acts

as if animated by a foreign person, and often names this foreign person

and gives his history. In old times the foreign 'control' was usually a

demon, and is so now in communities which favor that belief. With us he

gives himself out at the worst for an Indian or other grotesquely

speaking but harmless personage. Usually he purports to be the spirit of

a dead person known or unknown to those present, and the subject is then

what we call a 'medium.' Mediumistic possession in all its grades seems

to form a perfectly natural special type of alternate personality, and

the susceptibility to it in some form is by no means an uncommon gift,

in persons who have no other obvious nervous anomaly. The phenomena are

very intricate, and are only just beginning to be studied in a proper

scientific way. The lowest phase of mediumship is automatic writing, and

the lowest grade of that is where the Subject knows what words are

coming, but feels impelled to write them as if from without. Then comes

writing unconsciously, even whilst engaged in reading or talk.

Inspirational speaking, playing on musical instruments, etc., also

belong to the relatively lower phases of possession, in which the normal

self is not excluded from conscious participation in the performance,

though their initiative seems to come from elsewhere. In the highest

phase the trance is complete, the voice, language, and everything are

changed, and there is no after-memory whatever until the next trance

comes. One curious thing about trance-utterances is their generic

similarity in different individuals. The 'control' here in America is

either a grotesque, slangy, and flippant personage ('Indian' controls,

calling the ladies 'squaws,' the men 'braves,' the house a 'wigwam,'

etc., etc., are excessively common; or, if he ventures on higher

intellectual flights, he abounds in a curiously vague optimistic

philosophy-and-water, in which phrases about spirit, harmony, beauty,

law, progression, development, etc., keep recurring. It seems exactly

as if one author composed more than half of the trance-messages, no

matter by whom they are uttered. Whether all sub-conscious selves are

peculiarly susceptible to a certain stratum of the _Zeitgeist_, and get

their inspiration from it, I know not; but this is obviously the case

with the secondary selves which become 'developed' in spiritualist

circles. There the beginnings of the medium trance are indistinguishable

from effects of hypnotic suggestion. The subject assumes the rôle of a

medium simply because opinion expects it of him under the conditions

which are present; and carries it out with a feebleness or a vivacity

proportionate to his histrionic gifts. But the odd thing is that persons

unexposed to spiritualist traditions will so often act in the same way

when they become entranced, speak in the name of the departed, go

through the motions of their several death-agonies, send messages about

their happy home in the summer-land, and describe the ailments of those

present.

I have no theory to publish of these cases, the actual beginning of

several of which I have personally seen. I am, however, persuaded by

abundant acquaintance with the trances of one medium that the 'control'

may be altogether different from any _possible_ waking self of the

person. In the case I have in mind, it professes to be a certain

departed French doctor; and is, I am convinced, acquainted with facts

about the circumstances, and the living and dead relatives and

acquaintances, of numberless sitters whom the medium never met before,

and of whom she has never heard the names. I record my bare opinion here

unsupported by the evidence, not, of course, in order to convert anyone

to my view, but because I am persuaded that a serious study of these

trance-phenomena is one of the greatest needs of psychology, and think

that my personal confession may possibly draw a reader or two into a

field which the _soidisant_ 'scientist' usually refuses to explore.[33]

=Review, and Psychological Conclusion.=--To sum up this long chapter:--The

consciousness of Self involves a stream of thought, each part of which

as 'I' can remember those which went before, know the things they knew,

and care paramountly for certain ones among them as '_Me_,' and

_appropriate to these_ the rest. This Me is an empirical aggregate of

things objectively known. The _I_ which knows them cannot itself be an

aggregate; neither for psychological purposes need it be an unchanging

metaphysical entity like the Soul, or a principle like the

transcendental Ego, viewed as 'out of time.' It is a _thought_, at each

moment different from that of the last moment, but _appropriative_ of

the latter, together with all that the latter called its own. All the

experiential facts find their place in this description, unencumbered

with any hypothesis save that of the existence of passing thoughts or

states of mind.

If passing thoughts be the directly verifiable existents which no school

has hitherto doubted them to be, then they are the only 'Knower' of

which Psychology, treated as a natural science, need take any account.

The only pathway that I can discover for bringing in a more

transcendental Thinker would be to deny that we have any such _direct_

knowledge of the existence of our 'states of consciousness' as

common-sense supposes us to possess. The existence of the 'states' in

question would then be a mere hypothesis, or one way of asserting that

there _must be_ a knower correlative to all this known; but the problem

_who that knower is_ would have become a metaphysical problem. With the

question once stated in these terms, the notion either of a Spirit of

the world which thinks through us, or that of a set of individual

substantial souls, must be considered as _primâ facie_ on a par with our

own 'psychological' solution, and discussed impartially. I myself

believe that room for much future inquiry lies in this direction. The

'states of mind' which every psychologist believes in are by no means

clearly apprehensible, if distinguished from their objects. But to doubt

them lies beyond the scope of our natural-science (see p. 1) point of

view. And in this book the provisional solution which we have reached

must be the final word: the thoughts themselves are the thinkers.