=Habits are due to pathways through the nerve-centres.= If habits are due
to the plasticity of materials to outward agents, we can immediately see
to what outward influences, if to any, the brain-matter is plastic. Not
to mechanical pressures, not to thermal changes, not to any of the
forces to which all the other organs of our body are exposed; for, as
we saw on pp. 9-10, Nature has so blanketed and wrapped the brain about
that the only impressions that can be made upon it are through the
blood, on the one hand, and the sensory nerve-roots, on the other; and
it is to the infinitely attenuated currents that pour in through these
latter channels that the hemispherical cortex shows itself to be so
peculiarly susceptible. The currents, once in, must find a way out. In
getting out they leave their traces in the paths which they take. The
only thing they _can_ do, in short, is to deepen old paths or to make
new ones; and the whole plasticity of the brain sums itself up in two
words when we call it an organ in which currents pouring in from the
sense-organs make with extreme facility paths which do not easily
disappear. For, of course, a simple habit, like every other nervous
event--the habit of snuffling, for example, or of putting one's hands
into one's pockets, or of biting one's nails--is, mechanically, nothing
but a reflex discharge; and its anatomical substratum must be a path in
the system. The most complex habits, as we shall presently see more
fully, are, from the same point of view, nothing but _concatenated_
discharges in the nerve-centres, due to the presence there of systems of
reflex paths, so organized as to wake each other up successively--the
impression produced by one muscular contraction serving as a stimulus to
provoke the next, until a final impression inhibits the process and
closes the chain.

It must be noticed that the growth of structural modification in living
matter may be more rapid than in any lifeless mass, because the
incessant nutritive renovation of which the living matter is the seat
tends often to corroborate and fix the impressed modification, rather
than to counteract it by renewing the original constitution of the
tissue that has been impressed. Thus, we notice after exercising our
muscles or our brain in a new way, that we can do so no longer at that
time; but after a day or two of rest, when we resume the discipline, our
increase in skill not seldom surprises us. I have often noticed this in
learning a tune; and it has led a German author to say that we learn to
swim during the winter, and to skate during the summer.

=Practical Effects of Habit.=--First, habit simplifies our movements,
makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.

Man is born with a tendency to do more things than he has ready-made
arrangements for in his nerve-centres. Most of the performances of other
animals are automatic. But in him the number of them is so enormous that
most of them must be the fruit of painful study. If practice did not
make perfect, nor habit economize the expense of nervous and muscular
energy, he would be in a sorry plight. As Dr. Maudsley says:[30]

"If an act became no easier after being done several times, if the
careful direction of consciousness were necessary to its accomplishment
on each occasion, it is evident that the whole activity of a lifetime
might be confined to one or two deeds--that no progress could take place
in development. A man might be occupied all day in dressing and
undressing himself; the attitude of his body would absorb all his
attention and energy; the washing of his hands or the fastening of a
button would be as difficult to him on each occasion as to the child on
its first trial; and he would, furthermore, be completely exhausted by
his exertions. Think of the pains necessary to teach a child to stand,
of the many efforts which it must make, and of the ease with which it at
last stands, unconscious of any effort. For while secondarily-automatic
acts are accomplished with comparatively little weariness--in this
regard approaching the organic movements, or the original reflex
movements--the conscious effort of the will soon produces exhaustion. A
spinal cord without ... memory would simply be an idiotic spinal
cord.... It is impossible for an individual to realize how much he owes
to its automatic agency until disease has impaired its functions."

Secondly, _habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts
are performed_.

One may state this abstractly thus: If an act require for its execution
a chain, _A, B, C, D, E, F, G_, etc., of successive nervous events, then
in the first performances of the action the conscious will must choose
each of these events from a number of wrong alternatives that tend to
present themselves; but habit soon brings it about that each event calls
up its own appropriate successor without any alternative offering
itself, and without any reference to the conscious will, until at last
the whole chain, _A, B, C, D, E, F, G_, rattles itself off as soon as
_A_ occurs, just as if _A_ and the rest of the chain were fused into a
continuous stream. Whilst we are learning to walk, to ride, to swim,
skate, fence, write, play, or sing, we interrupt ourselves at every step
by unnecessary movements and false notes. When we are proficients, on
the contrary, the results follow not only with the very minimum of
muscular action requisite to bring them forth, but they follow from a
single instantaneous 'cue.' The marksman sees the bird, and, before he
knows it, he has aimed and shot. A gleam in his adversary's eye, a
momentary pressure from his rapier, and the fencer finds that he has
instantly made the right parry and return. A glance at the musical
hieroglyphics, and the pianist's fingers have rippled through a shower
of notes. And not only is it the right thing at the right time that we
thus involuntarily do, but the wrong thing also, if it be an habitual
thing. Who is there that has never wound up his watch on taking off his
waistcoat in the daytime, or taken his latch-key out on arriving at the
door-step of a friend? Persons in going to their bedroom to dress for
dinner have been known to take off one garment after another and finally
to get into bed, merely because that was the habitual issue of the first
few movements when performed at a later hour. We all have a definite
routine manner of performing certain daily offices connected with the
toilet, with the opening and shutting of familiar cupboards, and the
like. But our higher thought-centres know hardly anything about the
matter. Few men can tell off-hand which sock, shoe, or trousers-leg they
put on first. They must first mentally rehearse the act; and even that
is often insufficient--the act must be _performed_. So of the questions,
Which valve of the shutters opens first? Which way does my door swing?
etc. I cannot _tell_ the answer; yet my _hand_ never makes a mistake. No
one can _describe_ the order in which he brushes his hair or teeth; yet
it is likely that the order is a pretty fixed one in all of us.

These results may be expressed as follows:

In action grown habitual, what instigates each new muscular contraction
to take place in its appointed order is not a thought or a perception,
but the _sensation occasioned by the muscular contraction just
finished_. A strictly voluntary act has to be guided by idea,
perception, and volition, throughout its whole course. In habitual
action, mere sensation is a sufficient guide, and the upper regions of
brain and mind are set comparatively free. A diagram will make the
matter clear:

[Illustration: FIG. 51.]

Let _A, B, C, D, E, F, G_ represent an habitual chain of muscular
contractions, and let _a, b, c, d, e, f_ stand for the several
sensations which these contractions excite in us when they are
successively performed. Such sensations will usually be in the parts
moved, but they may also be effects of the movement upon the eye or the
ear. Through them, and through them alone, we are made aware whether or
not the contraction has occurred. When the series, _A, B, C, D, E, F,
G_, is being learned, each of these sensations becomes the object of a
separate act of attention by the mind. We test each movement
intellectually, to see if it have been rightly performed, before
advancing to the next. We hesitate, compare, choose, revoke, reject,
etc.; and the order by which the next movement is discharged is an
express order from the ideational centres after this deliberation has
been gone through.

In habitual action, on the contrary, the only impulse which the
intellectual centres need send down is that which carries the command to
_start_. This is represented in the diagram by _V_; it may be a thought
of the first movement or of the last result, or a mere perception of
some of the habitual conditions of the chain, the presence, e.g., of the
keyboard near the hand. In the present example, no sooner has this
conscious thought or volition instigated movement _A_, than _A_, through
the sensation _a_ of its own occurrence, awakens _B_ reflexly; _B_ then
excites _C_ through _b_, and so on till the chain is ended, when the
intellect generally takes cognizance of the final result. The
intellectual perception at the end is indicated in the diagram by the
sensible effect of the movement _G_ being represented at _G´_, in the
ideational centres above the merely sensational line. The sensational
impressions, _a, b, c, d, e, f_, are all supposed to have their seat
below the ideational level.

=Habits depend on sensations not attended to.= We have called _a, b, c, d,
e, f_, by the name of 'sensations.' If sensations, they are sensations
to which we are usually inattentive; but that they are more than
unconscious nerve-currents seems certain, for they catch our attention
if they go wrong. Schneider's account of these sensations deserves to be
quoted. In the act of walking, he says, even when our attention is
entirely absorbed elsewhere, it is doubtful whether we could preserve
equilibrium if no sensation of our body's attitude were there, and
doubtful whether we should advance our leg if we had no sensation of its
movement as executed, and not even a minimal feeling of impulse to set
it down. Knitting appears altogether mechanical, and the knitter keeps
up her knitting even while she reads or is engaged in lively talk. But
if we ask her how this is possible, she will hardly reply that the
knitting goes on of itself. She will rather say that she has a feeling
of it, that she feels in her hands that she knits and how she must knit,
and that therefore the movements of knitting are called forth and
regulated by the sensations associated therewithal, even when the
attention is called away...." Again: "When a pupil begins to play on the
violin, to keep him from raising his right elbow in playing a book is
placed under his right armpit, which he is ordered to hold fast by
keeping the upper arm tight against his body. The muscular feelings, and
feelings of contact connected with the book, provoke an impulse to press
it tight. But often it happens that the beginner, whose attention gets
absorbed in the production of the notes, lets drop the book. Later,
however, this never happens; the faintest sensations of contact suffice
to awaken the impulse to keep it in its place, and the attention may be
wholly absorbed by the notes and the fingering with the left hand. _The
simultaneous combination of movements is thus in the first instance
conditioned by the facility with which in us, alongside of intellectual
processes, processes of inattentive feeling may still go on._"

=Ethical and Pedagogical Importance of the Principle of Habit.=--"Habit a
second nature! Habit is ten times nature," the Duke of Wellington is
said to have exclaimed; and the degree to which this is true no one
probably can appreciate as well as one who is a veteran soldier himself.
The daily drill and the years of discipline end by fashioning a man
completely over again, as to most of the possibilities of his conduct.

"There is a story," says Prof. Huxley, "which is credible enough, though
it may not be true, of a practical joker who, seeing a discharged
veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out, 'Attention!'
whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton
and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and its effects
had become embodied in the man's nervous structure."

Riderless cavalry-horses, at many a battle, have been seen to come
together and go through their customary evolutions at the sound of the
bugle-call. Most domestic beasts seem machines almost pure and simple,
undoubtingly, unhesitatingly doing from minute to minute the duties they
have been taught, and giving no sign that the possibility of an
alternative ever suggests itself to their mind. Men grown old in prison
have asked to be readmitted after being once set free. In a railroad
accident a menagerie-tiger, whose cage had broken open, is said to have
emerged, but presently crept back again, as if too much bewildered by
his new responsibilities, so that he was without difficulty secured.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious
conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of
ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings
of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of
life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps
the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the
miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log-cabin and his
lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion
by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to
fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early
choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there
is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.
It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of
twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling down on the
young commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young minister,
on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage
running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices,
the ways of the 'shop,' in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no
more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of
folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the
world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set
like plaster, and will never soften again.

If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical one in the
formation of intellectual and professional habits, the period below
twenty is more important still for the fixing of _personal_ habits,
properly so called, such as vocalization and pronunciation, gesture,
motion, and address. Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty
spoken without a foreign accent; hardly ever can a youth transferred to
the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of
speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly
ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he
even learn to _dress_ like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their
wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest 'swell,' but he simply
_cannot_ buy the right things. An invisible law, as strong as
gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayed this year as he was the
last; and how his better-clad acquaintances contrive to get the things
they wear will be for him a mystery till his dying day.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to _make our nervous system
our ally instead of our enemy_. It is to fund and capitalize our
acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. _For this
we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many
useful actions as we can_, and guard against the growing into ways that
are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the
plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to
the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind
will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable
human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for
whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of
rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of
work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the
time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which
ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his
consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in
any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter
right.

In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral Habits' there are some
admirable practical remarks laid down. Two great maxims emerge from his
treatment. The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the
leaving off of an old one, we must take care to _launch ourselves with
as strong and decided an initiative as possible_. Accumulate all the
possible circumstances which shall re-enforce the right motives; put
yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make
engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case
allows; in short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know. This
will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to
break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day
during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not
occurring at all.

The second maxim is: _Never suffer an exception to occur till the new
habit is securely rooted in your life_. Each lapse is like the letting
fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single
slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. _Continuity_
of training is the great means of making the nervous system act
infallibly right. As Professor Bain says:

"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from
the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers,
one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is
necessary, above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a
battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests
on the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the
two opposing powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted
successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to
enable it to cope with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is
the theoretically best career of mental progress."

The need of securing success at the _outset_ is imperative. Failure at
first is apt to damp the energy of all future attempts, whereas past
experiences of success nerve one to future vigor. Goethe says to a man
who consulted him about an enterprise but mistrusted his own powers:
"Ach! you need only blow on your hands!" And the remark illustrates the
effect on Goethe's spirits of his own habitually successful career.

The question of "tapering-off," in abandoning such habits as drink and
opium-indulgence comes in here, and is a question about which experts
differ within certain limits, and in regard to what may be best for an
individual case. In the main, however, all expert opinion would agree
that abrupt acquisition of the new habit is the best way, _if there be a
real possibility of carrying it out_. We must be careful not to give the
will so stiff a task as to insure its defeat at the very outset; but,
_provided one can stand it_, a sharp period of suffering, and then a
free time, is the best thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habit
like that of opium, or in simply changing one's hours of rising or of
work. It is surprising how soon a desire will die of inanition if it be
_never_ fed.

"One must first learn, unmoved, looking neither to the right nor left,
to walk firmly on the strait and narrow path, before one can begin 'to
make one's self over again.' He who every day makes a fresh resolve is
like one who, arriving at the edge of the ditch he is to leap, forever
stops and returns for a fresh run. Without _unbroken_ advance there is
no such thing as _accumulation_ of the ethical forces possible, and to
make this possible, and to exercise us and habituate us in it, is the
sovereign blessing of regular work."[31]

A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: _Seize the very first
possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every
emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits
you aspire to gain_. It is not in the moment of their forming, but in
the moment of their producing _motor effects_, that resolves and
aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain. As the author last
quoted remarks:

"The actual presence of the practical opportunity alone furnishes the
fulcrum upon which the lever can rest, by means of which the moral will
may multiply its strength, and raise itself aloft. He who has no solid
ground to press against will never get beyond the stage of empty
gesture-making."

No matter how full a reservoir of _maxims_ one may possess, and no
matter how good one's _sentiments_ may be, if one have not taken
advantage of every concrete opportunity to _act_, one's character may
remain entirely unaffected for the better. With mere good intentions,
hell is proverbially paved. And this is an obvious consequence of the
principles we have laid down. A 'character,' as J. S. Mill says, 'is a
completely fashioned will'; and a will, in the sense in which he means
it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and
definite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. A tendency to
act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the
uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the
brain 'grows' to their use. When a resolve or a fine glow of feeling is
allowed to evaporate without bearing practical fruit it is worse than a
chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and
emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more
contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless
sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of
sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.
Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers of France, by his eloquence, to
follow Nature and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends his own
children to the foundling hospital, is the classical example of what I
mean. But every one of us in his measure, whenever, after glowing for an
abstractly formulated Good, he practically ignores some actual case,
among the squalid 'other particulars' of which that same Good lurks
disguised, treads straight on Rousseau's path. All Goods are disguised
by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day world; but
woe to him who can only recognize them when he thinks them in their pure
and abstract form! The habit of excessive novel-reading and
theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of
the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her
coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing
that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. Even the habit of
excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither performers
themselves nor musically gifted enough to take it in a purely
intellectual way, has probably a relaxing effect upon the character. One
becomes filled with emotions which habitually pass without prompting to
any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is kept up. The
remedy would be, never to suffer one's self to have an emotion at a
concert, without expressing it afterward in _some_ active way. Let the
expression be the least thing in the world--speaking genially to one's
grandmother, or giving up one's seat in a horse-car, if nothing more
heroic offers--but let it not fail to take place.

These latter cases make us aware that it is not simply _particular
lines_ of discharge, but also _general forms_ of discharge, that seem to
be grooved out by habit in the brain. Just as, if we let our emotions
evaporate, they get into a way of evaporating; so there is reason to
suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it
the effort-making capacity will be gone; and that, if we suffer the
wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time.
Attention and effort are, as we shall see later, but two names for the
same psychic fact. To what brain-processes they correspond we do not
know. The strongest reason for believing that they do depend on
brain-processes at all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just
this fact, that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit,
which is a material law. As a final practical maxim, relative to these
habits of the will, we may, then, offer something like this: _Keep the
faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every
day_. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary
points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you
would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh,
it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism
of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and
goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never
bring him a return. But if the fire _does_ come, his having paid it will
be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself
to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial
in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks
around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff
in the blast.

The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the most powerful
ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured hereafter, of which
theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this
world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could
the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of
habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic
state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be
undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so
little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses
himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't count this
time!' Well! he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it;
but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and
fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to
be used against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do
is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Of course this has its
good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so
many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities
and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate
acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot
of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully
busy each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result
to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine
morning, to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in
whatever pursuit he may have singled out. Silently, between all the
details of his business, the _power of judging_ in all that class of
matter will have built itself up within him as a possession that will
never pass away. Young people should know this truth in advance. The
ignorance of it has probably engendered more discouragement and
faint-heartedness in youths embarking on arduous careers than all other
causes put together.

CHAPTER XI.

THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

=The order of our study must be analytic.= We are now prepared to begin
the introspective study of the adult consciousness itself. Most books
adopt the so-called synthetic method. Starting with 'simple ideas of
sensation,' and regarding these as so many atoms, they proceed to build
up the higher states of mind out of their 'association,' 'integration,'
or 'fusion,' as houses are built by the agglutination of bricks. This
has the didactic advantages which the synthetic method usually has. But
it commits one beforehand to the very questionable theory that our
higher states of consciousness are compounds of units; and instead of
starting with what the reader directly knows, namely his total concrete
states of mind, it starts with a set of supposed 'simple ideas' with
which he has no immediate acquaintance at all, and concerning whose
alleged interactions he is much at the mercy of any plausible phrase. On
every ground, then, the method of advancing from the simple to the
compound exposes us to illusion. All pedants and abstractionists will
naturally hate to abandon it. But a student who loves the fulness of
human nature will prefer to follow the 'analytic' method, and to begin
with the most concrete facts, those with which he has a daily
acquaintance in his own inner life. The analytic method will discover in
due time the elementary parts, if such exist, without danger of
precipitate assumption. The reader will bear in mind that our own
chapters on sensation have dealt mainly with the physiological
conditions thereof. They were put first as a mere matter of convenience,
because incoming currents come first. _Psychologically_ they might
better have come last. Pure sensations were described on page 12 as
processes which in adult life are well-nigh unknown, and nothing was
said which could for a moment lead the reader to suppose that they were
the _elements of composition_ of the higher states of mind.

=The Fundamental Fact.=--The first and foremost concrete fact which every
one will affirm to belong to his inner experience is the fact that
_consciousness of some sort goes on. 'States of mind' succeed each other
in him._ If we could say in English 'it thinks,' as we say 'it rains' or
'it blows,' we should be stating the fact most simply and with the
minimum of assumption. As we cannot, we must simply say that _thought
goes on_.

=Four Characters in Consciousness.=--How does it go on? We notice
immediately four important characters in the process, of which it shall
be the duty of the present chapter to treat in a general way:

1) Every 'state' tends to be part of a personal consciousness.

2) Within each personal consciousness states are always changing.

3) Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous.

4) It is interested in some parts of its object to the exclusion of
others, and welcomes or rejects--_chooses_ from among them, in a
word--all the while.

In considering these four points successively, we shall have to plunge
_in medias res_ as regards our nomenclature and use psychological terms
which can only be adequately defined in later chapters of the book. But
every one knows what the terms mean in a rough way; and it is only in a
rough way that we are now to take them. This chapter is like a painter's
first charcoal sketch upon his canvas, in which no niceties appear.

When I say _every 'state' or 'thought' is part of a personal
consciousness_, 'personal consciousness' is one of the terms in
question. Its meaning we know so long as no one asks us to define it,
but to give an accurate account of it is the most difficult of
philosophic tasks. This task we must confront in the next chapter; here
a preliminary word will suffice.

In this room--this lecture-room, say--there are a multitude of thoughts,
yours and mine, some of which cohere mutually, and some not. They are as
little each-for-itself and reciprocally independent as they are
all-belonging-together. They are neither: no one of them is separate,
but each belongs with certain others and with none beside. My thought
belongs with _my_ other thoughts, and your thought with _your_ other
thoughts. Whether anywhere in the room there be a _mere_ thought, which
is nobody's thought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we have no
experience of its like. The only states of consciousness that we
naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses, minds,
selves, concrete particular I's and you's.

Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving
or bartering between them. No thought even comes into direct _sight_ of
a thought in another personal consciousness than its own. Absolute
insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the
elementary psychic fact were not _thought_ or _this thought_ or _that
thought_, but _my thought_, every thought being _owned_. Neither
contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and
content are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this
barrier of belonging to different personal minds. The breaches between
such thoughts are the most absolute breaches in nature. Every one will
recognize this to be true, so long as the existence of _something_
corresponding to the term 'personal mind' is all that is insisted on,
without any particular view of its nature being implied. On these terms
the personal self rather than the thought might be treated as the
immediate datum in psychology. The universal conscious fact is not
'feelings and thoughts exist,' but 'I think' and 'I feel.' No
psychology, at any rate, can question the _existence_ of personal
selves. Thoughts connected as we feel them to be connected are _what we
mean_ by personal selves. The worst a psychology can do is so to
interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of their _worth_.

=Consciousness is in constant change.= I do not mean by this to say that
no one state of mind has any duration--even if true, that would be hard
to establish. What I wish to lay stress on is this, that _no state once
gone can recur and be identical with what it was before_. Now we are
seeing, now hearing; now reasoning, now willing; now recollecting, now
expecting; now loving, now hating; and in a hundred other ways we know
our minds to be alternately engaged. But all these are complex states,
it may be said, produced by combination of simpler ones;--do not the
simpler ones follow a different law? Are not the _sensations_ which we
get from the same object, for example, always the same? Does not the
same piano-key, struck with the same force, make us hear in the same
way? Does not the same grass give us the same feeling of green, the same
sky the same feeling of blue, and do we not get the same olfactory
sensation no matter how many times we put our nose to the same flask of
cologne? It seems a piece of metaphysical sophistry to suggest that we
do not; and yet a close attention to the matter shows that _there is no
proof that an incoming current ever gives us just the same bodily
sensation twice_.

_What is got twice is the same_ OBJECT. We hear the same _note_ over and
over again; we see the same _quality_ of green, or smell the same
objective perfume, or experience the same _species_ of pain. The
realities, concrete and abstract, physical and ideal, whose permanent
existence we believe in, seem to be constantly coming up again before
our thought, and lead us, in our carelessness, to suppose that our
'ideas' of them are the same ideas. When we come, some time later, to
the chapter on Perception, we shall see how inveterate is our habit of
simply using our sensible impressions as stepping-stones to pass over to
the recognition of the realities whose presence they reveal. The grass
out of the window now looks to me of the same green in the sun as in the
shade, and yet a painter would have to paint one part of it dark brown,
another part bright yellow, to give its real sensational effect. We take
no heed, as a rule, of the different way in which the same things look
and sound and smell at different distances and under different
circumstances. The sameness of the _things_ is what we are concerned to
ascertain; and any sensations that assure us of that will probably be
considered in a rough way to be the same with each other. This is what
makes off-hand testimony about the subjective identity of different
sensations well-nigh worthless as a proof of the fact. The entire
history of what is called Sensation is a commentary on our inability to
tell whether two sensible qualities received apart are exactly alike.
What appeals to our attention far more than the absolute quality of an
impression is its _ratio_ to whatever other impressions we may have at
the same time. When everything is dark a somewhat less dark sensation
makes us see an object white. Helmholtz calculates that the white marble
painted in a picture representing an architectural view by moonlight is,
when seen by daylight, from ten to twenty thousand times brighter than
the real moonlit marble would be.

Such a difference as this could never have been _sensibly_ learned; it
had to be inferred from a series of indirect considerations. These make
us believe that our sensibility is altering all the time, so that the
same object cannot easily give us the same sensation over again. We feel
things differently accordingly as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or
full, fresh or tired; differently at night and in the morning,
differently in summer and in winter; and above all, differently in
childhood, manhood, and old age. And yet we never doubt that our
feelings reveal the same world, with the same sensible qualities and the
same sensible things occupying it. The difference of the sensibility is
shown best by the difference of our emotion about the things from one
age to another, or when we are in different organic moods. What was
bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable. The bird's
song is tedious, the breeze is mournful, the sky is sad.

To these indirect presumptions that our sensations, following the
mutations of our capacity for feeling, are always undergoing an
essential change, must be added another presumption, based on what must
happen in the brain. Every sensation corresponds to some cerebral
action. For an identical sensation to recur it would have to occur the
second time _in an unmodified brain_. But as this, strictly speaking, is
a physiological impossibility, so is an unmodified feeling an
impossibility; for to every brain-modification, however small, we
suppose that there must correspond a change of equal amount in the
consciousness which the brain subserves.

But if the assumption of 'simple sensations' recurring in immutable
shape is so easily shown to be baseless, how much more baseless is the
assumption of immutability in the larger masses of our thought!

For there it is obvious and palpable that our state of mind is never
precisely the same. Every thought we have of a given fact is, strictly
speaking, unique, and only bears a resemblance of kind with our other
thoughts of the same fact. When the identical fact recurs, we _must_
think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle,
apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last
appeared. And the thought by which we cognize it is the thought of
it-in-those-relations, a thought suffused with the consciousness of all
that dim context. Often we are ourselves struck at the strange
differences in our successive views of the same thing. We wonder how we
ever could have opined as we did last month about a certain matter. We
have outgrown the possibility of that state of mind, we know not how.
From one year to another we see things in new lights. What was unreal
has grown real, and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to
care the world for are shrunken to shadows; the women once so divine,
the stars, the woods, and the waters, how now so dull and common!--the
young girls that brought an aura of infinity, at present hardly
distinguishable existences; the pictures so empty; and as for the books,
what _was_ there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or in
John Mill so full of weight? Instead of all this, more zestful than ever
is the work; and fuller and deeper the import of common duties and of
common goods.

I am sure that this concrete and total manner of regarding the mind's
changes is the only true manner, difficult as it may be to carry it out
in detail. If anything seems obscure about it, it will grow clearer as
we advance. Meanwhile, if it be true, it is certainly also true that no
two 'ideas' are ever exactly the same, which is the proposition we
started to prove. The proposition is more important theoretically than
it at first sight seems. For it makes it already impossible for us to
follow obediently in the footprints of either the Lockian or the
Herbartian school, schools which have had almost unlimited influence in
Germany and among ourselves. No doubt it is often _convenient_ to
formulate the mental facts in an atomistic sort of way, and to treat the
higher states of consciousness as if they were all built out of
unchanging simple ideas which 'pass and turn again.' It is convenient
often to treat curves as if they were composed of small straight lines,
and electricity and nerve-force as if they were fluids. But in the one
case as in the other we must never forget that we are talking
symbolically, and that there is nothing in nature to answer to our
words. _A permanently existing 'Idea' which makes its appearance before
the footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals is as
mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades._

=Within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly continuous.= I
can only define 'continuous' as that which is without breach, crack, or
division. The only breaches that can well be conceived to occur within
the limits of a single mind would either be _interruptions_,
_time_-gaps during which the consciousness went out; or they would be
breaks in the content of the thought, so abrupt that what followed had
no connection whatever with what went before. The proposition that
consciousness feels continuous, means two things:

_a._ That even where there is a time-gap the consciousness after it
feels as if it belonged together with the consciousness before it, as
another part of the same self;

_b._ That the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the
consciousness are never absolutely abrupt.

The case of the time-gaps, as the simplest, shall be taken first.

_a._ When Paul and Peter wake up in the same bed, and recognize that
they have been asleep, each one of them mentally reaches back and makes
connection with but _one_ of the two streams of thought which were
broken by the sleeping hours. As the current of an electrode buried in
the ground unerringly finds its way to its own similarly buried mate,
across no matter how much intervening earth; so Peter's present
instantly finds out Peter's past, and never by mistake knits itself on
to that of Paul. Paul's thought in turn is as little liable to go
astray. The past thought of Peter is appropriated by the present Peter
alone. He may have a _knowledge_, and a correct one too, of what Paul's
last drowsy states of mind were as he sank into sleep, but it is an
entirely different sort of knowledge from that which he has of his own
last states. He _remembers_ his own states, whilst he only _conceives_
Paul's. Remembrance is like direct feeling; its object is suffused with
a warmth and intimacy to which no object of mere conception ever
attains. This quality of warmth and intimacy and immediacy is what
Peter's _present_ thought also possesses for itself. So sure as this
present is me, is mine, it says, so sure is anything else that comes
with the same warmth and intimacy and immediacy, me and mine. What the
qualities called warmth and intimacy may in themselves be will have to
be matter for future consideration. But whatever past states appear with
those qualities must be admitted to receive the greeting of the present
mental state, to be owned by it, and accepted as belonging together with
it in a common self. This community of self is what the time-gap cannot
break in twain, and is why a present thought, although not ignorant of
the time-gap, can still regard itself as continuous with certain chosen
portions of the past.

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such
words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents
itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river'
or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.
_In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of
consciousness, or of subjective life._

_b._ But now there appears, even within the limits of the same self, and
between thoughts all of which alike have this same sense of belonging
together, a kind of jointing and separateness among the parts, of which
this statement seems to take no account. I refer to the breaks that are
produced by sudden _contrasts in the quality_ of the successive segments
of the stream of thought. If the words 'chain' and 'train' had no
natural fitness in them, how came such words to be used at all? Does not
a loud explosion rend the consciousness upon which it abruptly breaks,
in twain? No; for even into our awareness of the thunder the
awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what
we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder _pure_, but
thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it. Our feeling of
the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from
what it would be were the thunder a continuation of previous thunder.
The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence; but
the _feeling_ of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just
gone; and it would be difficult to find in the actual concrete
consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have
an inkling of anything that went before.

='Substantive' and 'Transitive' States of Mind.=--When we take a general
view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first
is the different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be
an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language
expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and
every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually
occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is
that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and
contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with
thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain
between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest.

_Let us call the resting-places the 'substantive parts,' and the places
of flight the 'transitive parts,' of the stream of thought._ It then
appears that our thinking tends at all times towards some other
substantive part than the one from which it has just been dislodged. And
we may say that the main use of the transitive parts is to lead us from
one substantive conclusion to another.

Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the transitive parts
for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion,
stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really
annihilating them. Whilst if we wait till the conclusion _be_ reached,
it so exceeds them in vigor and stability that it quite eclipses and
swallows them up in its glare. Let anyone try to cut a thought across in
the middle and get a look at its section, and he will see how difficult
the introspective observation of the transitive tracts is. The rush of
the thought is so headlong that it almost always brings us up at the
conclusion before we can arrest it. Or if our purpose is nimble enough
and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself. As a snowflake
crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so,
instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find
we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were
pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and
particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. The attempt at
introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning
top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to
see how the darkness looks. And the challenge to _produce_ these
transitive states of consciousness, which is sure to be thrown by
doubting psychologists at anyone who contends for their existence, is as
unfair as Zeno's treatment of the advocates of motion, when, asking them
to point out in what place an arrow is when it moves, he argues the
falsity of their thesis from their inability to make to so preposterous
a question an immediate reply.

The results of this introspective difficulty are baleful. If to hold
fast and observe the transitive parts of thought's stream be so hard,
then the great blunder to which all schools are liable must be the
failure to register them, and the undue emphasizing of the more
substantive parts of the stream. Now the blunder has historically worked
in two ways. One set of thinkers have been led by it to
_Sensationalism_. Unable to lay their hands on any substantive feelings
corresponding to the innumerable relations and forms of connection
between the sensible things of the world, finding no _named_ mental
states mirroring such relations, they have for the most part denied that
any such states exist; and many of them, like Hume, have gone on to deny
the reality of most relations _out_ of the mind as well as in it. Simple
substantive 'ideas,' sensations and their copies, juxtaposed like
dominoes in a game, but really separate, everything else verbal
illusion,--such is the upshot of this view. The _Intellectualists_, on
the other hand, unable to give up the reality of relations _extra
mentem_, but equally unable to point to any distinct substantive
feelings in which they were known, have made the same admission that
such feelings do not exist. But they have drawn an opposite conclusion.
The relations must be known, they say, in something that is no feeling,
no mental 'state,' continuous and consubstantial with the subjective
tissue out of which sensations and other substantive conditions of
consciousness are made. They must be known by something that lies on an
entirely different plane, by an _actus purus_ of Thought, Intellect, or
Reason, all written with capitals and considered to mean something
unutterably superior to any passing perishing fact of sensibility
whatever.

But from our point of view both Intellectualists and Sensationalists are
wrong. If there be such things as feelings at all, _then so surely as
relations between objects exist_ in rerum naturâ, _so surely, and more
surely, do feelings exist to which these relations are known_. There is
not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase,
syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not
express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment
actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought. If we
speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we
speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each
of them by an inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations
are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to
all their shades.

We ought to say a feeling of _and_, a feeling of _if_, a feeling of
_but_, and a feeling of _by_, quite as readily as we say a feeling of
_blue_ or a feeling of _cold_. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our
habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts
alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use.
Consider once again the analogy of the brain. We believe the brain to be
an organ whose internal equilibrium is always in a state of change--the
change affecting every part. The pulses of change are doubtless more
violent in one place than in another, their rhythm more rapid at this
time than at that. As in a kaleidoscope revolving at a uniform rate,
although the figures are always rearranging themselves, there are
instants during which the transformation seems minute and interstitial
and almost absent, followed by others when it shoots with magical
rapidity, relatively stable forms thus alternating with forms we should
not distinguish if seen again; so in the brain the perpetual
rearrangement must result in some forms of tension lingering relatively
long, whilst others simply come and pass. But if consciousness
corresponds to the fact of rearrangement itself, why, if the
rearrangement stop not, should the consciousness ever cease? And if a
lingering rearrangement brings with it one kind of consciousness, why
should not a swift rearrangement bring another kind of consciousness as
peculiar as the rearrangement itself?

=The object before the mind always has a 'Fringe.'= There are other
unnamed modifications of consciousness just as important as the
transitive states, and just as cognitive as they. Examples will show
what I mean.

Suppose three successive persons say to us: 'Wait!' 'Hark!' 'Look!' Our
consciousness is thrown into three quite different attitudes of
expectancy, although no definite object is before it in any one of the
three cases. Probably no one will deny here the existence of a real
conscious affection, a sense of the direction from which an impression
is about to come, although no positive impression is yet there.
Meanwhile we have no names for the psychoses in question but the names
hark, look, and wait.

Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our
consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap. It
is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in
it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with
the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the
longed-for term. If wrong names are proposed to us, this singularly
definite gap acts immediately so as to negate them. They do not fit
into its mould. And the gap of one word does not feel like the gap of
another, all empty of content as both might seem necessarily to be when
described as gaps. When I vainly try to recall the name of Spalding, my
consciousness is far removed from what it is when I vainly try to recall
the name of Bowles. There are innumerable consciousnesses of _want_, no
one of which taken in itself has a name, but all different from each
other. Such a feeling of want is _toto cœlo_ other than a want of
feeling: it is an intense feeling. The rhythm of a lost word may be
there without a sound to clothe it; or the evanescent sense of something
which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fitfully, without
growing more distinct. Every one must know the tantalizing effect of the
blank rhythm of some forgotten verse, restlessly dancing in one's mind,
striving to be filled out with words.

What is that first instantaneous glimpse of some one's meaning which we
have, when in vulgar phrase we say we 'twig' it? Surely an altogether
specific affection of our mind. And has the reader never asked himself
what kind of a mental fact is his _intention of saying a thing_ before
he has said it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all
other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness,
therefore; and yet how much of it consists of definite sensorial images,
either of words or of things? Hardly anything! Linger, and the words and
things come into the mind; the anticipatory intention, the divination is
there no more. But as the words that replace it arrive, it welcomes them
successively and calls them right if they agree with it, it rejects them
and calls them wrong if they do not. The intention _to-say-so-and-so_ is
the only name it can receive. One may admit that a good third of our
psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of
schemes of thought not yet articulate. How comes it about that a man
reading something aloud for the first time is able immediately to
emphasize all his words aright, unless from the very first he have a
sense of at least the form of the sentence yet to come, which sense is
fused with his consciousness of the present word, and modifies its
emphasis in his mind so as to make him give it the proper accent as he
utters it? Emphasis of this kind almost altogether depends on
grammatical construction. If we read 'no more,' we expect presently a
'than'; if we read 'however,' it is a 'yet,' a 'still,' or a
'nevertheless,' that we expect. And this foreboding of the coming verbal
and grammatical scheme is so practically accurate that a reader
incapable of understanding four ideas of the book he is reading aloud
can nevertheless read it with the most delicately modulated expression
of intelligence.

It is, the reader will see, the reinstatement of the vague and
inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so
anxious to press on the attention. Mr. Galton and Prof. Huxley have, as
we shall see in the chapter on Imagination, made one step in advance in
exploding the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley that we can have no
images but of perfectly definite things. Another is made if we overthrow
the equally ridiculous notion that, whilst simple objective qualities
are revealed to our knowledge in 'states of consciousness,' relations
are not. But these reforms are not half sweeping and radical enough.
What must be admitted is that the definite images of traditional
psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually
live. The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river
consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful,
and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all
actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would
continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that
psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is
steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the
sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it
came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The
significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra
that surrounds and escorts it,--or rather that is fused into one with it
and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it
is true, an image of the same _thing_ it was before, but making it an
image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood.

_Let us call the consciousness of this halo of relations around the
image by the name of 'psychic overtone' or 'fringe.'_

=Cerebral Conditions of the 'Fringe.'=--Nothing is easier than to
symbolize these facts in terms of brain-action. Just as the echo of the
_whence_, the sense of the starting point of our thought, is probably
due to the dying excitement of processes but a moment since vividly
aroused; so the sense of the whither, the foretaste of the terminus,
must be due to the waxing excitement of tracts or processes whose
psychical correlative will a moment hence be the vividly present feature
of our thought. Represented by a curve, the neurosis underlying
consciousness must at any moment be like this:

[Illustration: FIG. 52.]

Let the horizontal in Fig. 52 be the line of time, and let the three
curves beginning at _a_, _b_, and _c_ respectively stand for the neural
processes correlated with the thoughts of those three letters. Each
process occupies a certain time during which its intensity waxes,
culminates, and wanes. The process for _a_ has not yet died out, the
process for _c_ has already begun, when that for _b_ is culminating. At
the time-instant represented by the vertical line all three processes
are _present_, in the intensities shown by the curve. Those before _c_'s
apex _were_ more intense a moment ago; those after it _will be_ more
intense a moment hence. If I recite _a_, _b_, _c_, then, at the moment
of uttering _b_, neither _a_ nor _c_ is out of my consciousness
altogether, but both, after their respective fashions, 'mix their dim
lights' with the stronger _b_, because their processes are both awake in
some degree.

It is just like 'overtones' in music: they are not separately heard by
the ear; they blend with the fundamental note, and suffuse it, and alter
it; and even so do the waxing and waning brain-processes at every moment
blend with and suffuse and alter the psychic effect of the processes
which are at their culminating point.

=The 'Topic' of the Thought.=--If we then consider the _cognitive
function_ of different states of mind, we may feel assured that the
difference between those that are mere 'acquaintance' and those that are
'knowledges-_about_' is reducible almost entirely to the absence or
presence of psychic fringes or overtones. Knowledge _about_ a thing is
knowledge of its relations. Acquaintance with it is limitation to the
bare impression which it makes. Of most of its relations we are only
aware in the penumbral nascent way of a 'fringe' of unarticulated
affinities about it. And, before passing to the next topic in order, I
must say a little of this sense of affinity, as itself one of the most
interesting features of the subjective stream.

=Thought may be equally rational in any sort of terms.= _In all our
voluntary thinking there is some_ TOPIC or SUBJECT about which all the
members of the thought revolve. Relation to this topic or interest is
constantly felt in the fringe, and particularly the relation of harmony
and discord, of furtherance or hindrance of the topic. Any thought the
quality of whose fringe lets us feel ourselves 'all right,' may be
considered a thought that furthers the topic. Provided we only feel its
object to have a place in the scheme of relations in which the topic
also lies, that is sufficient to make of it a relevant and appropriate
portion of our train of ideas.

Now we may think about our topic mainly in words, or we may think about
it mainly in visual or other images, but this need make no difference as
regards the furtherance of our knowledge of the topic. If we only feel
in the terms, whatever they be, a fringe of affinity with each other and
with the topic, and if we are conscious of approaching a conclusion, we
feel that our thought is rational and right. The words in every language
have contracted by long association fringes of mutual repugnance or
affinity with each other and with the conclusion, which run exactly
parallel with like fringes in the visual, tactile, and other ideas. The
most important element of these fringes is, I repeat, the mere feeling
of harmony or discord, of a right or wrong direction in the thought.

If we know English and French and begin a sentence in French, all the
later words that come are French; we hardly ever drop into English. And
this affinity of the French words for each other is not something merely
operating mechanically as a brain-law, it is something we feel at the
time. Our understanding of a French sentence heard never falls to so low
an ebb that we are not aware that the words linguistically belong
together. Our attention can hardly so wander that if an English word be
suddenly introduced we shall not start at the change. Such a vague sense
as this of the words belonging together is the very minimum of fringe
that can accompany them, if 'thought' at all. Usually the vague
perception that all the words we hear belong to the same language and to
the same special vocabulary in that language, and that the grammatical
sequence is familiar, is practically equivalent to an admission that
what we hear is sense. But if an unusual foreign word be introduced, if
the grammar trip, or if a term from an incongruous vocabulary suddenly
appear, such as 'rat-trap' or 'plumber's bill' in a philosophical
discourse, the sentence detonates as it were, we receive a shock from
the incongruity, and the drowsy assent is gone. The feeling of
rationality in these cases seems rather a negative than a positive
thing, being the mere absence of shock, or sense of discord, between the
terms of thought.

Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary, and if the
grammatical structure is correct, sentences with absolutely no meaning
may be uttered in good faith and pass unchallenged. Discourses at
prayer-meetings, re-shuffling the same collection of cant phrases, and
the whole genus of penny-a-line-isms and newspaper-reporter's flourishes
give illustrations of this. "The birds filled the tree-tops with their
morning song, making the air moist, cool, and pleasant," is a sentence I
remember reading once in a report of some athletic exercises in Jerome
Park. It was probably written unconsciously by the hurried reporter, and
read uncritically by many readers.

[Illustration: FIG. 53.]

We see, then, that it makes little or no difference in what sort of
mind-stuff, in what quality of imagery, our thinking goes on. The only
images _intrinsically_ important are the halting-places, the substantive
conclusions, provisional or final, of the thought. Throughout all the
rest of the stream, the feelings of relation are everything, and the
terms related almost naught. These feelings of relation, these psychic
overtones, halos, suffusions, or fringes about the terms, may be the
same in very different systems of imagery. A diagram may help to
accentuate this indifference of the mental means where the end is the
same. Let _A_ be some experience from which a number of thinkers start.
Let _Z_ be the practical conclusion rationally inferrible from it. One
gets to this conclusion by one line, another by another; one follows a
course of English, another of German, verbal imagery. With one, visual
images predominate; with another, tactile. Some trains are tinged with
emotions, others not; some are very abridged, synthetic and rapid;
others, hesitating and broken into many steps. But when the penultimate
terms of all the trains, however differing _inter se_, finally shoot
into the same conclusion, we say, and rightly say, that all the thinkers
have had substantially the same thought. It would probably astound each
of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find
how different the scenery there was from that in his own.

The last peculiarity to which attention is to be drawn in this first
rough description of thought's stream is that--

=Consciousness is always interested more in one part of its object than
in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it
thinks.=

The phenomena of selective attention and of deliberative will are of
course patent examples of this choosing activity. But few of us are
aware how incessantly it is at work in operations not ordinarily called
by these names. Accentuation and Emphasis are present in every
perception we have. We find it quite impossible to disperse our
attention impartially over a number of impressions. A monotonous
succession of sonorous strokes is broken up into rhythms, now of one
sort, now of another, by the different accent which we place on
different strokes. The simplest of these rhythms is the double one,
tick-tóck, tick-tóck, tick-tóck. Dots dispersed on a surface are
perceived in rows and groups. Lines separate into diverse figures. The
ubiquity of the distinctions, _this_ and _that_, _here_ and _there_,
_now_ and _then_, in our minds is the result of our laying the same
selective emphasis on parts of place and time.

But we do far more than emphasize things, and unite some, and keep
others apart. We actually _ignore_ most of the things before us. Let me
briefly show how this goes on.

To begin at the bottom, what are our very senses themselves, as we saw
on pp. 10-12, but organs of selection? Out of the infinite chaos of
movements, of which physics teaches us that the outer world consists,
each sense-organ picks out those which fall within certain limits of
velocity. To these it responds, but ignores the rest as completely as if
they did not exist. Out of what is in itself an undistinguishable,
swarming _continuum_, devoid of distinction or emphasis, our senses make
for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that, a world full of
contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt changes, of picturesque light and
shade.

If the sensations we receive from a given organ have their causes thus
picked out for us by the conformation of the organ's termination,
Attention, on the other hand, out of all the sensations yielded, picks
out certain ones as worthy of its notice and suppresses all the rest. We
notice only those sensations which are signs to us of _things_ which
happen practically or æsthetically to interest us, to which we therefore
give substantive names, and which we exalt to this exclusive status of
independence and dignity. But in itself, apart from my interest, a
particular dust-wreath on a windy day is just as much of an individual
_thing_, and just as much or as little deserves an individual name, as
my own body does.

And then, among the sensations we get from each separate thing, what
happens? The mind selects again. It chooses certain of the sensations to
represent the thing most _truly_, and considers the rest as its
appearances, modified by the conditions of the moment. Thus my table-top
is named _square_, after but one of an infinite number of retinal
sensations which it yields, the rest of them being sensations of two
acute and two obtuse angles; but I call the latter _perspective_ views,
and the four right angles the _true_ form of the table, and erect the
attribute squareness into the table's essence, for æsthetic reasons of
my own. In like manner, the real form of the circle is deemed to be the
sensation it gives when the line of vision is perpendicular to its
centre--all its other sensations are _signs_ of this sensation. The real
sound of the cannon is the sensation it makes when the ear is close by.
The real color of the brick is the sensation it gives when the eye looks
squarely at it from a near point, out of the sunshine and yet not in the
gloom; under other circumstances it gives us other color-sensations
which are but signs of this--we then see it looks pinker or bluer than
it really is. The reader knows no object which he does not represent to
himself by preference as in some typical attitude, of some normal size,
at some characteristic distance, of some standard tint, etc., etc. But
all these essential characteristics, which together form for us the
genuine objectivity of the thing and are contrasted with what we call
the subjective sensations it may yield us at a given moment, are mere
sensations like the latter. The mind chooses to suit itself, and decides
what particular sensation shall be held more real and valid than all the
rest.

Next, in a world of objects thus individualized by our mind's selective
industry, what is called our 'experience' is almost entirely determined
by our habits of attention. A thing may be present to a man a hundred
times, but if he persistently fails to notice it, it cannot be said to
enter into his experience. We are all seeing flies, moths, and beetles
by the thousand, but to whom, save an entomologist, do they say anything
distinct? On the other hand, a thing met only once in a lifetime may
leave an indelible experience in the memory. Let four men make a tour in
Europe. One will bring home only picturesque impressions--costumes and
colors, parks and views and works of architecture, pictures and statues.
To another all this will be non-existent; and distances and prices,
populations and drainage-arrangements, door-and window-fastenings, and
other useful statistics will take their place. A third will give a rich
account of the theatres, restaurants, and public halls, and naught
beside; whilst the fourth will perhaps have been so wrapped in his own
subjective broodings as to be able to tell little more than a few names
of places through which he passed. Each has selected, out of the same
mass of presented objects, those which suited his private interest and
has made his experience thereby.

If now, leaving the empirical combination of objects, we ask how the
mind proceeds _rationally_ to connect them, we find selection again to
be omnipotent. In a future chapter we shall see that all Reasoning
depends on the ability of the mind to break up the totality of the
phenomenon reasoned about, into parts, and to pick out from among these
the particular one which, in the given emergency, may lead to the proper
conclusion. The man of genius is he who will always stick in his bill at
the right point, and bring it out with the right element--'reason' if
the emergency be theoretical, 'means' if it be practical--transfixed
upon it.

If now we pass to the æsthetic department, our law is still more
obvious. The artist notoriously selects his items, rejecting all tones,
colors, shapes, which do not harmonize with each other and with the main
purpose of his work. That unity, harmony, 'convergence of characters,'
as M. Taine calls it, which gives to works of art their superiority over
works of nature, is wholly due to _elimination_. Any natural subject
will do, if the artist has wit enough to pounce upon some one feature of
it as characteristic, and suppress all merely accidental items which do
not harmonize with this.

Ascending still higher, we reach the plane of Ethics, where choice
reigns notoriously supreme. An act has no ethical quality whatever
unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible. To sustain the
arguments for the good course and keep them ever before us, to stifle
our longing for more flowery ways, to keep the foot unflinchingly on the
arduous path, these are characteristic ethical energies. But more than
these; for these but deal with the means of compassing interests already
felt by the man to be supreme. The ethical energy _par excellence_ has
to go farther and choose which _interest_ out of several, equally
coercive, shall become supreme. The issue here is of the utmost
pregnancy, for it decides a man's entire career. When he debates, Shall
I commit this crime? choose that profession? accept that office, or
marry this fortune?--his choice really lies between one of several
equally possible future Characters. What he shall _become_ is fixed by
the conduct of this moment. Schopenhauer, who enforces his determinism
by the argument that with a given fixed character only one reaction is
possible under given circumstances, forgets that, in these critical
ethical moments, what consciously _seems_ to be in question is the
complexion of the character itself. The problem with the man is less
what act he shall now resolve to do than what being he shall now choose
to become.

Taking human experience in a general way, the choosings of different men
are to a great extent the same. The race as a whole largely agrees as to
what it shall notice and name; and among the noticed parts we select in
much the same way for accentuation and preference, or subordination and
dislike. There is, however, one entirely extraordinary case in which no
two men ever are known to choose alike. One great splitting of the whole
universe into two halves is made by each of us; and for each of us
almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves; but we all
draw the line of division between them in a different place. When I say
that we all call the two halves by the same names, and that those names
are '_me_' and '_not-me_' respectively, it will at once be seen what I
mean. The altogether unique kind of interest which each human mind feels
in those parts of creation which it can call _me_ or _mine_ may be a
moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychological fact. No mind can
take the same interest in his neighbor's _me_ as in his own. The
neighbor's me falls together with all the rest of things in one foreign
mass against which his own _me_ stands out in startling relief. Even
the trodden worm, as Lotze somewhere says, contrasts his own suffering
self with the whole remaining universe, though he have no clear
conception either of himself or of what the universe may be. He is for
me a mere part of the world; for him it is I who am the mere part. Each
of us dichotomizes the Kosmos in a different place.

Descending now to finer work than this first general sketch, let us in
the next chapter try to trace the psychology of this fact of
self-consciousness to which we have thus once more been led.

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