The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

* Cf. Carlyle: Sartor Resartus, 'The Everlasting Yea.' "Itelltbee, blockhead, it all comes of thy vanity ; of what thou fanciest those same deserts of thine to be. Fancy that thou deservest to be hanged (as is most likely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot : fancy that thou deserv est to be hanged in a hair halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp. . . . What act of legislature was there that thou shouldst be happy ? A little while ajro thou hadst no right to be&t all." etc.. etc.

fulcrum of all appeals. But if a man lias 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. After wards 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 unsympa thetic 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 can not 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 con tent. Sympathetic people, on the contrary, proceed by the entirely opposite way of expansion and inclusion. The out line 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, / shall not negate them so long as |w 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, meanconditioned, 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 happi ness of the young people, the wisdom of the wise ones, and are not altogether without part or lot in the good for tunes of the Yanderbilts and the Hohenzollerns themselves. Thus either by negating or by embracing, the Ego may j V ' 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 negativeuess and obstructiveness has been removed — no wind can blow except to fill its sails.

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 Self at the bottom, the spiritual Self at top, and the extracorporeal material selves and the various social selves betiveen. Our merely natural self-seeking would lead us to aggrandize all these selves ; we give up deliberately only those among them which we

* " The usual mode of lessening the shock of disappointment or dises- i teem is to contract, if possible, a low estimate of the persons that inllict it. ' Thr's is our remedy for the unjust censures of party spirit, as well as of personal malignity." (Bain : Emotion and Will, p. 209.) find we caimot keep. Our unselfishness is thus apt to be a ' virtue of necessity ' ; and it is not without all show of rea son 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 sat isfied with in ourselves disgust us when seen in others. , With another man's bodily ' hoggishness ' hardly anyone I 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 i 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 materiallself

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 self, material, social, and spiritual, men distinguish between the immediate and actual, and the re mote and potential, between the narrower and the wider view, to the detriment of the former and 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 self 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 con demnation of my own family, club, and ' set ' ; when, as a protestant, I turn catholic ; as a catholic, freethinker ; as a ' regular practitioner,' homoeopath, 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. jYet still the emotion that beckons me on is indubitably j the pursuit of an ideal social self, of a self that is at least / I ivorthy of approving recognition by the highest possible judging companion, if such companion there be.* This

* It must be observed that the qualities of the Self thus ideally constituted are all qualities approved by my actual fellows in the first instance ; and that my reason for now appealing from their verdict to that of the \ self is the true, the intimate, the ultimate, the perma- 1 nent 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

ito 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 high est; and most men, either continually or occasionally, carry a reference to it in their breast. The humblest out cast 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 spectaitor. 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

ideal judge lies in some outward peculiarity of the immediate case. What once was admired in me as courage has now become in the eyes of men 'impertinence'; what was fortitude is obstinacy; what was fidelity is now fanaticism. The ideal judge alone, I now believe, can read my qualities, my willingnesses, my powers, for what they truly are. My fellows, misled by interest and prejudice, have gone astray. 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 wor ship after the slaying should have been done ; and the Eoman emperor felt sure the Absolute Eeason 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';j glory of God?" was probably never answered in the affir- ' mative 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.

All this about the impossibility of suicide is said on the supposition of positive motives. When possessed by the emotion of /ear, however, we are in a negative state of mind ; that is, our desire is limited to the mere banishing of some thing, without regard to what shall take its place. In this state of mind there can unquestionably be genuine thoughts, and genuine acts, of suicide, spiritual and social, as well as bodily. Anything, anything, at such times, so as to escape ! and not to be ! But such conditions of suicidal frenzy are pathological in their nature and run dead against every thing that is regular in the life of the Self in man.

We must now try to interpret the facts of self-love and self-seeking a little more delicately from within. A man in whom self-seeking of any sort is largely developed is said to be selfish.* He is on the other hand * The kind of selfishness varies with the self that is sought. If it be the mere bodily self; if a man grabs the best food, the warm corner, the vacant seat; if he makes room for no one, spits about, and belches in our faces,— we call it hoggishness. If it be the social self, in the form of popu larity or influence, for which he is greedy, he may in material ways subor-

called unselfish if he shows consideration for the interests of other selves than his own. Now what is the intimate nature of the selfish emotion in him? and what is the primary object of its regard ? We have described him pursuing and fostering as his self first one set of things and then another ; we have seen the same set of facts gain or lose interest in his eyes, leave him indifferent, or fill him either with triumph or despair according as he made pretensions to appropriate them, treated them as if they were potentially or actually parts of himself, or not. We know how little it matters to us whether some man, a man taken at large and in the abstract, prove a failure or succeed in life, — he may be hanged for aught we care, — but we know the utter momentousness and terribleness of the alternative when the man is the one whose name we ourselves bear, /must not be a failure, is the very loudest of the voices that clamor in each of our breasts : let fail who may, I at least must suc ceed. Now the first conclusion which these facts suggest is that each of us is animated by a direct feeling of regard for his oivn pure principle of individual existence, whatever that may be, taken merely as such. It appears as if all our concrete manifestations of selfishness might be the conclu sions of as many syllogisms, each with this principle as the subject of its major premiss, thus: Whatever is me is precious ; this is me ; therefore this is precious ; whatever is mine must not fail ; this is mine ; therefore this must not fail, etc.

It appears, I say, as if this principle inocu lated all it touched with its own intimate quality of worth ; as if, previous to the touching, everything might be matter of indifference, and nothing interesting in its own right ; as if my regard for my own body even were an interest not simply in this body, but in this body only so far as it is mine. dinate himself to others as the best means to his end; and in this case he is very apt to pass for a disinterested man. If it be the 'other-worldly ' self which he seeks, and if he seeks it ascetically, — even though he would rather see all mankind damned eternally than lose his individual soul.— ' saintliness ' will probably be the name by which his selfishness will be called.

this ' Nnmber One ' within me, for which, according to pro verbial philosophy, I am supposed to keep so constant a ' lookout ' ? Is it the inner nucleus of my spiritual self, that collection of obscurely felt ' adjustments,' plus perhaps that still more obscurely perceived subjectivity as such, of which we recently spoke? Or is it perhaps the concrete stream of my thought in its entirety, or some one section of the same? Or may it be the indivisible Soul-Substance, in which, according to the orthodox tradition, my faculties inhere ? Or, finally, can it be the mere pronoun I ? Surely it is none of these things, that self for which I feel such hot regard. Though all of them together were put within me, I should still be cold, and fail to exhibit anything worthy of the name of selfishness or of devotion to 'Number One.' To have a self that I can care for, nature must first present me with some object interesting enough to make me instinc tively wish to appropriate it for its own sake, and out of it to manufacture one of those material, social, or spiritual selves, which we have already passed in review. We shall find that all the facts of rivalry and substitution that have so struck us, all the shiftings and expansions and contrac tions of the sphere of what shall be considered me and mine, are but results of the fact that certain things appeal to primitive and instinctive impulses of our nature, and that we follow their destinies with an excitement that owes n6thing to a reflective source. These objects our con sciousness treats as the primordial constituents of its Me. Whatever other objects, whether by association with the fate of these, or in any other way, come to be followed with the same sort of interest, form our remoter and more sec ondary self.

The words ME, then, and SELF, so far as they arouse feeling and connote emotional worth, are OBJECTIVE designations, meaning ALL THE THINGS which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain peculiar sort. Let us try to justify this proposition in detail. The most palpable selfishness of a man is his bodily selfishness ; and his most palpable self is the body to which that selfishness relates. Now I say that he identifies him self with this body because he loves it, and that he does

not love it because lie finds it to be identified with himselt Keverting to natural history-psychology will help us to see the truth of this. In the chapter on Instincts we shall learn that every creature has a certain selective interest in certain portions of the world, and that this interest is as often connate as acquired. Our interest in things means the attention and emotion which the thought of them will excite, and the actions which their presence will evoke. Thus every species is particularly interested in its own prey or food, its own enemies, its own sexual mates, and its own young. These things fascinate by their intrinsic power to do so ; they are cared for for their own sakes.

Well, it stands not in the least otherwise with our bod ies. They too are percepts in our objective field — they are simply the most interesting percepts there. What happens to them excites in us emotions and tendencies to action more energetic and habitual than any which are excited by other portions of the ' field.' What my comrades call my bodily selfishness or self-love, is nothing but the sum of all the outer acts which this interest in my b xly spontane ously draws from me. My ' selfishness ' is here but a de scriptive name for grouping together the outward symp toms which I show. When I am led by self-love to keep my seat whilst ladies stand, or to grab something first and cut out my neighbor, what I really love is the comfortable seat, is the thing itself which I grab. I love them prima rily, as the mother loves her babe, or a generous man an heroic deed. Wherever, as here, self-seeking is the out come of simple instinctive propensity, it is but a name for certain reflex acts. Something rivets my attention fatally, and fatally provokes the ' selfish ' response. Could an au tomaton be so skilfully constructed as to ape these acts, it would be called selfish as properly as I. It is true that I am no automaton, but a thinker. But my thoughts, like my acts, are here concerned only with the outward things. They need neither know nor care for any pure principle within. In fact the more utterly ' selfish ' I am in this primitive way, the more blindly absorbed my thought will be in the objects and impulses of my lusts, and the more devoid of any inward looking glance. A baby, whose con-

sciousness of the pure Ego, of himself as a thinker, is not usually supposed developed, is, in this way, as some Ger man has said, ' der vollendeteste Egoist.' His corporeal per son, and what ministers to its needs, are the only self he can possibly be said to love. His so-called self-love is but a name for his insensibility to all but this one set of things, It may be that he needs a pure principle of subjectivity, a soul or pure Ego (he certainly needs a stream of thought) to make him sensible at all to anything, to make him dis criminate and love uberhaupt, — how that may be, we shall see ere long ; but this pure Ego, which would then be the condition of his loving, need no more be the object of his love than it need be the object of his thought. If his in terests lay altogether in other bodies than his own, if all his instincts were altruistic and all his acts suicidal, still he would need a principle of consciousness just as he does now. Such a principle cannot then be the principle of his bodily selfishness any more than it is the principle of any other ten dency he may show.

So much for the bodily self-love. But my social selflove, my interest in the images other men have framed of me, is also an interest in a set of objects external to my thought. These thoughts in other men's minds are out of my mind and ' ejective ' to me. They come and go, and grow and dwindle, and I am puffed up with pride, or blush with shame, at the result, just as at my success or failure in the pursuit of a material thing. So that here again, just as in the former case, the pure principle seems out of the game as an object of regard, and present only as the general form or condition under which the regard and the thinking go on in me at all.

But, it will immediately be objected, this is giving a mutilated account of the facts. Those images of me in the minds of other men are, it is true, things outside of me, whose changes I perceive just as I perceive any other out ward change. But the pride and shame which I feel are not concerned merely with those changes. I feel as if some thing else had changed too, when I perceive my image in your mind to have changed for the worse, something in me to which that image belongs, and which a moment ago I felt

inside of me, big and strong and lusty, but now weak, con tracted, and collapsed. Is not this latter change the change I feel the shame about ? Is not the condition of this thing inside of me the proper object of my egoistic concern, of my self-regard ? And is it not, after all, my pure Ego, my bare numerical principle of distinction from other men, and no empirical part of me at all ? No, it is no such pure principle, it is simply my total empirical selfhood again, my historic Me, a collection ol objective facts, to which the depreciated image in your mind ' belongs.' In what capacity is it that I claim and demand a respectful greeting from you instead of this expression of disdain ? It is not as being a bare I that I claim it ; it is as being an I who has always been treated with respect, who belongs to a certain family and ' set,' who has certain powers, possessions, and public functions, sensibilities, duties, and purposes, and merits and deserts. All this is what your disdain negates and contradicts ; this is ' the thing inside of me ' whose changed treatment I feel the shame about ; this is what was lusty, and now, in conse quence of your conduct, is collapsed ; and this certainly is an empirical objective thing. Indeed, the thing that is felt modified and changed for the worse during my feeling of shame is often more concrete even than this, — it is simply my bodily person, in which your conduct immediately and without any reflection at all on my part works those muscular, glandular, and vascular changes which together make up the ' expression ' of shame. In this instinctive, reflex sort of shame, the body is just as much the entire vehicle cf the self-feeling as, in the coarser cases which we first took up, it was the vehicle of the self-seeking. As, in simple ' hoggishness,' a succulent morsel gives rise, by the reflex mechanism, to behavior which the bystanders find ' greedy,' and consider to flow from a certain sort of * selfregard ; ' so here your disdain gives rise, by a mechanism quite as reflex and immediate, to another sort of behavior, which the bystanders call ' shame-faced ' and which they consider due to another kind of self-regard.

But in both cases there may be no particular self regarded at all by the mind : and the name self-regard may be only a descriptive title imposed from without the reflex acts themselves, and the feelings that immediately result from their discharge. After the bodily and social selves come the spiritual. But which of my spiritual selves do I really care for ? My Soul-substance? my 'transcendental Ego, or Thinker'? my pronoun I? my subjectivity as such? my nucleus of cephalic adjustments ? or my more phenomenal and perish able powers, my loves and hates, willingnesses and sensibil ities, and the like ? Surely the latter. But they, relatively to the central principle, whatever it may be, are external and objective. They come and go, and it remains — "so shakes the magnet, and so stands the pole." It may indeed have to be there for them to be loved, but being there is not identical with being loved itself.

To sum up, then, we see no reason to suppose that self-love ' is primarily, or secondarily, or ever, love for one's mere princi ple of consents identity. It is always love for something which, as compared with that principle, is superficial, tran sient, liable to be taken up or dropped at will. And zoological psychology again comes to the aid of our understanding and shows us that this must needs be so. In fact, in answering the question what things it is that a man loves in his self-love, we have implicitly answered the farther question, of why he loves them.

Unless his 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 destruc tion. Its own body, then, first of all, its friends ne.rt, and finally if s spiritual dispositions, MUST be the supremely in- 'eresting 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 con scious 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 be come 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. Were my mental life dependent exclusively on some other person's welfare, either directly or in an indirect way, then natural selection would unquestionably have brought it about that I should be as sensitive to the social vicissitudes of that other person as I now am to my own. Instead of being egoistic I should be spontaneously altruistic, then. But in this case, only partially realized in actual human conditions, though the self I empirically love would have changed, my pure Ego or Thinker would have to remain just what it is now.

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. My own body and what ministers to its needs are thus the primitive object, instinctively deter mined, of my egoistic interests. Other objects may become interesting derivatively through association with any of these things, either as means or as habitual concomitants ; and so in a thousand ways the primi tive sphere of the egoistic emotions may enlarge and change its boundaries.