714 COMPARATIVE AND GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY 



in which to expand this conception and to distinguish it sharply from 

 the metaphysical doctrine of the self with which it is too often con- 

 fused. It is essential, however, to suggest the justification for such 

 a conception of consciousness. The ground for the doctrine is, sim- 

 ply, this: Introspection discloses that every state of consciousness is 

 immediately known as the state, or idea, of some self. Thus, con- 

 sciousness of any idea involves also the consciousness of a self, con- 

 scious of this idea. On direct introspection, therefore, not on phil- 

 osophical demonstration, this conception of consciousness is based. 1 



It seems evident that a self, thus conceived, does undergo a de- 

 velopment which is psychic and not physiological. The progress 

 from infancy to maturity, or the advance from the savage through 

 the barbaric, to the civilized epoch of human life, illustrates what 

 is meant by self-development, a change which is correlated with 

 physiological processes, but is surely not identical with them. 2 My 

 ten-year-old self, shrinking with a terror which I still revive from 

 a new face, and my present self which welcomes every stranger with 

 a genial interest, are related by an identity and a difference. I am 

 the same self the childish terror still is realized as mine and 

 yet I am another self with a new attitude to the world. In just 

 this progressive reconciliation of sameness and difference, self- 

 development consists. 



To psychic development, thus conceived, as characteristic of 

 a self in its relations, there is not of course the decisive difficulty 

 which faces the theory of psychic development, when consciousness 

 is looked upon as series of ideas. An idea, a momentary psychic 

 occurrence, lacks as has been pointed out the permanence 

 which is necessary to a developing reality. A self, on the other hand, 

 has both identity and permanence, and may therefore be conceived as 

 growing and expanding. Yet the theory of self-development has 

 its own characteristic obstacle: A self, it is urged, is not a temporal 

 reality at all; on the other hand, time is the peculiar category of the 

 idea-series, and a self must be regarded without reference to temporal 

 realities. Only in its connection with its body is it necessarily con- 

 sidered as a past or present or future self: essentially it is the 

 same self, in spite of these distinctions. 3 And if this be true, 

 the development conception may not be applied directly to a self. 



It must be admitted that this difficulty has its roots in a just 

 conception of the nature of a self. Selves are, in truth, primarily 

 un temporal; and their basal relations are the untemporal ones 

 of common experience, of sympathetic emotion, of self-assertion, 



1 Cf. the writer's Introduction to Psychology, chap. xii. 



2 Cf. E. C. Sanford, Mental Growth and Decay, American Journal of Psycho- 

 logy, vol. xin, pp. 426 seq., 1902. 



3 Miinsterberg, Grundzilge, chap, iii (1) and (2); andRoyce, The World and the 

 Individual, Gifford Lectures, Second Series, m, vi. 



