THE UNIVERSAL SKINS. 283 



pleasure; when hurt, it shrinks away: in short, it is the texture of 

 superficial motives, and answers every appellant with lightning-haste. 

 And being the instigator of show, it tricks itself with the allure- 

 ments of animal art, and sees its own graces in every polished sur- 

 face ; and while it always displays itself, it conceals by hiding one 

 self under another, and putting the most feasible forward. Self 

 then is the dear " whole skin" of animality, which keeps it what it 

 is, bounds and binds it to its pleasures and pains, making it impas- 

 sive to all others, and cuts it off from the universe, but connects it 

 with similar selves. And as only a certain amount of self or animal 

 space is allowed to any creature, an equilibrium or competition 

 arises, which is the congregate self of animal tribes or the selfishness 

 of animal societies. Yet through self transpires more than self, and 

 from animality oozes forth that which it cannot keep in, a sphere of 

 wisdom, self-denials and animal virtues, as it were the first gases in 

 which moral life is respiring; — qualities whose origin we do not 

 attribute to the animals themselves, but to the Creator passing 

 through their shades, and leaving his prints among their dreams. 

 It remains to be said, that self rigorously clears out whatever is in- 

 congruous, and makes each animal more and more itself the longer 

 it lives. Anything unselfish is ghost and fantasy to self, necessa- 

 rily denied by every art, science and heart-beat of the brutes. 



Consciousness is the skin of human mind ;* for at any given mo- 



* Philosophers, busy with the investigation of consciousness, do not suspect 

 that they are writing- monographs on the cutaneous principles. The Ego and 

 the Me, the self, the personality, and suchlike thin things of thought, cannot help 

 being somewhat spare, and in themselves dry, for they are skinny subjects. 

 And when consciousness sets up for itself, and assumes that it is the human 

 mind, instead of the bag in which the mind lies, then the diseases of the mental 

 skin begin, and the unconscious philosophers describe their own maladies as the 

 history of the universe. Those who attach themselves to the "pure Ego" as 

 having an independent life in itself, are investigating the hairy scalp of the mind 

 more or less full of pediculi, which are " the life" that it has " in itself." Those 

 who limit themselves to personality or individuality, are all " face" in their pur- 

 suits, and study impudence in its universals. The drier studies of consciousness 

 are busied with the mental scarf-skin, and when the organic history of philoso- 

 phy is written, the limes of barren logic and method will form a chapter, headed 

 "The Age of Dandruff." For logic is an armor of little shiny scales, infinite- 

 simal flints of thought ; in a word, cuticle ; and when it is separated from 

 practical ends, scurf; though when legitimate it is the proper varnish of the 



