TEE SELF AND ITS DERANGEMENTS. 81 1 



apart from consciousness, there remains as the object of inquiry- 

 consciousness as we know it. In my first three papers (Decem- 

 ber, 1895, January and February, 1896) I have given my reasons 

 for thinking that we may conceive of it as a web containing mani- 

 fold and constantly shifting strands. Sensations of all kinds, some 

 vivid and some obscure, memories, anticipations, emotions, and 

 deliberate volitions succeed one another in bewildering confusion. 

 Yet at any given moment this apparent confusion is in reality a 

 system the form and constitution of which is determined by laws 

 as inflexible as any that rule in the physical world. 



What, then, is my self ? Is it merely another name for the 

 whole ? Or are there parts of this ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic 

 phantasmagoria which are parts of my self in a more special 

 sense than the others ? 



I think there are. In the first place, and in the broadest sense 

 of the word self, all those sensations which go to make up my con- 

 sciousness of my body as distinguished from the sensations which 

 I regard as springing from the outer world are peculiarly mine. 

 The appearance of my body from without, the double sensations 

 that arise from contact of part with part, but especially the vague 

 sensations that are always pouring in from every muscle and 

 joint, from the heart, lungs, stomach, and intestines, these all 

 blend into a confused mass which forms the background or stage 

 upon which the more distinct elements that are supplied by the 

 special senses play their parts. Any changes in this mass I feel 

 as changes in my self. Emotions and moods, and the indefinable 

 difference between the feeling of health and the feeling of disease 

 spring from obscure changes in it, but I feel them as changes in 

 my self. 



But with reflection comes a tendency to narrow the meaning 

 of the word self. Who has not gazed in the mirror at what 

 others call his self until the sense of opposition between the real 

 self and that at which he was looking became so intense that he 

 turned away almost frightened and glad to sink again into the 

 old familiar sense of unity with his body ? The more I reflect 

 the less does my body seem important to me. I am the inner life 

 of thought. Most of my thoughts I acknowledge as truly mine, 

 and most of the deeds that spring out of them I recognize as be- 

 longing to me. But occasionally a thought appears toward which 

 a sense of strangeness arises it seems none of mine. Possibly 

 because it is so much better than my usual thoughts that it seems 

 like a breath from a higher world, possibly because it is so wicked 

 that I am almost tempted to believe it comes from a devil, pos- 

 sibly merely because it is insistent and does not go when I bid it. 

 So of the impulses and desires that control me. Most of them are 

 mine, but now and then I do something toward which I feel, when 



