8i2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



I look back upon it, a curious sense of irresponsibility, as if it 

 were not of my doing after all. Such deeds are always those 

 which I seldom do ; my everyday virtues and my everyday vices 

 I must admit are mine. 



But there is just one thing which I always acknowledge as 

 mine. It is the sense of effort. It matters not whether I employ 

 it in contracting my muscles to the utmost, in fixing attention 

 upon some uninteresting object, in following some distant end in 

 spite of the solicitations of the present, or in overcoming for some 

 moral reason the claims of the greater pleasure this sense of 

 effort I always acknowledge and always must acknowledge as 

 mine. 



The word self, then, seems to stand for the most frequently re- 

 current elements of my inner life, with the consciousness of effort 

 as its very essence and core. But it is evident that we can not, 

 whenever we speak of it, think all these things. To evade that 

 necessity most men probably make use of some vague thought 

 symbol which the word self suggests. Symbols of this sort are 

 known as concepts. They play a great part in our mental life ; 

 without them the marvelous achievements of the human mind 

 would never have been. Yet they are so shadowy and evanescent 

 that it is almost impossible to determine their precise constitu- 

 tion, and the more complex and diverse the phenomena they stand 

 for, the greater the difficulty of fixing and describing them. The 

 task is almost as fruitless from the practical point of view as it is 

 vain from the speculative, yet an immense amount of labor and 

 ingenuity has been expended upon it. Most of the work com- 

 monly termed metaphysical is based upon the conviction that 

 these shadows are or represent realities apart from the concrete 

 things for which they stand; sundry attributes are ascribed to 

 them, and out of these imaginary attributes the metaphysician 

 tries to construct a science. Most of the difficulties that attach to 

 the notion of a self or ego spring out of this confusion be- 

 tween the symbol and the things symbolized, and I shall there- 

 fore say no more of the symbol, but confine myself to the concrete 

 states of consciousness which constitute my thinking self and 

 which alone possess interest for me. 



If this analysis of the self be true, it will follow that the con- 

 . sciousness of self can be modified by the addition to or subtrac- 

 tion from my inner life of large masses of stable elements, and this 

 appears to be borne out by the facts. 



Extensive changes in the mass of bodily sensation are fre- 

 quently accompanied by modifications in the sense of self. I can 

 not go into this in detail, but those who care to follow the subject 

 out will find it treated at length by Prof. Ribot in his little mono- 

 graph, The Diseases of Personality. 



