CHAPTER X. 



THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 



Let us begin with the Self in its widest acceptation, 

 and follow it up to its most delicate and subtle form, ad- 

 vancing from the study of the empirical, as the Germans 

 call it, to that of the pure, Ego. 



THE EMPIRICAL SELF OR ME. 



The Empirical Self of each of us is all that he is 

 tempted to call by the name of me. But it is clear that 

 between what a man calls me and what he simply calls 

 mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about 

 certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act 

 about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our 

 hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse 

 the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked. 

 And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours, or are 

 they us ? Certainly men have been ready to disown their 

 very bodies and to regard them as mere vestures, or even 

 as prisons of clay from which they should some day be glad 

 to escape. 



We see then that we are dealing with a fluctuating 

 material. The same object being sometimes treated as a 

 part of me, at other times as simply mine, and then again 

 as if I had nothing to do with it at all. In its ividest 

 'possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum total of all 

 that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, 

 but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his 

 ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands 

 and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things 

 give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he 

 feels triumphant ; if they dwindle and die away, he feels 

 cast down, — not necessarily in the same degree for each 



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