THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 293 



an ornamental sort, to clierisli parents, M'ife and babes, 

 and to find for ourselves a liome of our own which we may 

 live in and 'improve.' 



An equally instinctive im j)ulse drives us to collect prop- 

 erty ; and the collections thus made become, with different 

 degrees of intimacy, parts of our empirical selves. The 

 parts of our wealth most intimately ours are those which 

 are saturated with our labor. There are few men avIio 

 would not feel personally annihilated if a life-long con- 

 struction of their hands or brains — say an entomological 

 collection or an extensive work in manuscript — were 

 suddenly swept away. The miser feels similarly towards 

 his gold, and although it is true that a part of our depres- 

 sion at the loss of possessions is due to our feeling that Ave 

 must now go without certain goods that we expected the 

 possessions to bring in their train, yet in every case there 

 remains, over and above this, a sense of the shrinkage of 

 our personality, a partial conversion of ourselves to 

 nothingness, which is a psychological phenomenon by 

 itself. We are all at once assimilated to the tramps and 

 poor devils whom we so despise, and at the same time re- 

 moved farther than ever away from the happy sons ol 

 earth who lord it over land and sea and men in the full- 

 blown lustihood that wealth and power can give, and 

 before whom, stiffen ourselves as we will by appealing to 

 anti-snobbish first principles, we cannot escape an emo- 

 tion, oj)en or sneaking, of respect and dread. 



(b) A man's Social Self is the recognition which he gets 

 from his mates. We are not only gregarious animals, liking 

 to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propen- 

 sity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our 

 kind. No more fiendish punishment could be deAdsed, 

 were such a thing physically possible, than that one should 

 be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed 

 by all the members thereof. If no one turned round when 

 we entered, answered when Ave spoke, or minded what we 

 did, but if every person we met * cut us dead,' and acted as 

 if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent 

 despair would ere long well up in us, from Avhich the 



