296 PSTCnOLOOT. 



our social selves. You must not lie in general, but you 

 may lie as mucli as you please if asked about your relations 

 with a lady ; you must accept a cliallenge from an equal, 

 but if challenged by an inferior you may laugh him to 

 scorn : these are examples of what is meant. 



(c) By the Spiritual Self, so far as it belongs to the 

 Empirical Me, I mean a man's inner or subjective being, his 

 psychic faculties or dispositions, taken concretely ; not the 

 bare principle of jDersonal Unity, or ' pure ' Ego, which 

 remains still to be discussed. These psychic dispositions 

 are the most enduring and intimate part of the self, that 

 which we most verily seem to be. We take a purer self- 

 satisfaction w^hen we think of our ability to argue and dis- 

 criminate, of our moral sensibility and conscience, of our 

 indomitable will, than when we survey any of our other 

 possessions. Only when these are altered is a man said to 

 be cdienatus a se. 



Now this spiritual self may be considered in various 

 ways. We may divide it into faculties, as just instanced, 

 isolating them one from another, and identifying ourselves 

 with either in turn. This is an abstract way of dealing with 

 consciousness, in which, as it actually presents itself, a 

 plurality of such faculties are always to be simultaneously 

 found ; or w^e may insist on a concrete view, and then the 

 spiritual self in us will be either the entire stream of our 

 personal consciousness, or the present ' segment ' or ' sec- 

 tion ' * of that stream, according as we take a broader or a 

 narrower view — both the stream and the section being con- 

 crete existences in time, and each being a unity after its 

 own peculiar kind. But whether we take it abstractly or 

 concretely, our considering the spiritual self at all is a 

 reflective process, is the result of our abandoning the out- 

 ward-looking point of view, and of our having become able 

 to think of subjectivity as such, to think ourselves as thinkers. 



This attention to thought as such, and the identification 

 of ourselves with it rather than with any of the objects 

 which it reveals, is a momentous and in some respects a 

 ratlier mysterious operation, of which we need here only 

 say that as a matter of fact it exists ; and that in everyone, 

 at an early age, the distinction between thought as such, 



