298 PSYCHOLOGY. 



assent it iuflueuces the movements they teud to arouse. 

 It is the home of interest, — not the pleasant or the painful, 

 not even pleasure or pain, as such, but that within us to 

 which pleasure and pain, the pleasant and the painful, speak. 

 It is the source of effort and attention, and the place from 

 which appear to emanate the fiats of the will. A physiol- 

 ogist who should reflect upon it in his own person could 

 hardly help, I should think, connecting it more or less 

 vaguely with the process by which ideas or incoming sensa- 

 tions are ' reflected ' or pass over into outward acts. Not 

 necessarily that it should he this process or the mere feel- 

 ing of this process, but that it should be in some close way 

 related to this process ; for it plays apart analogous to it in 

 the psychic life, being a sort of junction at which sensory 

 ideas terminate and from which motor ideas proceed, and 

 forming a kind of link between the two. Being more in- 

 cessantly there than any other single element of the mental 

 life, the other elements end by seeming to accrete round it 

 and to belong to it. It become opposed to them as the per- 

 manent is ojjposed to the changing and inconstant. 



One may, I think, without fear of being upset by any 

 future Galtoniau circulars, believe that all men must single 

 out from the rest of what they call themselves some central 

 principle of which each would recognize the foregoing to be 

 a fair general description, — accurate enough, at any rate, to 

 denote what is meant, and keep it unconfused with other 

 things. The moment, however, they came to closer quarters 

 with it, trying to define more accurately its precise nature, 

 we should find opinions beginning to diverge. Some would 

 say that it is a simple active substance, the soul, of which 

 they are thus conscious ; others, that it is nothing but a 

 fiction, the imaginary being denoted by the pronoun I; and 

 between these extremes of opinion all sorts of intermediaries 

 would be found. 



Later we must ourselves discuss them all, and sufficient 

 to that day will be the evil thereof. Now, let us try to 

 settle for ourselves as definitely as we can, just how this 

 central nucleus of the Self uvaj feel, no matter M'hether it be 

 a spiritual substance or only a delusive word. 



For this central part of the Self iii felt. It may be all that 



