THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 303 



parison with the foreign matters, apropos to which they 

 occur, and hold a sort of arbitrating, decisive position, quite 

 unlike that held by any of the other constituents of the Me. 

 It would not be surprising, then, if we Avere to feel them as 

 the birthplace of conclusions and the starting jDoint of acts, 

 or if they came to appear as what we called a while back 

 the ' sanctuary within the citadel ' of our personal life.* 



* Wundt's account of Self-consciousness deserves to be compared with 

 this. What I have called 'adjustments ' he calls processes of 'Appercep- 

 tion.' ' ' In this development (of consciousness) one particular group of per- 

 cepts claims a prominent significance, namely, those of which the spring 

 lies in ourselves. The images of feelings we get from our own body, and 

 the representations of our own movements distinguish themselves from all 

 others by forming a permanent group. As there are always some muscles 

 in a state either of tension or of activity it follows that we never l.-ick a 

 sense, either dim or clear, of the positions or movements of our bodj. . . . 

 This permanent sense, moreover, has this peculiarity, that we are aware of 

 our power at any moment voluntarily to arouse anj' one of its ingredients. 

 We excite the sensations of movement immediately by such impulses of the 

 will as shall arouse the movements themselves; and we excite the visual 

 and tactile feelings of our body by the voluntary movement of our organs 

 of sense. So we come to conceive this permanent mass of feeling as 

 immediately or remotely subject to our will, and call it the consciousness qf 

 ourself. This self-consciousness is, at the outset, thoroughly sensational, 

 . . . only gradually the second-named of its characters, its subjection to 

 our will, attains predominance. In pioportion as the apperception of all 

 our mental objects appears to us as an inward exercise of will, does our 

 self-consciousness begin both to widen itself and to narrow itself at the 

 same time. It widens itself in tliat every mental act whatever comes to 

 stand in relation to our will; and it narrows itself in that it concentrates 

 itself more and more upon the inner activity of apperception, over against 

 which our own body and all the representations connected with it appear 

 as external objects, different from our proper self. This con.scioasness, 

 contracted down to the process of apperception, we call our Ego ; and the 

 apperception of mental objects in general, may thus, after Leibnitz, be 

 designated as the raising of them into our self -consciousness. Thus the 

 natural development of self-consciousness implicitly involves the most 

 abstract forms in which this faculty has been deseribed in philosophy; only 

 philosophy is fond of placing the abstract ego at the outset, and so revers- 

 ing the process of development. Nor should we overlook the fact tliat the 

 completely abstract ego [as pure activity], although suggested by the 

 natural development of our consciousness, is never actually found therein. 

 The most speculative of philosophers is incapable of disjoining his ego 

 from those bodily feelings and images which form the incessant back- 

 ground of his awareness of himself. The notion of his ego as such is, like 

 every notion, derived from sensibility, for the process of apperception itself 

 comes to our knowledge chiefly through those feelings of tension [what I 

 have above called inward adjustments] which accompany it." (Physioln- 

 gische Psychologie, 2te Aufl. Bd. ii pp 217-19.) 



