THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 313 



I can make it so, sucli people shall be as if they were not.* 

 Thus may a certain absoluteness and clefiniteness in the 

 outline of my Me console me for the smallness of its con- 

 tent. 



Sympathetic people, on the contrary, proceed by- the 

 entirely opposite way of expansion and inclusion. The out- 

 line of their self often gets uncertain enough, but for this 

 the spread of its content more than atones. Nil humani a 

 me alienum. Let them despise this little person of mine, 

 and treat me like a dog, / shall not negate tJiem so long as 

 I have a soul in my body. They are realities as much as I 

 am. What positive good is in them shall be mine too, etc., 

 etc. The magnanimity of these expansive natures is often 

 touching indeed. Such persons can feel a sort of delicate 

 rapture in thinking that, however sick, ill-favored, mean- 

 conditioned, and generally forsaken they may be, they yet 

 are integral parts of the whole of this brave world, have a 

 fellow's share in the strength of the dray-horses, the happi- 

 ness of the young people, the wisdom of the wise ones, 

 and are not altogether without part or lot in the good for- 

 tunes of the Vanderbilts and the Hohenzollerns themselves. 

 Thus either by negating or by embracing, the Ego may 

 seek to establish itself in reality. He who, with Marcus 

 Aurelius, can truly say, " O Universe, I wish all that thou 

 wishest," has a self from which every trace of negativeness 

 and obstructiveness has been removed — no wind can blow 

 except to fill its sails. 



A tolerably unanimous opinion ranges the different 

 selves of which a man may be ' seized and possessed,' and 

 the consequent different orders of his self-regard, in an 

 hierarchical scale, ivith the bodily Self at the bottom, the 

 spiritual Self at top, and the extracorporeal material selves 

 and the various social selves betiveen. Our merely natural 

 self-seeking would lead us to aggrandize all these selves ; 

 we give up deliberately only those among them which we 



* " The usual mode of lessening the shock of disappointment or dises- 

 teem is to contract, U possible, a low estimate of the persons that inflict it. 

 Th:s is our remedy for the unjust censures of pnrty spirit, as well as of 

 personal malignity." (Bain : Emotion and Will, p. 209.) 



