THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 321 



sciousness of the pure Ego, of himself as a thinker, is not 

 usually supposed developed, is, in this way, as some Ger- 

 man has said, ' der vollendeteste Egoist.'' His corporeal per- 

 son, and what ministers to its needs, are the only self he 

 can possibly be said to love. His so-called self-love is but 

 a name for his insensibility to all but this one set of things. 

 It may be that he needs a pure principle of subjectivity, a 

 soul or pure Ego (he certainly needs a stream of thought) 

 to make him sensible at all to anything, to make him dis- 

 criminate and love ilherhaupt, — how that may be, we shall 

 see ere long ; biit this pure Ego, which would then be the 

 condition of his loving, need no more be the object of his 

 love than it need be the object of his thought. If his in- 

 terests lay altogether in other bodies than his own, if all 

 his instincts were altruistic and all his acts suicidal, still he 

 would need a principle of consciousness just as he does now. 

 Such a princijile cannot then be the principle of his bodily 

 selfishness any more than it is the principle of any other ten- 

 dency he may show. 



So much for the bodily self-love. But my social self- 

 love, my interest in the images other men have framed of 

 me, is also an interest in a set of objects external to my 

 thought. These thoughts in other men's minds are out of 

 my mind and * ejective ' to me. They come and go, and 

 grow and dwindle, and I am puffed up with pride, or blush 

 with shame, at the result, just as at my success or failure 

 in the pursuit of a material thing. So that here again, just 

 as in the former case, the pure principle seems out of the 

 game as an object of regard, and present only as the general 

 form or condition under which the regard and the thinking 

 go on in me at all. 



But, it will immediately be objected, this is giving a 

 mutilated account of the facts. Those images of me in the 

 minds of other men are, it is true, things outside of me, 

 whose changes I perceive just as I perceive any other out- 

 ward change. But the j)ride and shame which I feel are 

 not concerned merely with those changes. I feel as if some- 

 thing else had changed too, when I perceive my image in 

 your mind to have changed for the worse, something in me 

 to which that image belongs, and which a moment ago I felt 



