322 PSYCHOLOGY. 



inside of me, big aud stroug aud lusty, but now weak, con- 

 tracted, and collapsed. Is not this latter change the change 

 I feel the shame about ? Is not the condition of this thing 

 inside of me the proper object of my egoistic concern, of my 

 self-regard '? And is it not, after all, my pure Ego, my bare 

 numerical principle of distinction from other men, aud no 

 empirical part of me at all ? 



No, it is no such pure principle, it is simply my total 

 empirical selfhood again, my historic Me, a collection ot 

 objective facts, to which the depreciated image in your mind 

 * belongs.' In what capacity is it that I claim and demand 

 a respectful greeting from you instead of this expression of 

 disdain ? It is not as being a bare I that I claim it ; it is 

 as being an I w^ho has always been treated with respect, 

 who belongs to a certain family and ' set,' who has certain 

 powers, possessions, and public functions, sensibilities, 

 duties, and purposes, and merits and deserts. All this is 

 what 3'our disdain negates and contradicts ; this is * the 

 thing inside of me ' Avhose changed treatment I feel the 

 shame about ; this is what was lusty, and now, in conse- 

 quence of your conduct, is collapsed ; and this certainly is 

 an empirical objective thing. Indeed, the thing that is felt 

 modified and changed for the worse during my feeling of 

 shame is often more concrete even than this, — it ift simply 

 my bodily person, in which your conduct immediately and 

 without any reflection at all on my part works those 

 muscular, glandular, and vascular changes which together 

 make up the ' expression ' of shame. In this instinctive, 

 reflex sort of shame, the body is just as much the entire 

 vehicle cf the self-feeling as, in the coarser cases which we 

 first took up, it was the vehicle of the self-seeking. As, in 

 simple ' hoggish ness,' a succulent morsel gives rise, by the 

 reflex mechanism, to behavior which the bystanders find 

 'greedy,' and consider to flow from a certain sort of 'self- 

 regard ; ' so here your disdain gives rise, by a mechanism 

 quite as reflex and immediate, to another sort of behavior, 

 which the bystanders call ' shame-faced ' and which they 

 consider due to another kind of self-regard. But in both 

 cases there may be no particular self regarded at all by the 

 mind ; and the name self-regard may be only a descriptive 



