THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 323 



title imposed from without tlie reflex acts themselves, and 

 the feelings that immediately result from their discharge. 



After the bodily and social selves come the spiritual. 

 But which of my spiritual selves do I really care for ? My 

 Soul-substance ? my ' transcendental Ego, or Thinker ' ? 

 my pronoim I? my subjectivit}^ as such? my nucleus of 

 cephalic adjustments ? or my more phenomenal and perish- 

 able powers, my loves and hates, willingnesses and sensibil- 

 ities, and the like ? Surely the latter. But they, relatively 

 to the central principle, whatever it may be, are external 

 and objective. They come and go, and it remains — "so 

 shakes the magnet, and so stands the j)ole." It may indeed 

 have to be there for them to be loved, but being there is 

 not identical with being loved itself. 



To sum up, then, ?ye see no reason to suppose that self-love^ 

 is primarily , or secondarily, or ever, love for one's mere princi- 

 ple of conscious identity. It is always love for something 

 which, as compared with that principle, is superficial, tran- 

 sient, liable to be taken up or dropped at will. 



And zoological psychology again comes to the aid of 

 our understanding and shows us that this must needs be 

 so. In fact, in answering the question what things it is that 

 a man loves in his self-love, we have implicitly answered the 

 farther question, of why he loves them. 



Unless his consciousness were something more than 

 cognitive, unless it experienced a partiality for certain of 

 the objects, which, in succession, occupy its ken, it could 

 not long maintain itself in existence ; for, by an inscrutable 

 necessit}', each human mind's appearance on this earth is 

 conditioned upon the integrity of the body with which it 

 belongs, upon the treatment which that body gets from 

 others, and upon the spiritual dispositions which use it as 

 their tool, and lead it either towards longe^-ity or to destruc- 

 tion. Its oivn hody, then, first of all, its friends next, and 

 finally its spiritual dispositions, must he the supremely in- 

 teresting OBJECTS for each human miiud. Each mind, to 

 begin with, must have a certain minimum of selfishness in 

 the shape of instincts of bodily self-seeking in order to exist. 

 This minimum must be there as a basis for all farther con- 

 scious acts, whether of self-negation or of a selfishness 



