THE C0NSC10U8NEt<S OF SELF. 369 



dramas enacted by entities whicli but reduplicate the char- 

 acters of the phenomena themselves. The self must not 

 only knoiv its object, — that is too bald and dead a relation 

 to be written down and left in its static state. The know- 

 ing must be painted as a ' famous victory ' in which the 

 object's distinctness is in some way ' overcome.' 



" The self exists as one self only as it opposes itself, as object, to 

 itself as subject, and immediately denies and transcends that opposi- 

 tion. Only because it is such a concrete unity, which has in itself a 

 resolved contradiction, can the intelligence cope with all the manifold- 

 ness and division of the mighty universe, and hope to master its secrets. 

 As the lightning sleeps in the dew-drop, so in the simple and trans- 

 parent unity of self-consciousness there is held in equilibrium that vital 

 antagonism of opposites which . . . seems to rend the world asunder. 

 The intelligence is able to understand the world, or, in other words, to 

 break down the barrier between itself and things and find itself in them, 

 just because its own existence is implicitly the solution of all the division 

 and conflict of things."* 



This dynamic (I had almost written dynamitic) way of 

 representing knowledge has the merit of not being tame. 

 To turn from it to our own psychological formulation is like 

 turning from the fireworks, trap-doors, and transformations 

 of the pantomime into the insipidity of the midnight, where 



' ' ghastly through the drizzling rain, 

 On the bald street breaks the blank day !"f 



And yet turn we must, witli the confession that our 

 * Thought ' — a cognitive phenomenal event in time — is, if 

 it exist at all, itself the only Thinker which the facts require. 

 The only service that transcendental egoism has done to 

 psychology has been by its protests against Hume's * bundle '- 



* E. Caird: Hegel (1883), p. 149. 



f One is almost tempted to believe that the pantomime-state of mind 

 and that of the Hegelian dialectics are, emotionally considered, one and the 

 same thing. In the pantomime all common things are represented to 

 happen in impossible ways, people jump down each other's tliroats, houses 

 turn inside out, old women become young men. everything ' passe": into 

 its opposite ' with inconceivable celerity and skill; and this, so far from 

 producing perplexity, brings rapture to the beholder's mind. And so in 

 the Hegelian logic, relations elsewhere recognized under the insipid name 

 of distinctions (such as that between knower and object, many and one) 

 must first be translated into impossibilities and contradictions, then 'tran- 

 scended ' and identitied by miracle, ere the proper temper is induced for 

 thoroughly enjoying the spectacle they show. 



