THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 371 



authors may be classed as radical or mitigated representa- 

 tives of the three schools we have named, substantialism, 

 associationism, or transcendentalism. Our own opinion 

 must be classed apart, although it incorj)orates essential 

 elements from all three schools. There need never have 

 been a quarrel hetiveen associationism and its rivals if the former 

 had admitted the indecomposable unity of every pulse of thought, 

 and the latter been willing to allow that ^ perishing ^ pulses of 

 thought might recollect and knoio. 



We m£..y sum up by saying that ^personality implies the 

 incessant presence of two elements, an objective person, 

 known by a passing subjective Thought and recognized as 

 continuing in time. Hereafter let us use the ivords me and I 

 for the empirical person and the judgi^ig Thought. 



Certain vicissitudes in the me demand our notice. 



In the first place, although its changes are gradual, 

 they become in time great. The central j)art of the me is 

 the feeling of the body and of the adjustments in the head ; 

 and in the feeling of the body should be included that of 

 the general emotional tones and tendencies, for at bottom 

 these are but the habits in which organic activities and sen- 

 sibilities run. Well, from infancy to old age, this assem- 

 blage of feelings, most constant of all, is yet a prey to slow 

 mutation. Our jDowers, bodily and mental, change at least 

 as fast.'^ Our possessions notoriously are perishable facts. 



*" When we compare the listless inactivity of the infant, slumbering 

 from the moment at which he lakes his milky food to the moment at which 

 he wakes to require it again, with the restless energies of that mighty being 

 which he is to become in his maturer years, pouring truth after truth, in 

 rapid and dazzling profusion, upon the world, or grasping in his single hand 

 the destiny of empires, how few are the circumstances of resemblance 

 which we can trace, of all that intelligence which is afterwards to be dis- 

 played; how little more is seen than what serves to give feeble motion to 

 the mere machinery of life ! . . . Every age, if we may speak of many 

 ages in the few years of human life, seems to be marked with a distinct 

 character. Each has its peculiar objects which excite lively affections; and 

 in each, exertion is excited by affections, which in other periods terminate 

 without inducing active desire. The boy linds a world in less space than 

 that which bounds his visible horizon; he wanders over his range of held 

 and exhausts his strength in the pursuit of objects which, in the years that 



