BODILY AND MENTAL SELF. 479 impress on the child his identity from moment to moment. As Goethe has it: "The name is not worn as a dress, but grows on to us layer upon layer, like our skin".1 Again, social intercourse and moral discipline, by taking back the child's thoughts to his past, as his, serves to develop a clearer consciousness of his personal identity. (c) Idea of Self as Enduring: Personal Identity. All reflexion on self and its states is a kind of retrospection. The full consciousness of self as an unity, that is, a permanent subject, only arises after a considerable development of reproduction. It is by retracing past experiences and apprehending them as a succession in the way explained above, that the fuller realisation of the idea of self emerges. Here, again, the bodily self continues to furnish a bond of unity. It is the constant presentative complex, the body with its relatively fixed mass of organic sensation more or less distinctly accompanying all the changing states that make up our history, which serves to weld these into an unity as parts of the one self. This close dependence of the consciousness of a permanent self and of personal identity on the organic sensations and the presentation of the body to the higher senses is seen in the effects of sudden changes in these factors. Thus we all know that a very decided change in dress gives a strange feeling of altered self. The altered look due to illness introduces a like sense of confusion. In the case of longer periods, as when we are shown a portrait of ourselves taken in childhood, the sense of identity becomes still further perplexed. Lastly, a bare reference may be made to those disturbances which are known to be occasioned by any considerable functional changes involving serious modifications of organic sensations (cœnæthesis).3 This co-ordination of successive experiences, recalled by the reproductive process, into the unity of the permanent self, i̇s 1 Quoted by Volkmann, op. cit., ii. p. 171. This writer remarks that among certain savage tribes it is the custom to change the name of a sick child. 2 This illustrates the fact that our idea of self is largely a reflexion of others' perception of us. On these modifications (to be spoken of again by-and-by), see Ribot, Maladies de la Personnalité, chap. i., where the effects of abnormal organic conditions on the feeling of personality are fully discussed. Cf. Maudsley, Pathology of Mind, p. 369 ff.; Mercier, Sanity and Insanity, p. 323 ff.; and James, op. cit., i. p. 371 ff. never carried out as perfectly as is sometimes represented. Not to speak of such obstacles to the realisation of continuity as the periodic rupture of sleep and illness, we may observe that the lapse of years, by effacing a large part of our memories, renders anything like a complete realisation of identity impossible. Not only so, this flux of time brings about profound changes in our tastes, aims, and so forth, and in this way serves to arrest the endeavour to identify our present with our past self. We are the "same" as we were when children more through the assurances of others than through our own recollective consciousness. It is frequently contended that in memory we have a direct apprehension of personal identity superior in value to that of material identity already examined. It is no doubt true that the knowledge of ourselves as permanent is based to a certain extent on retention and reproduction. In the very process of consciously recalling an experience with its attendant feelings, i.e., remembering something, I realise this experience as mine. The definite localisation of the experience in the time-order making up the past history aids this apprehension by bringing out the continuity of my past experience with the present. But memory only carries us a certain way here. We may fail to recall, i.e., meet with a gap in the past: or we may recall what is so foreign to our present selves that we cannot appropriate it as All this shows that the idea of a personal identity is based not merely on memory but on imagination and inference. In other words, it is largely a construction, in which the fundamental idea of self, viz., of the body with its concomitant complex of organic sensations which only slowly changes, is a chief contributing element. ours. It may be added that, apart from these limits of recollection, the complexity of our mental life tends rather to the development of the idea of different selves than of one simple self. In such states as doubt, hesitation in following an impulse, and still more in the reflective processes of intellectual and moral self-criticism, our conscious life seems to lend itself rather to the scheme of a duality of selves, a lower impulsive and a higher contemplative ego ("moi spectateur "), which are somehow conjoined with a single body. A final stage in the development of self-knowledge is the attainment of a consciousness of a personality, that is, an individual character with certain (relatively permanent). intellectual and moral attributes. The attainment of this cognition evidently presupposes the highest exercise of abstract thought. In order to know our intellectual weakness IDEA OF PERSONAL SAMENESS. 481 or strength we have not merely to abstract in the sense of withdrawing attention from sense-presentations and fixing them on inner states, but to abstract in the sense of comparing many remembered mental processes so as to discover their common aspect. Such self-knowledge, which, as we shall see, plays an important part in the best logical thought about the world, as also in the highest artistic and moral effort, is one of the rarest of attainments.1 § 26. Notions of Others. In close connexion with the growth of the idea of self there is developed that of others like "myself," having feelings and thoughts as I have them. In this way knowledge of things becomes completed by the apprehension of a world of sentient and conscious beings. The first crude consciousness of self, both in the child and in the race, appears to be that of one among a number of like beings. The animal and the child no doubt each distinguishes his own body from other like bodies by reason of the differencing marks already spoken of. Yet, from the first, there seems to be an impulse to endow other bodies similar to his own with an analogue of his sensations. In the instinctive sympathy of animals, in the infant's responsive smile, we see an interpretation of others' manifestations of feeling which precedes all definite reflective self-consciousness. At this stage there is rather a vague consciousness of self and others, or of self among others, than a differenced consciousness of self and of others.2 It is to be added that this primitive projection of sensation into material bodies, other than my own, extends beyond the limits of the species and of the animal world, embracing plants and even inorganic bodies. We see this impulse at work in the naïve attribution of human thoughts and feelings to animals by the child and by primitive man, and in that far-reaching 1 On the development of the idea of self and of personality, see Ward, loc. cit., p. 83; Taine, On Intelligence, pt. ii. bk. iii.; Waitz, Lehrbuch der Psychologie, § 58; Volkmann, op. cit., ii. p. 105 ff. On the child's first consciousness of self, see Prayer, Die Seele des Kindes, cap. xx. On the first crude conceptions of the soul in primitive thought, see Tylor, loc. cit.; and Siebeck, Geschichte der Psychologie, "Einleitung". (Cf. above, pp. 2 and 3.) 2 On this instinctive reading of others' feelings by the animal, see Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man, pp. 197, 198. personification of inanimate objects that fills so large a place in the early thought of the race and of the individual. In this way the child, like his primitive ancestor, first conceives of the world as a group of sentient beings of which he is one.1 As intelligence develops this first crude thought about the world gives place to a more exact conception. The differences between things are noted by the child, e.g., "me" and the grown-up person, 'me' and the animal, men and animals, and so forth. The attribution of sentient life to other things takes on here more of the character of a consciously inferential process. The child now recognises definite marks of sensation, inferring the existence of the sensation when the marks are present, and refraining from doing so when they are absent. In this way it gradually reaches a view of the world as made. of grades of existence, as the not-living and the living, the animal and the man. up It is to be added that the later developments of the knowledge of others stand in intimate connexion with that of the knowledge of self. A closer attention to our own mental states enables us to understand others better: we know mankind through self-study. As we shall see by-and-by, it is personal experience and reflexion upon this which helps us to enter sympathetically and intelligently into the mental life of our fellows. At the same time, it must not be supposed that self-consciousness is developed before any idea of others arises. The knowledge of self and of others grows pari passu, each reacting upon the other. The influence of the latter in the cruder form of social consciousness is seen plainly enough in the fact that the child forms the idea of his moral self, and to some extent even that of his physical self reflexly, by hearing and adopting what he hears others say of him. It is the objective sound, the name given to him by others, which first forces the attention on self. In fact his consciousness of self is never a pure result of his own perceptions and reflective processes, but is largely a reflex projection of what others say about him. In the higher stages of self-knowledge, too, we 1 On this naïve attribution of life to inanimate objects, see above, p. 379. This reflex of others' ideas and feelings is well described by W. James under the head "Social Self," op. cit., i. p. 293 ff. IDEA OF SELF AND OF OTHERS. 483 come to know ourselves better through a closer study of others. Sympathetic intercourse with those whose experience is wider than our own opens up new vistas of self. INTELLECTION AS KNOWLEDGE. § 27. Cognition of Reality: Belief. We have now carried the examination of the process of intellection far enough to consider it in its relation to its object; in other words, to view our thought as the cognition or knowledge of something real. The full inquiry into the relation of thought to reality would plainly carry us beyond the scope of psychology into the domain of philosophy or theory of knowledge. At the same time, the psychologist is called upon to inquire into the psychical characteristics of knowledge, to analyse the cognition of reality so far as this is a mental product having its own distinguishing elements and structure. In this way psychology leads up to the properly philosophical inquiry into the validity of such cognition.1 If now we consider thought in its objective aspect, that is, as representative of reality, we find its most essential and characteristic element to be belief. To know a thing as actually existent, to apprehend an object as real, is to be the subject of belief or assurance, belief being here understood to include the higher as well as the lower degrees of assurance.2 § 28. Nature of Belief. The precise psychological nature of belief is, to some extent, a matter of dispute. Most writers regard it as an intellectual phenomenon. It is evident that it has an intellectual aspect. Belief being realisation of an idea or apprehension of reality in some form and with some degree of strength, it follows that it is in one important respect a mani 1 Cf. above (p. 12). 2 Popularly, no doubt, the word belief is used more narrowly than this, viz., with reference to matters of probability, where room for doubt is supposed. We do not commonly speak of believing that we have a pain, that we hear a sound, or that two and two make four. Psychology, however, requires a single term to denote all varieties of assurance from mere conjecture up to reasoned certainty, and the word belief, in English psychology at least, has come to be used in this sense. James Mill, in his Analysis of the Human Mind, may be said to have first apprehended and defined the full extent or range of belief as a psychological phe nomenon. |