Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/316

But now enters a factor of great importance for my later self-consciousness. A great deal of my natural consciousness of myself depends upon certain habits that grow up in me in connexion with my early social experiences. Very early the child comes to recognise more or less dimly that there are in the world the experiences, intents, and interests of other people, — of his parents, of his nurses, of his play-mates. Now, the importance of all this recognition is of the vastest. For hereby the child comes to contrast his own inner self of bodily sensations and of emotions with the ideally conceived inner life of other people. The contrast gives the original self of bodily sensations and emotions a wholly transformed meaning. Henceforth, in a way that few of us sufficiently recognise, and that even the psychologists have usually ignored, the natural self-consciousness of a man becomes, and remains, the result of a certain very intricate and beautiful contrast-effect. I am consciously myself, in ordinary life, by virtue of the contrast between my inner life as I feel it and the inner life of somebody else, whose existence I believe in, and whose life I find set over against mine. Am I in a quarrel? — then I am conscious of myself as contrasted with the mind of my foe. Am I in conversation with you? — then I am self-conscious by virtue of the contrast between your expressed mind and mine. Am I in love? — then I exist for myself by contrast with the mind of my love. Ordinary self-consciousness is a contrast direct. I appear to myself in the light of my contrast with you.