Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/317

The result of the contrast, however, is manifest. From the first, I repeat, we take note of ourselves by a simple or direct contrast with what we regard as indicating to us the minds, the feelings, purposes, or power, of our interesting social fellows. Here belongs, for instance, the self-consciousness of simple rivalry, expressed in our early life in the childish insight that yonder social fellow wants to do so and so, but cannot do it “as well as I can.” In such a case, the contrast upon which the individuality of self-consciousness depends is of a relatively simple sort. So too with the self-consciousness of obstinacy, of social wilfulness, and of anger. Here, what I want is known to me by virtue of its contrast with what another wants, and this contrast, rendering relatively clear my consciousness of my own intent, tends, by its very existence, and by reason of the blindness of my passion, to inflame the opposition. In a more benign, but also, as I judge, in even a more primitive form, appears the simple contrast of ego and non-ego in all my imitative, or explicitly plastic and socially submissive, states of consciousness. Where I long to make out what my fellow means by his doings, and to that end try myself to repeat them, when I listen to his words and try to understand them, I constantly contrast what I mean with what he means, what I can so far do with what he can do, and in such ways increase the material of my self-consciousness. Of this highly important process the well-known questioning age in children is full. In all such ways, then, I increase the data of my self-consciousness by contrasting myself with my neighbour in a relatively