world of one’s self-consciousness; namely, the contrast between the ego that fortune has produced, in view of my calling and my limited sphere of action, and the ego that, as I more or less clearly feel, might have been, if these or these interesting accidents of my life, these or these passing moods of self-consciousness, had proved as fruitful and habitual as they were transient and inspiring. A man who has any but the most prosaic self-consciousness is likely to remember not infrequently what he might have been if other people had but given him a fair chance, if that lost skill or that noble purpose had proved stable, or if that dear friend had lived. The sailor, regretting his dog’s-life at sea, and fantastically conceiving, during his sober and monotonous voyages, a career such as would have been worthy of him, on that land of whose actual life he knows only what brief spells of drunken idleness, when he is in port, reveal to him; the unsuccessful mechanic, who barely earns a hard living, but who would have been, as he tells you, a very great man if his enemy had not stolen his early inventions and crushed his budding opportunities to death, — these men are self-conscious, in so far as they contrast a painfully real with a hopelessly lost ideal self. You never know a man’s self-consciousness until you learn something of this graveyard of perished ideal selves which his experience has filled for him, and which his memory has adorned with often very fantastic inscriptions.
But the ideal self need not remain this — still chaotic — collection of now changeless but forever
