Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/93

EXTENT, DEGREE, AND UNITY IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 77 knowing. We make this clear to ourselves by conceiving the pre-self-conscious stage of life as resembling brief rest- ing moments of later years when consciousness is so vague that neither do objects nor feelings appear in it. All, or nearly all, of us have these vacant moments, and some persons of fine bovine physique as well as persons of feeble, easily exhausted frame have such moments very often and very long. They do not present even confused states of feeling and thought : they are states in which both being nascent neither is distinguished. From these, know- ledge and feeling emerge together, and the feeling is the qualification of the subject, in which qualification it comes to consciousness as " self". I know the objects of consciousness as related to each other, I feel them as affecting "me". Full consciousness is never without this duality, self-consciousness, an under- current of feeling flowing on behind the objective conscious- ness which is the normal field of perception and thought. My feelings, as such, I do not strictly know. I am aware of them, or rather they are " me," and I appear to myself as their series, not a disparate series, but a continuous flow, each part of which has a living, though dim, share in all other parts, these being revivable through it. My feeling at one moment at least, in any moment of strong feeling is an integral of my feelings in all moments of my life. Only some circumstance that operates like the waters of Lethe impairs the truth of this momentous fact. I give my mind for a moment to my present state of feeling, grave or gay, and all my life-history of feeling rushes in upon me, though the only clear evidence I can offer is in the rise to objective consciousness at such times of odd scraps belonging to various periods of my life. It may, of course, be argued that the odd scraps come up through the association of ideas, and awaken feelings like to those they roused before. But in the first place the rush of feeling to the past, in a moment simply characterised by strong feeling a deepened sub- jectivity follows concentration on the feeling, and is so miscellaneous as to preclude explanation by any other than by subjective association, i.e., through feeling of self. In the second place, the odd scraps show no connexion according to the laws of association by objective similarity or con- tiguity. In the third place, they have one feature in com- mon, and, so far as I can see, only one : they are connected with, and have become symbolic of, the life-events about which " J " have felt much in which " / " have been deeply interested, feeling deeply. This is the similarity in the mis-