Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/97

EXTENT, DEGEEE, AND UNITY IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 81 and the imagination. It may flash out in images or not. It may blaze into and rouse or check the instincts or not. Normally it no doubt does both, but always more or less. Thus pleasure and pain tend not only to control the inner and outer life by their immediate influence as retaining and repelling the attention towards their objects, but also by the multiform force of the back wave in subjectivity which the broadened stimulus affords. Very strong feeling takes quite a perceptible time before it feels piled up to its height, and produces its further effect in consciousness. Obviously, however, there are those who feel vividly, but not so as to produce much effect on imagination or instinct. In that case we are apt to say that their feelings are not deep, but this does not really follow. The feelings may be deep enough, but they have a certain separateness or detachment. Or, rather, since the feeling self should be regarded as the central fact, we should say that the instincts and im- agination have an abnormal detachment from them. The contrast is that between a whole which is differentiated and not wholly re-integrated and a whole re-integrated at every differentiation. The most perfect type would probably consist in a personality so balanced that some degiee of detachability (like the power of an athlete to separate muscular actions generally conjoined) should co-exist with such a degree of unity as makes the whole consistent with itself. Unity of composition in the emotional self-consciousness was mentioned above as a characteristic according to the degree of which persons might vary. Since the emotional self-consciousness is an integral in time, unity of composi- tion implies that maximum wholeness from first to last of all past feeling in each full personal feeling which has been already described. George Eliot puts it thus: I am thy loved Past, The soul that makes thee one from first to last. To any person who approximates to this type inconsistency between past feeling and present feeling, as for instance to- wards persons, is very painful. The requirement that for happiness the present state of feeling shall be harmonious implies the requirement that the history of personal feeling shall be a harmonious development, the changes in which appear as slow evolution not revolution. A revolution in feeling is in itself a heart-break to a self-consciousness with this tenacious grip upon its past. Such persons are hard to change in anything affecting the main current of 6