Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/525

 METAPHYSICAL ELEMENTS IN SOCIOLOGY $9

principle must consist largely in this "warmth or intimacy" which seems to be an appreciative experience because we cannot translate it into more exact terms than calling it an attitude? Sensational analysis in its case fails as inadequate. Or at another place we read :

The altogether unique kind of interest which each human mind feels in those parts of creation which it can call me or mine may be a moral riddle, but it is a psychological fact.* 1

In view of this, might we not ask : Among the not-me's, do not those not-me's which, by consciousness of kind, I find to be like me, share to some extent in the uniqueness of the " me " ? Professor Royce says :

The Self is not a Thing, but a Meaning embodied in a conscious life. Its individuality, in case of any human being, implies the essential uniqueness of

this life The empirical variety, complexity, ambiguity, and inconsistency

of our present consciousness of the self, is to be explained as due to the fact that in a real order of the universe, no individual self is or can be isolated, or in any sense sundered, from other selves, or from the whole realm of the inner life of nature itself."

This utterance is sufficiently clear, in its relation to our purpose, to demand no further comment.

Professor James, in treating of the spiritual self as one of the constituents of the self, is speaking of an element in this stream of consciousness which seems to be sort of a permanent one, and therefore a self ; and so he says :

Compared with this element of the stream, the other parts, even of the subjective life, seem transient external possessions, of which each in turn can be disowned, whilst that which disowns them remains. Now, what is this self of all the other selves?

Probably all men would describe it in much the same way up to a certain point. They would call it the active element in all consciousness ; saying that whatever qualities a man's feelings may possess, or whatever content his thought may include, there is a spiritual something in him which seems to go out to meet" these qualities and contents, whilst they seem to come in to be received by it. It is what welcomes or rejects."

n Ibid., p. 289. " World and the Individual, ad Set., p. 269.

18 Italics in this phrase mine, except the words " to go out," which are itali- cized by the author ; all other italics in the quotation are his. " Op. cit., p. 297.