Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/528

 512 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Then he goes on to say that what this obscurer feeling is, is still an open question. He here recognizes the need of this "plus"" element might we call it the over-descriptive moment? which is embodied in what he calls the " obscurer feeling of some- thing more." It is in this obscurer feeling that we get the appre- ciative moment. It must be appreciative, since it successfully resists description.

Professor Ormond takes the position that

the reaction of the subject-consciousness is a reaction as a whole, and self- apprehension will be a function of this mode of reaction If we are

sure of our self-activity, we have that assurance because we grasp it in an act of immediate intuition." It cannot be disputed, then, that we know the fact

of our self-activity If in the reactive consciousness, .s^-activity, and

not simply activity that has no label, is revealed, then it is clear that we have a qualification of the content as a whole which renders it not merely a that, but a what." The fact that the activity is taking the form of a self shows that it is not formless, but is defining itself as a whole. This being conceded, it follows that there may be a mode of knowing which consists in defining a content as an indivisible whole, whose representation cannot for that reason be achieved piecemeal or broken up into bits. And if this much be granted, as we think it must, the impossibility of reducing self-consciousness to the definiteness of objective representation has been accounted for; while, at the same time, the possibility of another type of knowing, to which this content is amenable, is left open."

This point from Professor Ormond's book has been quoted at length because it points out very clearly that the categories of description are not large or intensive enough to cover the material in the self-consciousness; while the outcome leads one's thought directly to appreciation, as it seems to have done his, when on p. 268 he says :

The soul is not conscious of itself as standing alone, or as including and responding to the agency of its other. The fact of collision, which is the most external phenomenon of social relationships, we have seen to be essentially internal and leading to internal modifications of the colliding elements. It is this intcrnalness of the social situation, entering as it does, as a real moment, into self-consciousness, that exerts the profoundly modifying influence on the soul's sense of its own agency of which we have spoken above.

This consciousness on the part of the self of its own agency as including and responding to the agency of its other Is essentially


 * Italics mine. * Italics his. " Op. cit., p. 255.