Page:Appearance and Reality (1916).djvu/117

 from within the self is of the essence of the matter.

But there are several points necessary for the comprehension of this view. 1. The reader must understand, first of all, that the expansion is not necessarily the enlargement of the self in the sense of the whole individual. Nor is it even the enlargement of the self as against the not-self, in every meaning of those terms. It is the expansion of the self so far as that is identified with the idea of the change. If, for example, I wished to produce self-contraction, then that also would be enlargement, because in it the idea, before limited by the fact of a greater area, would transcend that limit. Thus even self-destruction is relative expansion, so long as the activity lasts. And we may say, generally, the self here is that in which it feels its chief interest. For this is both indivisible from and prominent in its inmost being. No one who misses this point can understand what activity means.

2. This leads us to a difficulty. For sometimes clearly I am active, where there is no idea proper, and, it might be added, even no limiting not-self. I will take the last point first. (a) Let us, for argument’s sake, imagine a case where, with no outside Other, and no consciousness of an empty environment, the self feels expansion. In what sense can we discover any not-self here? The answer is simple. The self, as existing, is that limit to itself which it transcends by activity. Let us call the self, as it is before the activity, A, and, while active, AB. But we have a third feature, the inner nature of A, which emerges in AB. This, as we saw, is the idea of the change, and we may hence write it b. We have, therefore, at the beginning not merely A, but in addition A qualified by b; and these are opposite to one another. The unqualified A is the not-self of A as identified with b; and the tension between Ab and A is the inner source of the change,