Page:Appearance and Reality (1916).djvu/97

 that human beings, even when metaphysical, lack courage at some point. And we cannot afford to deal with monsters, who in the end may seduce us, and who are certain sometimes, at any rate, to be much in our way. But I am only too sensible that, with all our care, the danger nearest each is least seen.

I will merely mention that use of self which identifies it with the body. As to our perception of our own bodies, there, of course, exists some psychological error. And this may take a metaphysical form if it tries to warrant, through some immediate revelation, the existence of the organism as somehow the real expression of the self. But I intend to pass all this by. For, at the point which we have reached, there seems no exit by such a road from familiar difficulties.

1. Let us then, excluding the body as an outward thing, go on to inquire into the meanings of self. And the first of these is pretty clear. By asking what is the self of this or that individual man, I may be enquiring as to the present contents of his experience. Take a section through the man at any given moment. You will then find a mass of feelings, and thoughts, and sensations, which come to him as the world of things and other persons, and again as himself; and this contains, of course, his views and his wishes about everything. Everything, self and not-self, and what is not distinguished as either, in short the total filling of the man’s soul at this or that moment—we may understand this when we ask what is the individual at a given time. There is no difficulty here in principle, though the detail would naturally (as detail) be unmanageable. But, for our present purpose, such a sense is obviously not promising.

2. The congeries inside a man at one given moment does not satisfy as an answer to the question what is self. The self, to go no further, must be something beyond present time, and it