Page:Ethical Studies (reprint 1911).djvu/256

 to the other. Nor is it only at different times that I feel so different, but also at one and the same time: I feel in myself impulses to good in collision with impulses to bad, and I feel myself in each of them; and, whichever way I go, I satisfy myself and yet fail to do so. If I yield to the bad self, the good self is dissatisfied; and if I yield to the good self, the bad self is discontented; and I am driven to believe that two souls, two opposing principles, are at war in me, and make me at war with myself; each of which loves what the other hates, and hates what the other loves. In this strife I know that the good is the true self, it is certainly more myself than the other; and yet I can not say that the other is not myself, and when I enter the lists against it, it is at my own breast that I lay my lance in rest.

No doubt this account, as a description of every one, would be much overcharged. There are persons, no doubt, who know the bad self, not as an active enemy of the good, but merely as an opposing drag. It is, however, better to see the whole extent of the facts we have to explain.

The two selves do not present themselves as a mere collection of desires and habits, some of which we call good and some bad. We are not only conscious of ourself in them, but in each we are conscious of self in a certain character, as good against bad, bad against good. We are conscious of ourselves as willing them each in that specific character, and we recognize and refer our desires and acts, not to what seem to be certain headings, but rather each to an apparent active centre, embodied in our will, which has asserted itself and does assert itself in us, and in which we have asserted and do assert ourselves, not as a collection or series, but as a real being, as what we call our good and bad self.

A being which is not self-conscious, and morally self-conscious, can not know a division in himself of good and bad will; and this by itself is a fatal objection against the theory which explains the two selves as hereditary groups of habits, ‘egoistic’ and ‘altruistic,’ which oppose each other. I am far from denying that this view has a considerable value and sheds light on the subject, but, as a sufficient explanation of the collision in the self, it fails in two ways. In the first place, as we have just seen, the theory fails because the fact to be explained is a double self, and