Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/92

 76 SOPHIE BRYANT. taken that ideas of beneficent action more particularly be not checked. Perhaps no department of education is more liable to neglect and perversion than this one. If the idea of reason as it develops is to be practical, then it must be lived as it comes to light. The individual history in this way educates persons very differently. People become practical as the exigencies of life demand practicality from them, but a life monotonous, luxurious and irresponsible will leave the ratio of specula- tion to practice just where it congenitally was. No amount of careful education would do away with the variety thus born of diversity in the circumstances of life, but the great extremes which are full of mischief might be abolished the man who meditates but does not act, and the man who acts but does not deliberate. Defect of deliberativeness is the mark of an over-practical distribution of the subjective energy. In that case attention to an object of practical import dissolves at once into the instinct it is hardly a resolve to act. The speculative interest which prompts us to turn the matter over, to look at it in relation to other objects, the ideas that make up our practical wisdom generally, to orientate ourselves with re- spect to it and so on, is here deficient. The agent leaps out in act ; " something is to be done, therefore do it," i.e., the first thing that conies into the head. Perhaps few fates are more trying than life with a very over-practical person, and no two opposites go worse in harness than over-practice and over-deliberation. They do not ameliorate, but aggra- vate each other. Both are curable, but two of the same sort together have a better mutual influence. The defect of deliberation in one stimulates deliberative effort in the other, and just as a hasty pair soon find out the incon- venience of hastiness, in the same way the over-deliberative pair are stimulated to compensate each other's faults. 2. The process of self-consciousness. But it is high time to approach the inquiry : How is self known, and as what, in consciousness ? This brings us into the very heart of our problem. What is it that I am aware of as my own self ? How does this consciousness differ from one to another ? Our business here is not with the origin of the simple unqualified consciousness of existence as pertaining to the subject in knowledge. Our question is as to the develop- ment of self-consciousness the qualification of this prim- ordial I-ness. The distinction of self from things known emerges in consciousness as the differentiation of feeling and