Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/94

 78 SOPHIE BRYANT. cellaneous group thronging the objective memory when I pause in my day's work and relapse into feeling myself. And so I argue that the link of association is subjective that in feeling myself I feel my past of feeling, so that all the deep events of feeling recur in me. So in reflective self- consciousness, a happy moment means a happy life, and the sadness of a sad life is most of all seen in the saddened self- consciousness of old age. Thus the qualification of me to myself is my life history of feeling. Let me give an example : misunderstanding is so easy. During two weeks of somewhat depressed health I had prudently kept myself as much as possible out of my thoughts seeing that the self-consciousness of a person physically depressed is apt to take tone from the general depression. But one morning I became conscious of being myself again well when I heard the birds not only singing outside my window, but making me feel their song as I had not done for a week or so. Pleasure of the cheerful sounds went into me, and this deepened into the pleasure of feeling myself as a physical whole better, and with that I dropped cheerfully into a strongly self-conscious mood for a brief space. At the end of that space I was myself in the complex ; a vast complex mixture of pain and pleasure was upon me, while floating dimly in imagination were the familiar oft-recurring scraps of painful and pleasant re- membered scenes and events. Not least noteworthy among these and in a middle state of feeling most steady on the whole, was that kaleidoscopic group of images into which seems to be condensed all emotional life-history of a child- hood, healthy, serene and abounding in hopefulness. Visual imagery is apt to be for me the expression of feeling : a stronger wave carries me on to the vocal and auditory organs. And so my symbols of childhood's feelings are first of all an outlook towards blue mountains and a beautiful wide river flowing past the meadows behind my early home, a path through the fields, and a stretch of wood between house and river, a boat-house, a big safe boat on the river, and two children a boy and girl in the boat with oars altogether out of proportion to their size. These images change into a thousand others belonging to the same or later dates ; but I think I may safely say that myself as a permanent thing never entirely changed by many great changes coils itself round no one of its many symbols in imagination more securely than round this image of a wide river flowing between hills and woods. From all of which may be drawn the practical inference that a happy wholesome childhood