Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/98

 82 SOPHIE BRYANT : their feeling, and when sudden change is forced upon them it is like the rending of limb from limb, while a permanent change leaves a permanent gash in self-consciousness well called a heart-break a something that not only aches by its failure to harmonise with the present whole in each moment, but makes further a dull ache throughout the whole of that self-consciousness which it has divided into two contradic- tory parts. Affection turned to aversion is probably the most striking example. In the more loosely integrated self- consciousness, so commonly depicted in works of fiction, this may appear as revolution pure and simple. Love was, aversion is, the whole of self so far is changed : there is a pain attached to the remembered past, but the remedy is obvious blot the past out, withdraw attention from it, live in the changed self to which that mistaken past be- comes easily alien. So the past is not so much buried as shaken off, and feeling does not tend at all to backslide into its old attachment. This is the revolutionary temper to which breaches of feeling come easily, because there is less integration by nature and habit of past feeling with present. Between the two extremes may be found all degrees of capacity for alienating inharmonious bits of the past, and no doubt the capacity can be in some small measure acquired. A severe personal shock is a lesson in alienation given at the point of the sword, since a full escape from pain can only be found that way. The highly conservative temper, however, may still reject the lesson, and, instead of alienated feeling, we may then have, as a pis aller, the withdrawal of attention from self-consciousness as a whole so far as possible. This is the method of burying a grief, and it is effected by con- centration on objective concerns, till the slow modification of feeling by the growth of new interests makes self-con- sciousness more endurable. In such a case, reverting to our former illustration, affection does not turn to aversion simply, but to some strange inconsistent and unstable mixture, more painful than either by the very nature of its composition, and refusing to be blotted out except by the withdrawal of attention from self. To sum up then so far, we find in the emotional self- consciousness three variant characteristics : (1) emotional susceptibility, (2) effectiveness, or influence on the whole mental movement, (3) unity of composition in itself. 4. Self -consciousness as related to the active self. But self-consciousness is more than the consciousness of feeling as such. As the total integral of subjectivity it