Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/383

 370 F. H. BRADLEY : from that aspect and one with its core of internal sensations. But at this point we must be cautious, or we shall fall into an error which is far too common. The feeling-mass is in the first place not confined to the body-group. It will contain more or less of whatever in the environment has not been dissociated from itself. The sensations from our surroundings, inclusive of other animates, are, certainly at first, and probably afterwards, more or less inseparable from our self- group. This is a conclusion which follows from our principles theoretically, and in practice certain facts are inexplicable without it. Nor is there anything to urge against it but the metaphysical prejudice of individualism. And, in the second place, the outlines of this group are not fixed, and they never become fixed. If I ask what is myself, what are in general those habits, those ways of feeling, thinking and acting, which make me what I am, the answer would vary with years. And it would vary in particular as from moment to moment the self contracts or expands with failure or satisfaction, and suffers from or possesses itself of the external ; and at its limits I should not know what was part of me and what foreign. So that in putting forward the body-group as identified with, and representative of, the group one with feeling, we must remember that the body, neither at last nor at first, includes all the self; and that at its limits, and again later through nearly all its extent, the body becomes dissociable from self. We have so far reached the stage where in the one mass of feeling (the unbroken whole of sensation and pleasure) groups are more or less connected, and where the greater part of these groups have been dissociated more or less from the feeling-nucleus, the core specially connected with pains and pleasures. We are still below the point at which conscious- ness 1 with its subject and object has appeared. This is fully reached first when a relation is perceived between the group identified with feeling and some features not identified. But this perception is led up to by a long course of hardening among cohesions and of collisions in the felt between the discrepancies. And, when conscious- ness is reached, it is not constantly maintained. It must 1 I think, on the whole, that this is the best sense to give the word. But we cannot get rid of another in which ' to be conscious ' means ' to notice,' and 'the unconscious' is that of which we are not aware. We may obviously be ' unconscious ' of sensations which, for all that, make part of the object-group. Again, we must remember that in those states where the subject and object disappear, almost if not altogether, features of the object may sink back wholly into the stage of mere feeling.