Page:Scepticism and Animal Faith.djvu/165

 precisely this psyche is, this self of mine, the existence of which is so indubitable to my active and passionate nature. The evidence for it in shock hardly goes beyond the instinctive assertion that I existed before, that I am a principle of steady life, welcoming or rejecting events, that I am a nucleus of active interests and passions. It will be easy to graft upon these passions and interests the mental discourse which I had previously asserted to be going on, and which made up, in this critical reconstruction of belief, my first notion of myself. And yet here is one of the dangers of my investigation, because mental discourse is not, and cannot be, a self nor a psyche. It is all surface; it neither precedes, nor survives, nor guides, nor posits its data; it merely notes and remembers them. Discourse is a most superficial function of the self; and if by the self I was tempted to understand a series of ideas, I should be merely reverting sceptically to that stage of philosophic denudation in which I found myself, before I had consented to accept the evidence of shock in favour of my own existence. I, if I exist, am not an idea, nor am I the fact that several ideas may exist, one of which remembers the other. If I exist, I am a living creature to whom ideas are incidents, like aeroplanes in the sky; they pass over, more or less followed by the eye, more or less listened to, recognised, or remembered; but the self slumbers and breathes below, a mysterious natural organism, full of dark yet definite potentialities; so that different events will awake it to quite disproportionate activities. The self is a fountain of joy, folly, and sorrow, a waxing and waning, stupid and dreaming creature, in the midst of a vast natural world, of which it catches but a few transient and odd perspectives.