Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/314

Rh have any eternal nature or significance? Can there be any abiding core of personality about me?

To these questions our present general answer is this: If you ask as to what facts of experience go together to fill up the contents of my actual self-consciousness, you find, as every psychologist knows, that the consciousness of self is, in its complexity, the most delicate, unstable, and intricate of all the phenomena studied by psychology. But if you ask what our self-consciousness, when once it has come to exist, really means, — then you ask a question that no psychology, no mere natural history of mind, can answer, but that, as I hold, an idealistic philosophy can answer. One has to distinguish sharply between the brute facts of self-consciousness, as psychology studies them, and their true meaning, as philosophy defines it. As a matter of brute fact, and of mere natural history, my private self-consciousness is the most complex and evanescent thing about me. A headache deranges the empirical self; a social annoyance confuses it; a passing mood overwhelms it; a moment of drowsiness eclipses it; death erelong utterly hides it. But if one asks, not, What happens to the empirical self, or when does it come to view? but, What value, meaning, metaphysical reality, is indicated by self-consciousness whenever, especially in the moral world, it comes to light, as the principle of choice, of intent, of reasonableness? — then the only answer is, that the rational self-consciousness, wherever it comes to light, reveals itself as of eternal significance, as an embodiment of God’s plan. How can this be? How can this