VI
Yet after becoming possessed of self-consciousness, we do not steadily retain it. States of mind occur where the self slips out, though vivid consciousness remains. As I sit in my chair and fix my eye on the distance, a daydream or reverie comes over me. I see a picture, another, another. Somebody speaks and I am recalled. "Why, here I am! This is I." I find myself once more. I had lost myself—paradoxical yet accurate expression. We have many such to indicate the disappearance of self-consciousness at moments of elation. "I was absorbed in thought," we say; the I was sucked out by strenuous attention elsewhere. "I was swept away with grief," i.e., I vanished, while grief held sway. "I was transported with delight," "I was overwhelmed with shame," and—perhaps most beautiful of all these fragments of poetic psychology,—"I was beside myself with terror," I felt myself, to be near, but was still parted; through the fear I could merely catch glimpses of the one who was terrified.
These and similar phrases suggest the instability of self- consciousness. It is not fixed, once and forever, but varies continually and within a wide range of degree. We like to think that man possesses full self-consciousness, while other creatures have none. Our minds are disposed to part off things with sharpness, but nature cares less about sharp divisions and seems on the whole to prefer subtle gradations and unstable varieties. So the self has all degrees of vividness. Of it we never have an experience barely. It is always in some condition, colored by what it is mixed with. I know myself speaking or angry or hearing; I know myself, that is, in some special mood. But never am I able to sunder this self from the special mass of consciousness in which it is immersed and to gaze upon it pure and simple. At times that mass of consciousness is so engrossing that hardly a trace of the self remains. At times the sense of being shut up to one's self is positively oppressive. Between the two extremes there is endless variation. When we call self-consciousness the prerogative of man we do not mean that he fully possesses it, but only that he may possess it, may possess it more and more; and that in it, rather than in the merely conscious life, the significance of his being is found.