II.
Colors, sounds, temperatures, pressures, spaces, times, and the like, are united with one another in the most manifold ways; and to these are joined moods of mind, feelings, and wills. Out of this complication, that which is relatively the more fixed and the more permanent stands prominently forth, engraves itself in the memory, and expresses itself in language. As relatively more permanent appear, first, complexes of colors, sounds, pressures, and so forth, that are connected in time and space, that therefore receive special names, and are designated as bodies. Such complexes are by no means absolutely permanent.
My table is now brightly and now darkly lighted. It may be warmer or colder. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may get broken. It can be repaired, polished, and replaced part for part. But for me, amid all, it remains the table at which I daily write.
My friend can put on a different coat. His countenance can assume a serious or joyful expression. The complexion of his face, under the effects of light or of emotion, can change. His shape can be altered by a movement, or can be permanently transformed. But the sum total of the permanent, as compared with gradual alterations of this kind, always remains so great, that the latter vanish. It is the same friend with whom I take my daily walk.
My coat can receive a stain, a tear. The very manner of my expression indicates that the gist of the thing is a quantity of permanency, to which the new element is added and from which that which is lacking is subsequently deducted.
Our greater intimacy with this quantity of permanency, and its preponderance as contrasted with the changeable, impel us to the partly instinctive, partly voluntary and conscious economy of mental representation and designation which is expressed in ordinary thought and speech. That which has been once perceptually represented receives a single designation, a single name.
As relatively permanent, is exhibited, further, that complex of memories, moods, and feelings, joined to a particular body (the human body), which is denominated the "I" or "Ego." I can be engaged with this subject or with that subject, I can be quiet or animated, excited or ill-humoured. Yet—pathological cases not considered—enough that is permanent remains to recognise the ego as the same. Moreover, the ego also is only of relative permanency.
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The apparent permanency of the ego consists pre-eminently in the fact of its continuity, and in its slow change. The many thoughts and plans of yesterday that are continued to-day, and of which our environment in waking hours continually reminds us (and therefore in dreams the ego can be very indistinct, doubled, or entirely wanting), and the little habits that are unconsciously and involuntarily kept up for longer periods of time, constitute the fundamental root of the ego. There can hardly be greater differences in the ego of different people, than occur in the course of years in one person. When I recall to-day my early youth, I should take the boy that I then was, with the exception of a few single features, for a different person, did not the chain of memories that make up my personality now lie before me. Many a treatise that I myself wrote twenty years ago, now makes upon me a very strange impression. The very gradual character of the changes of the body also contributes to the permanency of the ego, but in a much less degree than people imagine. Such things are much less analysed and noticed than the intellectual and the moral ego. Individually, personally, people have a very poor knowledge of themselves.
Once, when a young man, I espied in the street a face in profile that was very displeasing and repulsive to me. I was not a little taken aback when a moment afterwards I found that it was my own, which, in passing by a place where mirrors were sold, I had perceived reflected from two mirrors that stood at the proper inclination to each other.
Not long ago, after a trying railway journey by night, being much fatigued, I got into an omnibus just as another gentleman appeared at the other end. "What degenerated pedagogue is that, who has just entered," thought I. It was myself: opposite me hung a large mirror. My ordinary dress, accordingly, was more familiar to me than my travelling attire.
The ego is as little absolutely permanent as bodies. That which we so greatly fear in death, the annihilation of our permanency, actually occurs in life in abundant measure. That which is most valued by us, remains preserved in countless copies, or, in cases of exceptional excellence, as a rule preserves itself. In the best human being, however, there are individual traits the loss of which neither he himself nor others need regret. Indeed, at times, death, viewed as liberation from individuality, can even become a pleasant thought.
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After the first survey has been obtained, by the formation of the concepts of substance, "body" "ego" (matter, soul), the will is impelled to a more exact examination of the changes that take place in this relatively permanent existence. The changeable element in bodies and in the ego, indeed, is the very thing that moves the will. Now, for the first time, do the constituent elements of the complex stand forth as properties of the same. A fruit is sweet; but it can also be bitter. So, too, other fruits can be sweet. The red color that is sought is found in many bodies. The neighborhood of some bodies is pleasant, that of others unpleasant. Thus, gradually, do different complexes appear to be composed of common constituent elements. The visible, the audible, the tangible, are separated from bodies. The visible is broken up into color and into form. Out of the manifold constitution of colors issue, again, in lesser numbers, certain other constituent elements—the primary colors, and so forth. The complexes are disintegrated into elements.