“Here am I, with no friend but the sad sea,
The beating heart of this great enterprise,
Which, without me, would stiffen in swift death.”
And so the “I am the way” which we read in the New Testament is surely the expression of a sentiment not very different from these. In the following we have a more plaintive sentiment of self:
Philoctetes.— And know’st thou not, O boy, whom thou dost see? Neoptolemus.— How can I know a man I ne’er beheld? Philoctetes.— And didst thou never hear my name, nor fame Of these my ills, in which I pined away? Neoptolemus.— Know that I nothing know of what thou ask’st. Philoctetes.— O crushed with many woes, and of the Gods Hated am I, of whom, in this my woe, No rumor travelled homeward, nor went forth Through any clime of Hellas.[[39]]
We all have thoughts of the same sort as these, and yet it is possible to talk so coldly or mystically about the self that one begins to forget that there is, really, any such thing.
But perhaps the best way to realize the naïve meaning of “I” is to listen to the talk of children playing together, especially if they do not agree very well. They use the first person with none of the conventional self-repression of their elders, but with much emphasis and variety of inflection, so that its emotional animus is unmistakable.
Self-feeling of a reflective and agreeable sort, an appropriative zest of contemplation, is strongly suggested by the word “gloating.” To gloat, in this sense, is as much as to think “mine, mine, mine,” with a pleasant warmth of feeling. Thus a boy gloats over something he has made with his scroll-saw, over the bird he has brought down with his gun, or over his collection of stamps or eggs; a girl gloats over her new clothes, and over the approving words or looks of others; a farmer over his fields and his stock; a business man over his trade and his bank account; a mother over her child; the poet over a successful quatrain; the self-righteous man over the state of his soul; and in like manner everyone gloats over the prosperity of any cherished idea.
I would not be understood as saying that self-feeling is clearly marked off in experience from other kinds of feeling; but it is, perhaps, as definite in this regard as anger, fear, grief, and the like. To quote Professor James, “The emotions themselves of self-satisfaction and abasement are of a unique sort, each as worthy to be classed as a primitive emotional species as are, for example, rage or pain.”[[40]] It is true here, as wherever mental facts are distinguished, that there are no fences, but that one thing merges by degrees into another. Yet if “I” did not denote an idea much the same in all minds and fairly distinguishable from other ideas, it could not be used freely and universally as a means of communication.
As many people have the impression that the verifiable self, the object that we name with “I,” is usually the material body, it may be well to say that this impression is an illusion, easily dispelled by anyone who will undertake a simple examination of facts. It is true that when we philosophize a little about “I” and look around for a tangible object to which to attach it, we soon fix upon the material body as the most available locus; but when we use the word naïvely, as in ordinary speech, it is not very common to think of the body in connection with it; not nearly so common as it is to think of other things. There is no difficulty in testing this statement, since the word “I” is one of the commonest in conversation and literature, so that nothing is more practicable than to study its meaning at any length that may be desired. One need only listen to ordinary speech until the word has occurred, say, a hundred times, noting its connections, or observe its use in a similar number of cases by the characters in a novel. Ordinarily it will be found that in not more than ten cases in a hundred does “I” have reference to the body of the person speaking. It refers chiefly to opinions, purposes, desires, claims, and the like, concerning matters that involve no thought of the body. I think or feel so and so; I wish or intend so and so; I want this or that; are typical uses, the self-feeling being associated with the view, purpose, or object mentioned. It should also be remembered that “my” and “mine” are as much the names of the self as “I” and these, of course, commonly refer to miscellaneous possessions.