But the most radical remedy for the mortifications and uncertainties of the social self is not the negative one of merely secluding or diminishing the I, but the positive one of transforming it. The two are not easily distinguishable, and are usually phases of the same process. The self-instinct, though it cannot be suppressed while mental vigor remains, can be taught to associate itself more and more with ideas and aims of general and permanent worth, which can be thought of as higher than the more sensual, narrow, or temporary interests, and independent of them. It must always be borne in mind that the self is any idea or system of ideas with which is associated the peculiar appropriative attitude we call self-feeling. Anything whose depreciation makes me feel resentful is myself, whether it is my coat, my face, my brother, the book I have published, the scientific theory I accept, the philanthropic work to which I am devoted, my religious creed, or my country. The only question is, Am I identified with it in my thought, so that to touch it is to touch me? Thus in “Middlemarch” the true self of Mr. Casaubon, his most aggressive, persistent, and sensitive part, is his system of ideas relating to the unpublished “Key to All Mythologies.” It is about this that he is proud, jealous, sore, and apprehensive. What he imagines that the Brasenose men will think of it is a large part of his social self, and he suffers hidden joy and torture according as he is hopeful or despondent of its triumphant publication. When he finds that his body must die his chief thought is how to keep this alive, and he attempts to impose its completion upon poor Dorothea, who is a pale shadow in his life compared with the Key, a mere instrument to minister to this fantastic ego. So if one, turning the leaves of history, could evoke the real selves of all the men of thought, what a strange procession they would be!—outlandish theories, unintelligible and forgotten creeds, hypotheses once despised but now long established, or vice versa—all conceived eagerly, jealously, devotedly, as the very heart of the self. There is no class more sensitive and none, not even the insane, in whom self-feeling attaches to such singular and remote conceptions. An astronomer may be indifferent when you depreciate his personal appearance, abuse his relatives, or question his pecuniary honesty; but if you doubt that there are artificial canals on Mars you cut him to the quick. And poets and artists of every sort have always and with good reason been regarded as a genus irritabile.
The ideas of self most commonly cherished, and the ambitions corresponding to these ideas, fail to appease the imagination of the idealist, for various reasons; chiefly, perhaps, for the following: first because they seem more or less at variance with the good of other persons, and so, to the imaginative and sympathetic mind, bring elements of inconsistency and wrong, which it cannot accept as consonant with its own needs; and second because their objects are at best temporary, so that even if thought of as achieved they fail to meet the need of the mind for a resting-place in some conception of permanent good or right. The transformation of narrow and temporary ambitions or ideals into something more fitted to satisfy the imagination in these respects, is an urgent need, a condition precedent to peace of mind, in many persons. The unquiet and discordant state of the unregenerate is a commonplace, a thousand times repeated, of writings on the inner life. “Superbus et avarus numquam quiescunt,” they tell us, and to enable us to escape from such unrest is a chief aim of the discipline of self-feeling enjoined by ethical and religious teachers. “Self,” “the natural man,” and similar expressions indicate an aspect of the self thought of as lower—in part at least because of the insecure, inconsistent, and temporary character just indicated—which is to be so far as possible subjected and forgotten, while the feelings once attached to it find a less precarious object in ideas of justice and right, or in the conception of a personal deity, in whom all that is best of personality is to have secure existence and eternal success.
In this sense also we may understand the idea of freedom as it presented itself to Thomas à Kempis and similar minds. To forget “self” and live the larger life is to be free; free, that is, from the racking passions of the lower self, free to go onward into a self that is joyful, boundless, and without remorse. To gain this freedom the principal means is the control or mortification of sensual needs and worldly ambitions.
Thus the passion of self-aggrandizement is persistent but plastic; it will never disappear from a vigorous mind, but may become morally higher by attaching itself to a larger conception of what constitutes the self.
Wherever men find themselves out of joint with their social environment the fact will be reflected in some peculiarity of self-feeling. Thus it was in times when the general state of Europe was decadent and hopeless, or later when ceaseless wars and the common rule of violence prevailed, that finer spirits, for whose ambition the times offered no congenial career, so largely sought refuge in religious seclusion, and there built up among themselves a philosophy which compensated them by the vision of glory in another world for their insignificance in this. An institution so popular and enduring as monasticism and the system of belief that throve in connection with it must have answered to some deep need of human nature, and it would seem that, as regarded the more intellectual class, this need was largely that of creating a social self and system of selves which could thrive in the actual state of things. Their natures craved success, and, following a tendency always at work, though never more fantastic in its operation, they created an ideal or standard of success which they could achieve—very much as a farmer’s boy with a weak body but an active brain sometimes goes into law, seeking and upholding an intellectual type of success. From this point of view—which is, of course, only one of many whence monasticism may be regarded—it appears as a wonderful exhibition of the power of human nature to effectuate itself in a co-operative manner in spite of the most untoward external circumstances.
If we have less flight from the world, corporeal or metaphysical, at the present day, it is doubtless in part because the times are more hospitable to the finer abilities, so that all sorts of men, within wide limits, find careers in which they may hope to gratify a reasonable ambition. But even now, where conditions are deranged and somewhat anarchical, so that many find themselves cut off from the outlook toward a congenial self-development, the wine of life turns bitter, and harrying resentments are generated which more or less disturb the stability of the social order. Each man must have his “I”; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.
Persons of great ambitions, or of peculiar aims of any sort, lie open to disorders of self-feeling, because they necessarily build up in their minds a self-image which no ordinary social environment can understand or corroborate, and which must be maintained by hardening themselves against immediate influences, enduring or repressing the pains of present depreciation, and cultivating in imagination the approval of some higher tribunal. If the man succeeds in becoming indifferent to the opinions of his neighbors he runs into another danger, that of a distorted and extravagant self of the pride sort, since by the very process of gaining independence and immunity from the stings of depreciation and misunderstanding, he has perhaps lost that wholesome deference to some social tribunal that a man cannot dispense with and remain quite sane. The image lacks verification and correction and becomes too much the reflection of an undisciplined self-feeling. It would seem that the megalomania or delusion of greatness which Lombroso, with more or less plausibility, ascribes to Victor Hugo and many other men of genius, is to be explained largely in this way.
Much the same may be said regarding the relation of self-feeling to mental disorder, and to abnormal personality of all sorts. It seems obvious, for instance, that the delusions of greatness and delusions of persecution so common in insanity are expressions of self-feeling escaped from normal limitation and control. The instinct which under proper regulation by reason and sympathy gives rise to just and sane ambition, in the absence of it swells to grotesque proportions; while the delusion of persecution appears to be a like extravagant development of that jealousy regarding what others are thinking of us which often reaches an almost insane point in irritable people whose sanity is not questioned.
The peculiar relations to other persons attending any marked personal deficiency or peculiarity are likely to aggravate, if not to produce, abnormal manifestations of self-feeling. Any such trait sufficiently noticeable to interrupt easy and familiar intercourse with others, and make people talk and think about a person or to him rather than with him, can hardly fail to have this effect. If he is naturally inclined to pride or irritability, these tendencies, which depend for correction upon the flow of sympathy, are likely to be increased. One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore. He finds himself apart, “not in it,” and feels chilled, fearful, and suspicious. Thus “queerness” is no sooner perceived than it is multiplied by reflection from other minds. The same is true in some degree of dwarfs, deformed or disfigured persons, even the deaf and those suffering from the infirmities of old age. The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.