The inneity of the altruistic instinct, therefore, seems to me proved beyond the possibility of reply. It may be very energetic in some individuals, or very weak in others; in this it only resembles all instinctive tendencies. As a genus, this instinct comprises several varieties, of a general character, such as benevolence, affection, pity, etc. Finally, it is one of the elements which make up several composite emotions—veneration, admiration, sexual love, etc.

It remains only to inquire in what form it first made its entry into the world, what was its earliest manifestation. With regard to this matter, there are only three possible hypotheses: those of maternal love, gregarious instinct, and the very improbable one of sexual instinct. The value of these hypotheses will be discussed later on, in the chapter on moral emotion, which is the natural complement to the present one.[[150]]

CHAPTER V.
THE EGO AND ITS EMOTIONAL MANIFESTATIONS.

Reducible to one primary fact: the feeling of strength or weakness—Positive form: type, pride. Its physiological and psychological characteristics. Its relation to joy and anger. Its evolution—Negative form: humility. Its semi-social character—Pathology, positive form: monomania of power, megalomania—Extreme negative form: suicidal tendency—Psychological problem of this practical negation of the fundamental instinct.

I.

The English designate by the term of self-feeling, and the Germans by that of Selbstgefühl, a group of sentiments directly derived from the ego. I scarcely know what to call them: “personal” would be too vague a term, “egoistic” too ambiguous (“egotistic” would be better). To identify them with pride and its opposite would be to restrict them too far, for they have other forms. We might, for want of a better, include them under the term amour-propre (in its etymological meaning, amor proprius), i.e., satisfaction or dissatisfaction with one’s self, with its different varieties.

Whatever name we may give them, these emotional forms are reducible to one primary fact of which they are the embodiment in consciousness—viz., the feeling (well-founded, or not) of personal strength or weakness, with the tendency to action or arrest of action which is its motor manifestation. We can also, but in a less direct manner, connect them with the instinct of conservation, and say, with Höffding, that they result from that instinct “arrived at the full consciousness of itself and incarnated in the idea of the Ego.”

This group has its peculiar characteristics. It is almost, if not quite, exclusively human, while the emotions hitherto studied have been as much animal as human. It is late in making its appearance (about the end of the third year), and is the last in chronological order, except the sex-instinct. This is because it soon assumes a reflective character, and because it implies that the ego is constituted and that the individual is conscious of himself as such.

The self-feeling has two forms, one positive, the other negative, of which pride and humility may respectively be taken as the types.

Under its positive form, it has a well-known physiological expression,[[151]] which consists of a series of movements tending to two ends—(1) Increase in size: the respiration is deep, the thorax greatly dilated, the gestures eccentric, and, as it were, aggressive, whence the popular expressions “puffed up” or “swollen” with pride. (2) Increase in height: the body and head are held more erect, the gait is assured, the mouth firmly closed, the teeth clenched; in megalomaniacs, who present, so to speak, the caricature of pride, these traits are still further emphasised. Some writers note, besides, as a specific character, the action of the musculus superbus, which everts the lower lip.