There is another danger. Language has many words which begin with _self_: self-possession, self-assurance, self-consciousness, and the like; and the implication is that the corresponding mental processes represent self-experiences, in the sense of p. 315. But do they? Let us take _self-consciousness_ as an example. A young lecturer stands for the first time upon the platform, and a kindly soul in the audience may murmur: ‘Poor young man! he is dreadfully self-conscious!’ Truly, the signs are there: parched throat, burning cheeks, gasping breath, hoarse and broken voice, moist and trembling hands, uncertainty of all coordinated movements; everything that indicates what the audience, from their external standpoint (p. 313), must regard as self-consciousness; and yet there may be nothing whatever of self-reference in the lecturer’s own experience. He feels timid, excited, heartily uncomfortable; but it is very unlikely that he is thinking of himself; he has too many other things to think of! Suppose that his lecture is a success, and that he steps from the lecture-room in a mood of self-congratulation; he feels relief, relaxation; he ‘glows’ with satisfaction and pride; but, again, there need be no sort of self-reference in his experience. Yet, in writing to a friend about the eventful lecture, he may very well say: ‘I felt terribly self-conscious when I began, but afterwards I really was a bit pleased with myself!’ The personal forms are so natural as to be almost inevitable. How often, when a conversation has languished, do two or three persons with a simultaneous impulse try to revive it—by uttering a long-drawn ‘I’! and how often are we surprised, when we read over a letter just written, to see that every paragraph begins with the same ‘I’! Not by any means necessarily because we are thinking at the time of ourselves, but very likely because we have nothing urgent to say, and so slip instinctively into the commonest and most stereotyped pattern of speech. Language, therefore, is no more than any other movement (p. 232) an index to mind. The I-phrases and the self-words may carry a self-meaning, or they may not; it all depends upon the determination of the moment. _Do not imagine, however, that psychology alone suffers from this warp and bias of language_! The tendency to personalisation (p. 205), which shows itself in the mannikin-mind and the common-sense self, appears also in the ‘forces’ of physics and the ‘attractions’ of chemistry; and if the psychologist has to clarify the current notions of mind and self, the worker in these other sciences must, on his side, come to terms with a like heritage of equivocal words. All such concepts illustrate the same speculative trend of primitive thinking; and all of them are stumbling-blocks in the path of science.