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 Casaubon, his most aggressive, persistent, and sensitive part, is his system of ideas relating to the unpublished “Key to All Mythologies.”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_.