Since “I” is known to our experience primarily as a feeling, or as a feeling-ingredient in our ideas, it cannot be described or defined without suggesting that feeling. We are sometimes likely to fall into a formal and empty way of talking regarding questions of emotion, by attempting to define that which is in its nature primary and indefinable. A formal definition of self-feeling, or indeed of any sort of feeling, must be as hollow as a formal definition of the taste of salt, or the color red; we can expect to know what it is only by experiencing it. There can be no final test of the self except the way we feel; it is that toward which we have the “my” attitude. But as this feeling is quite as familiar to us and as easy to recall as the taste of salt or the color red, there should be no difficulty in understanding what is meant by it. One need only imagine some attack on his “me,” say ridicule of his dress or an attempt to take away his property or his child, or his good name by slander, and self-feeling immediately appears. Indeed, he need only pronounce, with strong emphasis, one of the self-words, like “I” or “my,” and self-feeling will be recalled by association. Another good way is to enter by sympathy into some self-assertive state of mind depicted in literature; as, for instance, into that of Coriolanus when, having been sneered at as a “boy of tears,” he cries out: “Boy!... If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there, That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I Fluttered your Volscians in Corioli; Alone I did it.—Boy!” Here is a self indeed, which no one can fail to feel, though he might be unable to describe it. What a ferocious scream of the outraged ego is that “I” at the end of the second line! So much is written on this topic that ignores self-feeling and thus deprives “self” of all vivid and palpable meaning, that I feel it permissible to add a few more passages in which this feeling is forcibly expressed. Thus in Lowell’s poem, “A Glance Behind the Curtain,” Cromwell says: “I, perchance, Am one raised up by the Almighty arm To witness some great truth to all the world.” And his Columbus, on the bow of his vessel, soliloquizes: “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.