Descending now to finer work than this first general sketch, let us in the next chapter try to trace the psychology of this fact of self-consciousness to which we have thus once more been led. CHAPTER XII. THE SELF. =The Me and the I.=--Whatever I may be thinking of, I am always at the same time more or less aware of _myself_, of my _personal existence_. At the same time it is _I_ who am aware; so that the total self of me, being as it were duplex, partly known and partly knower, partly object and partly subject, must have two aspects discriminated in it, of which for shortness we may call one the _Me_ and the other the _I_. I call these 'discriminated aspects,' and not separate things, because the identity of _I_ with _me_, even in the very act of their discrimination, is perhaps the most ineradicable dictum of common-sense, and must not be undermined by our terminology here at the outset, whatever we may come to think of its validity at our inquiry's end. I shall therefore treat successively of A) the self as known, or the _me_, the 'empirical ego' as it is sometimes called; and of B) the self as knower, or the I, the 'pure ego' of certain authors. A) THE SELF AS KNOWN. =The Empirical Self or Me.=--Between what a man calls _me_ and what he simply calls _mine_ the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked. And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours, or are they _us_? Certainly men have been ready to disown their very bodies and to regard them as mere vestures, or even as prisons of clay from which they should some day be glad to escape. We see then that we are dealing with a fluctuating material; the same object being sometimes treated as a part of me, at other times as simply mine, and then again as if I had nothing to do with it at all. _In its widest possible sense_, however, _a man's Me is the sum total of all that he_ CAN _call his_, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down,--not necessarily in the same degree for each thing, but in much the same way for all. Understanding the Me in this widest sense, we may begin by dividing the history of it into three parts, relating respectively to-- _a._ Its constituents; _b._ The feelings and emotions they arouse,--_self-appreciation_; _c._ The act to which they prompt,--_self-seeking and self-preservation_. * * * * * _a._ _The constituents of the Me_ may be divided into two classes, those which make up respectively--