=The Spiritual Me.=--By the 'spiritual me,' so far as it belongs to the
empirical self, I mean no one of my passing states of consciousness. I
mean rather the entire collection of my states of consciousness, my
psychic faculties and dispositions taken concretely. This collection can
at any moment become an object to my thought at that moment and awaken
emotions like those awakened by any of the other portions of the Me.
When we _think of ourselves as thinkers_, all the other ingredients of
our Me seem relatively external possessions. Even within the spiritual
_Me_ some ingredients seem more external than others. Our capacities for
sensation, for example, are less intimate possessions, so to speak, than
our emotions and desires; our intellectual processes are less intimate
than our volitional decisions. The more _active-feeling_ states of
consciousness are thus the more central portions of the spiritual Me.
The very core and nucleus of our self, as we know it, the very sanctuary
of our life, is the sense of activity which certain inner states
possess. This sense of activity is often held to be a direct revelation
of the living substance of our Soul. Whether this be so or not is an
ulterior question. I wish now only to lay down the peculiar
_internality_ of whatever states possess this quality of seeming to be
active. It is as if they _went out to meet_ all the other elements of
our experience. In thus feeling about them probably all men agree.
_b._ _The feelings and emotions of self_ come after the constituents.
=Self-appreciation.=--This is of two sorts, _self-complacency_ and
_self-dissatisfaction_. 'Self-love' more properly belongs under the
division _C_, of _acts_, since what men mean by that name is rather a
set of motor tendencies than a kind of feeling properly so called.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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