Popular and scientific observation agree that a very interesting and important phenomenon in consciousness is the sense of self as involving such feelings as pride, shame, self-satisfaction, and self-disgust. And the evolutionary psychologist is bound to consider self-consciousness in its rise and development as a life factor. What is its significance for life? How and when did it arise as answering a demand in the struggle for existence? Further, the psychologist is bound to clearly define and analyse the self-sense as psychic fact, to understand just what it is, as well as what it seems. The nature of the self-sense must be carefully studied by introspection, and its elements and quality determined. However, the psychist has nothing, of course, to do with the self which is sensed, an inquiry which belongs alone to the metaphysician.

Self-consciousness has been throughout all our discussion assumed and implied as factor in emotion life. Object is not merely perceived, for this in itself has no life value, but is at once interpreted in experience terms, is self-related, and emotion arises and stimulates suitable will-response in bodily activities. Thus all response to environment through cognition of environment means with sense of the environment as its own. Thus, and thus only, is sense of environment rendered efficacious, for bare objectivity, which signifies nothing, has no value for life. 252Under the conditions of existence in the struggle of life object cognition could not originate because it has no function. The theory of natural selection then requires that object and subject cognition be regarded as complementary psychic factors, coincident in their origin, and developing in strict correlation.

This corollary from the theory of natural selection, implying a self-relating act in all cognition under the condition of struggle for existence, is seen to be a likely hypothesis so far as we can judge from the action of low psychisms. Any one who closely observes animals must recognise that self-interest determines their cognitive activities and in turn is roused by it. The alert listening and looking of a squirrel is obviously impelled by fear and awakens fear. The object perceived is constantly interpreted for its experience value, that is, there is constant self-reference. This is the type of all cognition under natural selection, i.e., where use dominates.

Assuming then psychism as mode of adaptive reaction, we see the necessity for the correlation of the sense of self with the sense of things. An experiencer blind to self, who has no awareness of self, but merely blindly strives, has little advantage, for it possesses no self-directivity and no power of intelligent action. Its adaptation is purely general; to be specific adaptation it must appreciate differences in environment in their differential action upon itself, an appreciation of the objective in subjective terms. It is probable then that the first knowledge was the apprehension of thing as painer and then of the thing as pleasurer. A discrimination of the two is attained, probably tactile, as hard and soft. The subjective import of the thing is at once realized from these signs.

It is obvious that the origin of self-consciousness must be placed very early in psychic life. With organisms which have but a few flashes of consciousness during their whole individual existence, whose whole experience is a 253mere sum of separate pleasure-pain thrills and blind efforts, there is neither sense of objectivity nor subjectivity. These very lowest psychisms have experience, but no sense of experience; pleasures and pains possess them, but they do not possess these. But if mentality arises and progresses solely by virtue of its function in saving and profiting the individual living organism, if the end of psychosis is this self-conservation of the bodily whole in its vitality, there is an imperative demand for self-cognizance in order to self-care. Under the law of struggle and survival of the fittest, the organism which does not look out for itself must go to the wall or be in the lowest grade. Self-conservation is closely linked with self-sense. Hence the individual very early acquires some sense of itself in its environment, and so acts and conducts itself. Thus under adverse forces it learns to know itself, to realize its own place and power, and to feel fear, anger, and so to appropriately respond to any environment. Thus is secured manifold and special response to multiform conditions, whereas in the organism which has only pure subjectivity of pain the response would be uniform.

The condition of an ego being sensed or known is, of course, that there is an ego to be sensed. All experience is an individual’s experience, is personal, but this does not constitute egoism as an experience. The experiencer must have experience before he can know himself as experience centre, that is, there must be experience before there can be experience of experience. But the amount of consciousness and integration thereof which is required for self-cognizance is probably very small. The dynamic organic whole of psychic life, which we denominate ego, has almost from the start self-consciousness, and grows by self-integration. By the conjoint interaction of subject and object cognition with feeling and will elements egohood or personality is gradually developed to the largeness which we see in the human mind. Experience which 254does not self-integrate is scarce worthy the name, and it is noticeable that we usually associate self-consciousness with the term. “Having an experience” signifies a self-related psychic fact. Given the first germ and experience constantly returns upon itself and self-develops. It anticipates itself, experiences the experienceable, and so serves life. A psychic individual without sense of his own individuality is practically undiscoverable and impossible. It is perhaps not too much to say that psychically egohood really begins when experience cognizes and organizes itself; the self is made by the sense of self. At first only an occasional achievement upon a very meagre basis of psychosis, the self-sense rose only through intense pain and effort, but has now become so built into experience that, with human minds at least, it seems constant and spontaneous factor. Just what this means we have to note when we come to analyze the self-sense.

While the ego-sense is to be regarded as a reflection of experience upon itself, this reflection is far from being abstract, or general, or spontaneous. The self-sense is wrought out in the direct commerce with objects demanded by the exigencies of existence, a particular and concrete apprehension is produced. That is, mind is no purely internal development nor yet a mechanical impression. Development is forced upon it in a world of competition and danger, but yet this development is always active response. The self-sense then by which the individual becomes aware of its own activities and feelings as its own, originates, like all other new modes, by stress and strain as a most valuable psychosis in the struggle of existence.

The primitive self-consciousness is evidently na?ve, that is, there is no consciousness of the self-consciousness. The low psychism is conscious of itself, knows what is to its own advantage, and is absorbingly selfish, but it is wholly unconscious of its self regard; so also with very young 255children we see an egoism which is perfectly unconscious and na?ve, often humorously so to the observant adult who perceives the utter simplicity of its selfishness. The embarrassing self-consciousness of the boy and girl in their teens, a conscious self-consciousness, is not yet achieved. The immediate consciousness of self cannot by itself embarrass, it must be complicated with reflection and with cognizance of other ego\'s; but later forms we do not need to discuss here.

In the simplest form of self-consciousness what are the necessary elements? and what is the essential nature of self-consciousness as psychic fact?

In the first place, then, what is the nature of self-consciousness as cognition? If cognition be awareness of object, what is self or subject cognition? Is subject merely a kind of object? Is self-consciousness a peculiar conscious mode, or is it merely of the same type as the general cognition of object? Of course we wish to consider such questions here simply in the light of psychic fact.

It is often considered that self-cognitions are really in no way unique, that the subject sensed is merely the individual’s body or his mental powers. And it is undoubtedly true that subject is always some object, the subject cognition is apprehension of some object either corporeal or mental; yet self-cognition is never merely an object seen as object. The psychic act of self-cognition is a peculiar qualifying of the object cognition; the individual who merely knows body or mind has not self-sense, he must be aware of body and mind as his own. The essence of self-sense is not in the object as so perceived, but in the subjectifying reference. While the ego then is always constituted as object, ego sense as psychic fact is more than mere object cognition. The psychic self as object, as some mode or modes of consciousness, has naturally been emphasized. Thus the self may be defined 256as that which is subject to will. Yet the least reflection shows us that for self-sense this must imply my will, and so assume what it would explain. A consciousness of will act as effective psychic fact is not ego sense. A cognition of effort or nisus is not the sense of self save so far as the effort is known or felt as mine. And so in any other objectivist definition of self as psychic object, the self in its real nature as psychic act vanishes. Thus the consciousness of pleasure-pain capacity, while closely related to self-sense, does not make it, for we have to add that the capacity must be known as one’s own. In every endeavour then to define or analyze the self as psychic fact we must either eliminate it or presuppose it, and this must be taken as very significant. It means at least that this stating it—being merely objectifying act—destroys the subjectifying which is its essence. The radical distinction and polar opposition of subjectifying and objectifying is therein suggested, and the difficulty of all fruitful discussion and scientific investigation, which is objectifying, is made apparent.

The objective cognition of a self can only mean cognition of an object capable of experience. Objects are thus discriminated into two classes—experiencers and non-experiencers, subject-objects and bare objects; but this is not self-sense whereby the experiencer directly knows his own experience as such, but merely sense of a self as any individual object experiencing. This objective definition of a self is simple enough. It merely asserts that any object which at any moment of its persistence or existence has a consciousness or experience of any kind is thereby a self. But this is obviously not a definition of the self and self-sense as psychic act, nor does it explain it. The scientific statement that individual objects exist as experiencers, and so are personalities, or ego\'s, does not clear up the self-sense whereby the individual is aware of his own individuality as such. Egohood as selfishness in 257this objective sense, and ego-hood as self-experience, as a feeling and knowing myself, are quite distinct. To the question, What makes an object—this particular object, body with limbs and various organs capable of feeling pain-pleasure—what makes this myself? the only answer is relation not, be it noted, to experience, but to my experience felt as such. And what makes an experience mine is that I consciously experience it; not merely that I experience—that experience occurs to me, or in me, as objective fact—but that I consciously experience, subjectively realize the experience as mine; not merely as realizing experience as experience, but as mine own. This ceaseless circle into which we fall in trying to define ego is hinted at in various common expressions. A child even will often remark, “I did not do it, my hand did it”; “you did not touch me, you touched my foot,” etc. That is, even the most cursory observation asserts that object in itself is not subject, that the me is not mine.

While, then, we must regard self-cognition as a genus by itself and as unanalyzable simple psychic fact, arising early upon a very slight basis of experience, and continually developing as most important psychosis for life, we may yet distinguish what is involved with it, what modes of consciousness it presupposes, and from which it yet is distinct.

We might speak of ego-sense as an experience knowing itself. But since cognition implies always a knowing and the known, an experience cannot, and does not, know itself. The consciousness knowing is never the consciousness known; and to speak of a consciousness as aware of itself is misleading and inaccurate. To speak of the cognizance of a pain as pain self-cognizant is an erroneous expression, for the pain does not know itself; but it is known by a cognition which is not it. To be aware of pain as such is awareness of consciousness, but is, interpreted strictly, in no wise self-consciousness. I may even 258speak of a self-conscious self-consciousness. This does not really mean what it directly implies, but can only mean a self-consciousness plus a consciousness of it as one’s own; that is, the self-consciousness is not actually conscious of itself. Even if a consciousness could both be and know its being as an absolute, simple act, yet this would not be self-sense, an individual realizing its own individuality, but merely a single psychic act existing, and at the same time conscious of its existence. Self-consciousness is more and other than any consciousness which is self-conscious, if that were possible.

Consciousness of consciousness is not, then, self-consciousness. It is, indeed, conceivable that an ego, in objective sense, might know his own consciousness not as his own—the act of self-consciousness—but merely as consciousness, and he would thus exist as an individual, yet without subjective individuality. Yet, as matter of fact, consciousness of consciousness always carries self-consciousness with it. If I become conscious of a consciousness which is my own, I know it, not merely as a consciousness, but as my own consciousness; if I am conscious of anger, I am conscious of being angry.

Hume, in his chapter on Personal Identity, observes, “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.” This is a good illustration of a futile and mistaken attempt to absorb self-consciousness in consciousness of consciousness. Of course Hume was not the hypothetical ego which we have instanced as purely objective observer of his own consciousness; when he was conscious of any consciousness, as a heat or light sensation, a pleasure or a pain, he was assuredly, like other mortals, conscious of it as his own. The sense of mine-ness 259as psychic fact he should not have ignored, whatever might be his conclusions as to the myself But metaphysical psychology is always apt to swerve from fact.

The close connection of self-consciousness with consciousness of consciousness leads often to their confusion. Thus under the head “Illusions of Self-consciousness,” J. M. Baldwin, in his treatise on the Senses and Intellect, says, “Of these subjective illusions we may mention emotional illusions, wrong estimates of our emotional states, as when an angry man declares that he was never more cool in his life.” This instance is plainly an illusion of introspection, not of self-inspection; there is a mistake in the consciousness of consciousness. Wundt, in defining self-sense as perception of the unity of experience, falls into the same confusion.

It points to the fundamental value and place of these cognition factors, that when we say any one is conscious we imply them all. Thus I say of some one rendered unconscious by an accident, “He slowly recovered consciousness,” by which I mean, became aware of himself and his surroundings with awareness of his own mental activities. He is consciously conscious, objectively conscious, and self-conscious. All this makes up for us being conscious, and is for cognitive mind such a simple organic basal movement as circulatory-nervous-motor function is for body.

An organism must, of course, have had some psychosis before it can become conscious of it, and of it as its own, and this primitive psychosis we regard as pure pleasure-pain series. But in the struggle for existence the organism is driven out of this subjectivity to cognize its environment as related to itself, to apprehend and comprehend and so to feel about itself—emotion—and so led to intelligent will activity as real self-activity. At the very first the organism has pleasures and pains, without knowing them as determined in itself by objects, but this primitive 260pre-cognitive stage is short, and most psychisms are certainly beyond it; they sense and notice things, bodily and beyond the body, as of experience value in pleasure and pain terms. At some most critical moment cognition first arose as triple movement, object—subject—consciousness knowledge. Just what may have been its original form it is most difficult to determine, but we may suppose it to have been a very weak activity, possibly expressible, as, “it hurts,” object being simply pain centre. “It hurts,” means object self-related, with consciousness of the consciousness, and this is our language expression for what seems to be an extremely common psychosis among many organisms. As simple pains were probably the first conscious phenomena, consciousness of pain was probably the first consciousness of consciousness, involving also subject and object consciousness. Not only to have a pain, but to be conscious of it as definitely objectively determined is decidedly useful attainment, which is finally inground in experience, so that it occurs spontaneously in highest psychisms. But it is only with a few of the highest human psychisms that consciousness object and subject are apprehended as general facts. Even by philosophers and scientists, subject, subjectivity, and object are not easily apprehended in their distinctness as purely general modes; it requires will strain to properly know them.

We have throughout sought the origin and place of modes of consciousness in function, and from this point of view we must view object-knowledge, subject-knowledge, and consciousness-knowledge as early coincident and correlative. Cognition springs up as a threefold mode, for in no single factor by itself has it life value. Pain, we say, forced the organism to work out to object as painer, cognition arising at once as triple activity. However, this does not imply that there is a constant knowing with, an apperception, that every consciousness is accompanied with a 261consciousness of it. Pains, pleasures, perceptions, etc., constantly engross the consciousness field without our apprehending them. Simple, common folk and children are rarely apperceptive, but yet they are eminently self-conscious, and consciousness conscious in all their life of na?ve selfishness. They are constantly perceiving the significance of things for their own experience, and acting upon this felt meaning. Although not immediately aware of what is passing in their own consciousness, as is common to certain high types of human psychism, yet in their self-interest they certainly know themselves as experiencers. Thus immediate awareness of one’s own psychic attitude as such—apperception—is a kind of consciousness of consciousness in measure divorced from consciousness of the object, and so belonging to such a high scope of psychism that it hardly falls within the range of our discussion, which is confined to simple direct emotion—value of things as implying both self and consciousness knowledge. Apperception as a constant reflection and introspection is certainly not original. In its original form consciousness of consciousness is merely implied element in the study of things. The study of conscious self self-possession, self-poise, conscious psychic self-development, is all very late.

Leaving now the general consideration and analysis of self-consciousness in the light of the general doctrine of evolution, let us note how it occurs in consciousness to-day. Let us come to some direct inductive study.

The simplest method and the most direct of studying the rise and nature of self-consciousness is in those experiences in coming to self-consciousness from deep sleep or from coma after severe accident. I say, “I regained consciousness,” “I came to consciousness,” meaning, not bare consciousness as in mere sensations or perceptions, but a self-consciousness involved therein. In becoming conscious I came to self-consciousness; in becoming aware of the objective, I at once realize my subjectivity, myself as 262experiencer. In coming out from under the influence of chloroform, there is, I have distinctly observed in my own case, a struggling to realize, which is both objective and subjective cognition. It is true a person having awakened under very strange circumstances, as in a bed in a hospital after an accident, may declare, “I did not know myself,” but this does not mean that he had no self-consciousness, but merely that for the moment he did not identify this self, himself, as John Smith, of Jonesville, etc. Sometimes it happens that self-identification is not reached at all, but the self, as bodily whole experiencing, is speedily aware of self, a new personality and sense of personality quickly grows up. Again, a lunatic mistaking himself for Herod or C?sar is thus always self-conscious. He has consciously established himself as the self playing a part in the world, but according to the opinion of his sane fellows he is much in error as to what that part is. Strictly speaking, there is no illusion of self-consciousness, except under the impossible supposition that a being not a real self or psychic individual should have self-sense; but the very act of self-cognizance implies reality of self-hood. It is plain that even the insane man who regards himself as tree or stone, has, however, the act of self-regard, is really self-conscious. Strictly speaking, we cannot identify or recognise self, for sense of self is necessary in any recognition to make it such, a self-consciousness is a fundamental prius. You recognise a tree, a house, but you do not recognise yourself except as yourself is mere object related to you, to your experience. Self-identification means only objective act, and is not, then, the same as self-consciousness, though based upon it.

I have endeavoured to make observations of myself in moments of awaking from sleep or going to sleep, to find whether subjective reference and objective apprehension are mingled co-ordinately in consciousness from the beginning, whether the self-sense reaches through both the 263perceptive life and the sensation life. Drowsing in bed I sometimes have a feeling of bare pleasure as the first stage in a pleasant awakening. There is here no sensing, no localizing, no awareness of body or of anything, no self-consciousness. This mere undifferentiated pleasure, interrupted by “cat-naps,” may often recur. Lolling half-awake every one has frequently experienced these feelings of pure pleasure, unsensed and unlocalized, and wholly unobjectivised, the barest and simplest consciousness, the very first stage in awaking. In this very lowest status in which I can ever catch my consciousness I have the pleasure from the warmth and softness of the bed without having to feel warm or sensing the soft. It is a distinct step to even feeling warm; moreover, in extreme drowsiness it is an effortful step, an active sensing, an objectifying self-activity, and hence a real self-consciousness, implied in the sensing act. To feel warm, to sense in this mode, is primarily object cognition which implies a measure of subject and consciousness cognition in feeling the warmth as source of the pleasure. Any one who will closely examine his mental state at the very first stage of slow awaking from deep sleep—a state of primitive consciousness—will notice a vanishing moment of mere pleasure or pain, and in cases of great drowsiness, when a sensation supervenes upon this stage, it does not merely come, as in our ordinary consciousness, but it is brought; there is objectifying effort. So in basking in the sun like an animal, the very first and lowest stage of consciousness I drop to is pure pleasure without having even to feel warm; and the feeling warm is distinctly a new and higher step in consciousness which is often attained by some slight effort. Thus it is distinctly possible for a man at times to be too lazy to feel warm; and this fundamental laziness must be accounted not uncommon with lower psychisms. Similarly for cold awakening one. There is a moment of pain from cold before one feels cold, 264a general pain and uneasiness discomfort before one realizes what is the matter, feels cold and the part cold—foot it may be—and so reaches some self-consciousness; in language expression, I am cold or feel cold. Here is a self-conscious personal experience, though the first touch of mere pain was experienced by the individual unconscious of himself.

We infer, then, that self-consciousness is first reached and maintained in the sensing act as definite cognitive volition. To sense warmth and cold is simply a little earlier objectification than to attain sense of a light or a sound. To feel is as active as to look or to listen. We know that there are modes of force an appreciation of which does not now enter into known psychosis, but which might be sensed through long and severe effort and evolve a new sense-organ. Thus, if the conditions of life had demanded it, there would have arisen in the struggle of existence a magnetic sense, though now a man may place his head between the poles of the strongest magnet and be unable to reach any sensation. A magnetic sense once organized and inbred into experience would act with the same apparent spontaneity, as a “given,” as does such a sensation as that of heat; and a person feeling magnetic would have self-feeling implied the same as in feeling warm. That feeling warm with us denotes something which possesses consciousness rather than consciousness by struggle possessing it, is simply the result of the inheritance of the accumulated mental force by which past generations have reached this sense, and thereby consolidated self-consciousness with it, for self-consciousness is built up as reflex cognition from the cognitive effort and willing of the individual. Sensation always begins in a sensing, a volition of the individual to realize externality in its experience value, that is, mode of affection of its own body, as in feeling warm pleasurably or painfully. When the objective is not merely sensed but perceived, 265when object and objects are definitely cognized, self-consciousness is greatly furthered, as each object and objectifying cognizance means self-reference or interpretation in terms of self-experience.

That self-consciousness is early and fundamental psychosis, is apparent, not only from the gradual losing consciousness on going to sleep or in gaining consciousness in waking, but also from the fact of its being universal in dream life. Those factors which remain throughout all stages and kinds of dream life, are justly regarded as organic and basal. The higher and later elements, those which are still nascent and in the volitional stage, as conscience and reason, rarely or never occur in dreams. In the slightest dreams there is personal quality; I am consciously experiencing, I am walking, riding, looking, hearing, etc. An awareness of self pervades all dream life, even in its lowest form. We are constantly in a world of objects which we are conscious of in their experience value as affecting us or to affect us. A person relating a dream always narrates it as personal experience and so felt—“I dreamed I was in a cave and I heard water running and I felt it cold,” etc., etc. As far then as we can survey dream life, it is a significant fact that self-consciousness pervades it.

As far then as we can discover in dream consciousness, or in ordinary consciousness, self-consciousness is persistent and pervasive element. In the whole range of consciousness, with the exception of the very evanescent and absolutely primitive pure pleasure-pain series, self-cognition appears. We say, indeed, that a man forgets himself in a rage, but mean merely that the rage object as self-related quite engrosses consciousness to the exclusion of other forms of self-consciousness, as himself related to other selves. Blind with fury to all other objects than the rage object, he does not notice things as related to himself, and he will rush into a stone wall. In the utmost 266concentration and intensification of emotion, self-consciousness does not disappear, but is itself concentrated and intensified. Even in the delirium of passion, so long as any cognition remains self-consciousness remains. The intensification order in consciousness, that is, where multiple consciousness loses elements through intensifying of some others, bears evidence then to the fundamental nature of self-consciousness. A person roused from sleep by cold, which becomes more and more intense till he loses all conscio............