'I am not what I see, And other than the things I touch.'
And that something we would not lose, at any cost.--But the only way not to lose it, is to use it as a stepping-stone to higher things. The metaphor, indeed, like metaphors in general, must not be pressed too far. For it is more than a stepping-stone and it is never left behind as a mere dead self: there is
'Nothing of it that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.'
And that richer result into which it is transformed is the consciousness of a self, and the intelligence which wills and knows.
If it be asked in what respects the result is richer, the answer is as follows. The soul,--this 'first entelechy--is exclusive, and it is immersed in its natural limits of organic life. It has yet to go through the school of self-detachment, the process of 'erecting itself above itself'; and of thus extending its view and its range of control over a wider field of objects. Gradually it attains to the rank of a consciousness before which is unrolled the spectacle of a world of objects set over against it, and even of a world within it; itself as an object deposed to the rank of something to be surveyed. As such, it seems almost to have left all immersion in corporeity completely behind, and to have completely divested itself of any limitation. It floats freely above the real psychical life out of which it emerged--a detached but somewhat shadowy self, not burdened by any restrictions of nature or circumstance. As such a mere Ego, or logical self--as the mere theatre on which the play of ideas takes place, it surveys its real psychical self far below; it finds itself as a strange sort of thing, and says _This was me_ (which however is not exactly the same as _I am I_, I = I). Yet it was a great step to have thus ceased to be absorbed in its qualities, to be the mere breath of life and feeling, stirring in its several affections and modifications. In order to get forward, it was necessary to recoil a little: to save itself--and that must mean to get itself in fuller and richer being--the mind had, as it were, to measure and realise the full depth of its nonentity, and to surrender all that it had hitherto clung to as its own. In an attitude of reflection upon itself it fancies that it is the empty room, the _tabula rasa_, on which experience is to write itself: but in its secret heart it retains the faith and acts upon it, that it is the power of intelligent and intelligible unity which makes the writing intelligible, if it does not even itself play the writer. What it now seems to find--what fills up its consciousness, presumed empty and merely receptive,--it gradually recognises to be its very and original own. Through labour and experiment it fills up the vacant form (the passive half of itself to which it deposed itself) of consciousness; and thus, as an intelligent self, a true mind, it has for itself and realises as in itself all the life and reality which in its earlier stage of soul it only was and felt itself naturally to be. But on this stage of free intelligence it is no longer bound up with its natural being in such a way as to feel itself a fixed and restricted centre, sunk in the living environment so as to see no further, and to deem itself in its seclusion the permanent reality, the exclusive fact. It is no longer exclusive and self-concentrated, but inclusive and all-embracing. It is no longer a mere consciousness--a mere receptive and synthetic unity of apperception--but a reason and a mind. And a reason and a mind already refuse to be narrowed and confined by the same limits as seem appropriate to the soul. In the province of free self-realised intelligence we at least seem to occupy a ground on which others can equally come,--to have nothing peculiar or merely individual. In Knowledge, which is reasoned perception, and in Will, which is reasoned impulse, there is a king's highway, a public forum, where souls meet and converse and perform a collective work;--and in both _mere_, i. e. essentially restricted, individuality is at a discount[8].