3. Let us then take, as before, a man’s mind, and inspect its furniture and contents. We must try to find that part of them in which the self really consists, and which makes it one and not another. And here, so far as I am aware, we can get no assistance from popular ideas. There seems, however, no doubt that the inner core of feeling, resting mainly on what is called Cœnesthesia, is the foundation of the self.[1]
But this inner nucleus, in the first place, is not separated from the average self of the man by any line that can be drawn; and, in the second place, its elements come from a variety of sources. In some cases it will contain, indivisibly from the rest, relation to a not-self of a certain character. Where an individual is such that alteration in what comes from the environment completely unsettles him, where this change may produce a feeling of self-estrangement so severe as to cause sickness and even death, we must admit that the self is not enclosed by a wall. And where the essential self is to end, and the accidental self to begin, seems a riddle without an answer.
For an attempt to answer it is baffled by a fatal dilemma. If you take an essence which can change, it is not an essence at all; while, if you stand on anything more narrow, the self has disappeared. What is this essence of the self which never is altered? Infancy and old age, disease and madness, bring new features, while others are borne away. It is hard indeed to fix any limit to the self’s mutability. One self, doubtless, can suffer change in which another would perish. But, on the other hand, there comes a point in each where we should agree that the man is no longer himself. This
