What really does lie and does work in his mind, would appear to be this. He is sure that he exists. A man, as we know, may doubt of many things, of anything else; but he never can doubt of his own being. And he is sure that he is nothing but himself. His notions on the matter are entirely hazy. It would be idle and absurd to ask him questions; but he can not think of himself and not-himself, and bring the two ideas together. He can think (and it is a delusion to say he can not think) of the world, apart from and without himself. The stage is there, and he can come on or go off. He can appear or not appear, be or not be; can come in and go out, like a candle, which must be alight or not alight—a fire, which must be ‘in’ or ‘out;’ but by no possibility can he conceive of himself as in becoming. How can he (there already) become himself? and how can he (there still) be ceasing to be himself? It is impossible that this should come before his mind.
What he means by his self, we have already remarked, he knows not; and indeed his views are much confused; for at times, as we said, he identifies his character with his self (anything but his character would not be his self), and carries it back to the beginning of his life; and, at times again, he will tell you that without his bringing-up and education, and without his own resolution and self-denial, he never would have been the sort of man he is now; and here the self, which is there from the first, is not the character. You may tell him his character was born with him, that is one of his views; or you may tell him it has been developed, that is another; but then you must add (fairly to represent him) that he has developed it.
Suppose that all this is lying in his mind, and one sees directly the ground of our man’s dislike for rational prediction; for such prediction is, in a word, the construction of himself out of what is not himself; and that, as we saw, he can not understand. If, from given data and from universal rules, another man can work out the generation of him like a sum in arithmetic, where is his self gone to? It is invaded by another, broken up into selfless elements, put together again, mastered and handled, just as a poor dead thing is mastered by man. And this being so, our man feels dimly that, if another can thus unmake and remake him, he himself
