actual fact. And this fact, it may be alleged, is the understanding of our self, or is, at least, that which is superior to and over-rides any mere intellectual criticism. It must be accepted for what it is, and its reality must be admitted by the intelligence as a unique revelation.
But no such claim can be maintained. I will begin by pointing out that feeling, if a revelation, is not exclusively or even specially a revelation of the self. For you must choose one of two things. Either you do not descend low enough to get rid of relations with all their inconsistency, or else you have reached a level where subject and object are in no sense distinguished, and where, therefore, neither self nor its opposite exists. Feeling, if taken as immediate presentation, most obviously gives features of what later becomes the environment. And these are indivisibly one thing with what later becomes the self. Feeling, therefore, can be no unique or special revelation of the self, in distinction from any other element of the universe. Nor, even if feeling be used wrongly as equivalent to the aspect of pleasure or pain,[1] need we much modify our conclusion. This is a point on which naturally I have seen a good many dogmatic assertions, but no argument that would bear a serious examination. Why in the case of a pleasant feeling—for example, that of warmth—the side of pleasure should belong to the self, and the side of sensation to the not-self (psychologically or logically), I really do not know. If we keep to facts, it seems clear that at the beginning no such distinction exists at all; and it is clear too that at the latest stage there are some elements within the not-self which retain their original aspect of pleasure or pain. And hence we must come to this result. We could
- ↑ I think this confined use wrong, but it is, of course, legitimate. To ignore the existence of other uses is, on the other hand, inexcusable.
