510 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
He then goes on to say :
One may, I think believe that all men must single out from the rest
of what they call themselves, some central principle of which each would recognize the foregoing* to be a fair general description accurate enough, at any rate, to denote what is meant, and keep it unconfused with other things."
Now, when he says "all men," the immediate and necessary inference is that each man must do this for himself, that no one can do it fully for anyone else ; thus showing that the experience is unique for each individual. This is borne out when he says, immediately following the above :
The moment, however, they come to closer quarters with it, trying to define more accurately its precise nature, we should find opinions beginning to diverge.
This sentence, and the characterization in foregoing pages of his own analysis as a " fair general description, accurate enough, at any rate, to denote what is meant, and to keep it unconfused with other things," show that he recognizes that the experience of the self is an altogether individual one, and that it cannot be given any more than a very vague general description. When he uses the phrase, " to denote what is meant," he tacitly recognizes that he can describe but partly that which he wishes to characterize, viz., the self, and that those who would understand what he has to say about the real inner self will have to translate his char- acterization into terms of their own inner content; or, in other words, he is endeavoring to transfer content which is appreciative, and is able to do so only by a rough sketch, so to speak, which reveals its true meaning only when again transformed into appre- ciative experience by the hearer or reader. Any other way of transferring such appreciative content would be impossible. And we must remember that even then the content itself cannot be transferred, but only, as far as we can say, a similar content aroused within the other.
Thus the significance of this would be that we see that the self
- Referring here to an analysis of self-consciousness, a portion of which has
preceded this quotation. " Op. cit., p. 298.
