Consciousness is a born hermit. Though subject, by divine dispensation,
to spells of fervour and apathy, like a singing bird, it is at first
quite unconcerned about its own conditions or maintenance. To acquire a
notion of such matters, or an interest in them, it would have to lose
its hearty simplicity and begin to reflect; it would have to forget the
present with its instant joys in order laboriously to conceive the
absent and the hypothetical. The body may be said to make for
self-preservation, since it has an organic equilibrium which, when not
too rudely disturbed, restores itself by growth and co-operative action;
but no such principle appears in the soul. Foolish in the beginning and
generous in the end, consciousness thinks of nothing so little as of its
own interests. It is lost in its objects; nor would it ever acquire even
an indirect concern in its future, did not love of things external
attach it to their fortunes. Attachment to ideal terms is indeed what
gives consciousness its continuity; its parts have no relevance or
relation to one another save what they acquire by depending on the same
body or representing the same objects. Even when consciousness grows
sophisticated and thinks it cares for itself, it really cares only for
its ideals; the world it pictures seems to it beautiful, and it may
incidentally prize itself also, when it has come to regard itself as a
part of that world. Initially, however, it is free even from that honest
selfishness; it looks straight out; it is interested in the movements it
observes; it swells with the represented world, suffers with its
commotion, and subsides, no less willingly, in its interludes of calm.

Natural history and psychology arrive at consciousness from the outside,
and consequently give it an artificial articulation and rationality
which are wholly alien to its essence. These sciences infer feeling from
habit or expression; so that only the expressible and practical aspects
of feeling figure in their calculation. But these aspects are really