“I”
The title of this chapter is a very
short one. It consists of but a single word,
and that the shortest word in the whole English language.
And though it is the shortest word, yet it is the most
wonderful and mysterious word. Though it is
a word that every one of us has on his lips every
moment of the day, yet no one who reads this book no
one in the whole world has ever been able
to understand what it means.
Just the letter “I.” All
day long, from morning till night, we are using it: I
did this. I mean to do that. I ought.
I shall. I will. I think. I wish.
I love. I hate. I remember. I forget.
And so on and on ever ringing the changes
on this little word in all its cases “I”
and “my” and “mine” and “me.”
I want to set you thinking. Who or what is
this “I,” this “me”?
Perhaps you will say, “Oh, there
is nothing mysterious about it I know very
well what I mean by it. ‘I’ means
myself.”
But what do I mean by Myself?
Of course there is a rough work-day meaning in which
it means my whole being as I stand clothes,
body, brains, thoughts, feelings, general appearance,
everything. But every thinking man knows that
this is not the real “I,” that when he
says I can, I do, I will, I ought, I remember, the
“I” means to him something much deeper
and more mysterious than that. Ask yourself,
each one, what do you mean by “I”?
Section 1
Is it my body?
Nay, surely not. I know that my body is only
my outward garment woven by “me” out of
certain chemical substances. In a scientific
museum I can stand before a glass case and see neatly
labelled the exact portions of lime and silica and
iron and water and other elements which compose my
body. I know that this body is continually changing
its substance like the rainbow in the sky, like the
eddy round a stone in the river. The body I have
to-day is no more the body of last year than the fire
on my hearth to-night is the fire that was there this
morning. I have had a dozen different bodies
since I was born, but I am the same still. Every
thinking man knows that the “I,” the real
self, stands behind the body looking out through the
windows of the eyes, receiving messages through the
portals of the ears. It rules the body, it possesses
the body. It says, “I have a body.”
“This body is a thing belonging to me.”
As you watch the changing expression
in the face of your friend, as you see his eyes flashing
in anger, or softening in affectionate sympathy, do
you not feel that all you see is but the outward casing,
that the real self of your friend is a something dwelling
within?
I hope I am not puzzling you.
What I want to do is to introduce you to your own
self, to make you really acquainted with that mysterious
being in his first stage of existence here and then
to follow him out into the great adventure of the
Hereafter.
Section 2
Let us go on. What is this I,
this self? Is it my brain?
Physiologists tell us wonderful things of that brain;
how its size and shape, and the amount of gray matter
modify my character; how it excites itself when I
am thinking; how it has different departments for
different functions; how it rules and directs everything
I do. And men impressed by these wonders have
sometimes asserted that there is nothing more to be
found. It is the brain which originates all,
thought is only certain activities of the brain memory
is only impressions on the substance of the brain when
the brain decays there is no self remaining.
What I call “I” is merely a function of
my brain.
But immediately the question arises,
Which brain? The particles of my brain are always
changing. I have had a dozen different brains
in my lifetime, with not a particle remaining the
same. Which of these brains is it that “I”
am only a function of? And how does it happen
that I remember what I thought and did and said with
the old vanished brains of twenty and thirty years
ago? Memory insists that I am still the same
“I” in spite of all those changes of brain.
If memory be but a series of impressions registered
on the brain these could no more survive the dissolution
of the brain than impressions on wax could survive
the melting of the wax. Surely my memory, my
irresistible conviction of personal identity with
my past makes it abundantly clear that “I”
am a mysterious unchanging spiritual being behind this
ever changing brain.
And that is what the best modern science
asserts that the brain is but my instrument.
If we compare it to a violin then “I”
am the unseen violin player behind it. The musician
cannot produce violin music without a violin, but
also the violin cannot produce a musical note, much
less take part in a complex symphony without the musician
behind it. If the strings of the violin be injured,
or if they be smeared with grease, the result is discords
and crazy sounds. If the brain be physically
injured or disordered the result is what we call mental
derangement.
To say, then, that the brain is the
seat of thought is not at all to say that it
is the source of thought. Everything involved
in my conscious personality is related to the
brain, but it is not originated by the brain.
The mysterious spiritual “I” is behind
the brain, using the brain nay further actually
educating and fitting the brain for its work.
The brain of a little child with its plastic gray
matter is smooth and unformed. It is the “I”
behind that is steadily creasing and moulding and
training it for its purpose. I don’t know
of anything more impressive than the study of the
human brain in its activities, and how “I”
am continually changing and modifying and educating
my brain. You feel sometimes as if you could
almost lay hands on that mysterious spiritual being
that is behind it, like a spider in his web feeling
and interpreting every quiver of it, sending messages
out into the world by means of it. But he always
eludes you. You have no instrument that can touch
him. You only know that he is there, enshrouded
in mystery, a supernatural being not only using the
brain but educating it for use. The brain itself
has no knowledge or thought, and no power of itself
to originate knowledge or thought. The brain
of a baboon differs very little from the brain of a
man. The difference is in the being who is behind
it. I read lately the statement of a great scientist:
“As far as I can see, if the soul of a man could
get behind the brain of an ape he could probably use
it almost as well as his own.”
I have never known a really thoughtful
student of science satisfied with the foolish notion
that the brain is what thinks and remembers and wills.
He looks upon a human brain, on the dissecting table,
a mere mass of cells and nerve centres suffused with
blood, and he thinks of the glorious poems and the
mighty intellectual efforts and the noble thoughts
of God and Righteousness, and perforce he laughs at
the thought that that poor bleeding thing originated
them. Something within him indignantly replies:
“Nay, ‘I’ am not the brain.
I possess it. I use it. It is mine, but
it is not me!”
Section 3
We have not yet gone deep enough to
discover this “I.” It is hardly
necessary to ask the next question which some foolish
people are speculating about to-day. Am I merely
the train of thoughts and feelings
and emotions? Am “I” but
like an Eolian harp, played on by the wind of sensations
from without?
Surely not. This mysterious
“I” is constantly and persistently claiming
to be a real conscious person behind all these greater
than all these possessing all these.
Listen to the voice down deep in your consciousness cogito,
ergo Sum. “I” think therefore
“I” exist. I am not the thoughts
and feelings and emotions I am greater than
them all. I am the possessor of them all.
They are mine. They are not Me. They
are only passing phases of my being. They are
always changing. Everything around is changing.
I remain the same being always. Nothing else
in the universe remains the same being except
God. God and I. God and these selves that are
in every one of us.
I cannot escape that conviction that
“I” am the permanent being behind all
the changes. No human vision can see me.
No surgeon’s knife can detect me. But
I am there, behind everything.
The particles of my body, of brain
and nerves and heart are constantly being changed every
few years they are completely renewed. I have
had a dozen new bodies, a dozen new sets of brains
and heart since I was born I am always
wearing them out. I change them when they are
worn out and throw them aside like old clothes.
My thoughts and feelings are ever changing, like
the ripples on the sea.
But I am absolutely certain that “I”
am still there that I am the same just
as God is the same. The same “I”
that played as a little child the same
“I” that lived and desired and thought
and felt and worked and sinned years and years ago.
Not a particle remains of the brain,
or nerves, or tongue, or eyes, or hands, or feet,
with which I did a good or evil deed twenty years
since but it is impossible for me to doubt
that it was “I” who did it, that I to-day
deserve the praise or blame which is due to it.
Every man on earth, when he thinks
about it, has this conviction of himself as an “I” as
a person separate from all other persons, as a self
separate from all other selves, as remaining always
the same being, whatever changes may take place around
him. That is what constitutes man a
self conscious of itself. As far as we can discover,
the lower animals have no such idea. Children,
at first, have not. Did you ever notice how
a little child never says “I” till he
is about three years old? He always speaks in
the third person. It is always “Baby does
this,” “Baby likes that,” until the
Divine revelation of his personality gradually grows
and he recognizes himself as a person. Then,
without any teaching on your part, the child, of his
own accord, will begin to say “I.”
Section 4
Oh, who or what is this awful, mysterious
“I” that dwells somewhere in the centre
of my being, and rules and possesses and is responsible
for everything? What is this self, in each of
you, that is hidden behind your faces as behind a
mask that is looking out through your eyes,
and receiving, through your ears, the thoughts that
others are trying to express for you? Can the
surgeon’s knife find any trace of it? Is
it possible to destroy it? Is it possible to
get away from it? It has survived the putting
away of every part of the body a dozen times over.
Will it survive the final putting away of the whole
body at death? Will it survive everything?
Shall “I” be “I,” the same
identical person through all the ages of eternity?
Section 5
Look in again upon this “I”
within you and answer this question. Why does
it assert so positively that it is impossible to doubt
it; “I ought to do certain things, I ought not
to do certain other things”? All over the
earth this day from the St. Lawrence to
the Ganges, from the North Pole to the South there
is no man outside of a lunatic asylum without that
conviction. No race, not even the lowest, has
been found without it. Where did that conviction
come from? From the Bible, do you say?
From the teachings of Christ? Nay, surely not.
Long before the Bible, long before the incarnation
of Christ, the old pagan had the thought clear and
distinct, though not by any means so clear and distinct
as Christianity has made it. Did you ever think
of the mystery of this authoritative utterance of
the self within you: “I ought”?
In the very lowest savages it asserts this.
St. Paul calls this sense of “ought” the
law of God written in our hearts (Rom. i.
St. John calls it the light of Christ in us, “the
light which lighteth every man coming into the world”
(St. John . Longfellow sings of it in “Hiawatha”:
That in even savage bosoms
There are longings, yearnings, strivings
For the good they comprehend not;
That the feeble hands and helpless,
Groping blindly in the darkness,
Touch God’s right hand in the darkness.
Even in the heart of the thief or
the murderer it insists: I ought to do this,
I ought not to do that, and when he disobeys this mysterious
law within him he is compelled to drag himself up for
judgment and fierce remorse for wrong that no one
else knows of, that no one else can punish him for.
What do you think of that mysterious fact about this
Conscious Personality within you? Does it not
look as if it belongs to God, that every soul is stamped
with God’s image and superscription, as every
coin of King George is stamped in the mint with the
image and superscription of the King?
Section 6
And this suggests a further question.
Why is there in us this sense of imperfection, of
incompleteness of ideals always away in
the front that we can never even approximately reach
on earth? Look at this conscience which we have
just been thinking about. It is always holding
high above us an ideal of perfect goodness and insisting
that we must strive after it. But we can never
get even near it on earth. The very best man
at the close of life sees his ideal still high above
him and feels how much better he might be and ought
to be and then he dies feeling the incompleteness
of this life. Does not this unfinished life
thus broken off, with its aim still far in the future,
demand something further? The great German philosopher
Kant founded on this fact his famous argument for
Immortality.
Or look at our efforts after knowledge.
It takes nearly all this life to fit the student
for his search after truth, and when he is just ready
and the great ocean of truth lies before him, Death
comes. Oh, how incomplete and unfinished his
life seems! Just the scaffolding put up for
his work, just the tools got into good order.
Then he dies.
“For half a century,”
said Victor Hugo, “I have been writing my thoughts
in prose and verse, history, philosophy, drama, romance,
tradition, satire, ode, song. But I feel that
I have not said a thousandth part of what is in me.
When I go down to the grave I shall have finished
my day’s work.” And this thought
of incompleteness compels in him the hope, “another
day will begin next morning.”
Was Victor Hugo right? Was the
old pagan philosopher right? “You may
catch my body,” said Socrates, “but no
man can catch me, myself, to bury me.”
Victor Hugo did not believe in the Christian Bible.
Socrates had no revelation from God, except the revelation
of this self within him. You have the revelation
of Christ as well. What do you think of the
question? When the dust shall return to the earth
as it was, shall the spirit return to God who gave
it? When brain and heart and nerves are destroyed,
when the sun is old and the stars grow cold, and all
that you ever saw is swept away into nothingness, will
this mysterious, lonely self remain, to say “I”
and “my” and “mine” and “me,”
through all the ages of Eternity?
Section 7
Now, I put a closer question still.
Is not this mysterious “I” behind the
brain the being that God is especially concerned with?
What He sometimes calls your soul. The ceiling
of the Sistine chapel at Rome has a fine painting
by Michael Angelo from the text, “Man became
a living soul.” It represents the Supreme
Spirit floating in the ether and touching with His
finger the body of Adam. As He touches it an
electric spark flashes into the body and Adam becomes
a living soul. Is not this the centre of the
awful mystery that I call “I,” myself the
same of which our Lord asks His tremendous question:
“What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole
world and lose his own self?”
Is not this “self” the
real man, the man in the centre of his life, in the
deepest recesses of his being, the man as he lives
beneath the eye of God and enters into relations with
God the man for whom the Bible announces
that exciting adventure in the long ages of the Hereafter?
Is not this “I” looking
out from behind your eyes this moment the
real man, of whom the body that you see is only the
outward covering, of whom the brain is only the outward
telegraphic instrument? Should not we adapt
our thoughts to that tremendous fact? Instead
of thinking “I have a soul,” should
we not rather think “I am a soul”?
Instead of thinking, that beautiful girl has an ugly
soul, that insignificant looking man has a noble soul,
should we not rather think, that ugly soul has a beautiful
girl body, that splendid soul is in a mean looking
body? Would not some such manner of thinking
help to bring home the reality, that “I”
am the invisible immortal being which clothes itself
in a material body during this first stage of its life.
Should not we be more likely to become acquainted
with our own soul, to become impressed with its existence,
to think about its character? Should we not
thus learn more easily that wealth and clothes and
outward appearance are not so important, that the
character, the relation to God is the one supreme
thing?
Think out for yourself the answer
to that and to all these questions. I am not
going to answer any of them. My purpose here
is not to answer questions but to set you asking them not
to do your thinking for you, but to set you thinking
for yourselves. Is it the spoiling and ruining
of that self within you which Christ balances against
the whole world?
Section 8
Now, have I helped, even in a little
way, to introduce you to yourself that
“self” that is going out into the great
adventure of the Hereafter? If I have, I have
done a very good thing for you. With so many
the soul is but a vague abstraction, belonging to the
pulpit and the sick-bed and the life of the hereafter.
But amid the busy daily life, the real work and pleasure,
the real streets and houses, it is hard to think of
it except as something shadowy and unreal. My
effort here is to take it out of the region of the
vague and unreal and bring it into the region of every-day,
practical life.
Try to respond to my thoughts.
Try to get acquainted with your own self your
own soul. Try to watch its wondrous life.
Try to become impressed with its existence to
think about its character. Think whether, when
the Bible says anything about your soul, it means this
mysterious being that you call “I.”
Think whether this “I” is an emanation
from God’s nature, and therefore is intended
to be in harmony with Him. Think whether it
must live for ever and ever, and therefore if its
character be not of enormous importance if
its character-making be not the one supremely important
thing in your life.
Then realize that whether you exalt
or degrade it, it is with you for ever. You
can never, never, never get
away from yourself. You will be
the very same self after death as before. I read
some time since of the sinking of a ship and how the
captain dived through the cabin door, and keeping
the light above in view, swam up through the hatchway
and escaped out of the wreck. There is a deceitful
expectation in human nature that when we go down in
the sea of death and eternity we shall in some way
escape out of ourselves, swim away from our own personalities,
and thus leave the ship at the bottom of the sea.
If the “I” meant only the body, that
would be true. But this “I” is where
character exists, where love and desire and will exist.
This “I” is the captain himself.
The captain cannot swim away from the captain.
Myself cannot swim away from “myself.”
“I” must be “I” to all eternity.
I cannot shake off my character, be it good or bad.
Realize next what you mean to the
God who created you and lovingly planned for you your
magnificent destiny.
Let the soul within you feel its dignity,
its priceless importance in the eyes of its Maker.
Measure the value of it by what God has done for
it.
Why was this world slowly built through
thousands of ages? Just as a platform for this
“I” to develop character. Why was
the Incarnation and Death of the Everlasting Son of
God? Why is the gift and energy of the Holy
Spirit? Why is the perpetual intercession of
Christ in Heaven? Why is the grace and power
of the Sacraments in life? Why are the boundless
prospects opened beyond the grave?
All for the sake of this mysterious
permanent supernatural being that we call “I.”
Measure I say by what God has done for it, the tremendous
value He sets on your immortal soul.