ation between subject and object,
the nature of reality, and the possibility of knowledge of self and of
object. The ordinary idea of the self as a physical entity, obviously
separate from others, takes no account of the problem as to how and in
what sense the individual is conscious of himself; what is the relation
between subject and object in the phenomenon of self-consciousness, in
which the mind reflects upon itself both past and present? The mind is
in this case both subject and object, or, as William James puts it, both
"I" and "me." The phenomenon has been described in various ways by
different thinkers. Thus Kant distinguished the two selves as rational
and empirical, just as he distinguished the two egos as the noumenal or
real and the phenomenal from the metaphysical standpoint. A similar
distinction is made by Herbart. Others have held that the self has a
complex content, the subject self being, as it were, a fuller expression
of the object-self (so Bradley); or again the subject self is the active
content of the mind, and the object self the passive content which for
the moment is exciting the attention. The most satisfactory and also the
most general view is that consciousness is complex and unanalysable.

The relation of the self to the not-self need not to be treated here
(see METAPHYSICS). It may, however, be pointed out that in so far as an
object is cognized by the mind, it becomes in a sense part of the
complex self-content. In this sense the individual is in himself his own
universe, his whole existence being, in other words, the sum total of
his psychic relations, and nothing else being _for him_ in existence at
all. A similar idea is prominent in many philosophico-religious systems
wherein the idea of God or the Infinite is, as it were, the union of the
ego and the non-ego, of subject and object. The self of man is regarded
as having limitations, whereas the Godhead is infinite and
all-inclusive. In many mystical Oriental religions the perfection of the
human self is absorption in the infinite, as a ripple dies away on the
surface of water. The problems of the self may be summed up as follows.
The psychologist investigates the ideal construction of the self, i.e.
the way in which the conception of the self arises, the different
aspects or contents of the self and the relation of the subject to the
object self. At this point the epistemologist takes up the question of
empirical knowledge and conside