In each of us, the bodily organization is an essential component of our physical personality, and some parts of the body can be called ours in the narrowest sense of the word. The body organization is followed by clothing. The old saying that the human person consists of three parts: soul, body and dress is more than a simple joke. We appropriate the clothes of our personality to such an extent, to such an extent we identify one with the other, that few of us will not hesitate for a moment to give a decisive answer to the question which of the two alternatives they choose: to have a beautiful body, dressed in eternally dirty and torn rags, or under an ever-new suit to hide an ugly, ugly body. Then the closest part of ourselves is our family, father and mother, wife and children — flesh from flesh and bone from our bone. When they die, a part of us disappears. We are ashamed of their bad deeds. If someone offended them, indignation flares up in us immediately, as if we ourselves were in their place. Next comes our home, our home. What happens in it is part of our life, its sight arouses in us the most tender feeling of affection, and we are reluctant to forgive a guest who, having visited us, points out shortcomings in our home environment or treats it contemptuously. We give an instinctive preference to all these various objects connected with the most important practical interests of our life. We all have an unconscious drive to guard our bodies, to dress them in adorned dresses, to cherish our parents, wife and children, and to look for our own corner in which we can live, perfecting our home furnishings.
The same instinctive drive urges us to accumulate wealth, and the acquisitions we have made earlier become more or less familiar parts of our empirical personality. The works of our vital labor are most closely connected with us. Few people would not feel their personal annihilation if the work of their hands and brain (for example, a collection of insects or an extensive handwritten work), which they created over a lifetime, suddenly turned out to be destroyed. The same feeling is felt by the stingy with his money. Although it is true that part of our grief at the loss of objects of possession is due to the realization that we now have to do without some benefits that we expected to receive from the further use of objects now lost, nevertheless, in any such case, in addition to that, there still remains in us a feeling belittling our personality, turning some part of it into nothing. And this fact is an independent mental phenomenon. We immediately find ourselves on the same level with the tramps, with those pauvres diables (rabble) whom we so despise, and at the same time we become more alienated than ever from the happy sons of the earth, the lords of the land, the sea and people, the lords living in full splendor of power and material security. No matter how we appeal to democratic principles, involuntarily, in front of such people, openly or secretly, we experience feelings of fear and respect.