Of course this is not the only way in which we learn to subordinate our

lower selves to our higher. A direct ethical judgment unquestionably

also plays its part, and last, not least, we apply to our own persons

judgments originally called forth by the acts of others. It is one

of the strangest laws of our nature that many things which we are

well satisfied with in ourselves disgust us when seen in others.

With another man's bodily 'hoggishness' hardly anyone has any

sympathy;--almost as little with his cupidity, his social vanity and

eagerness, his jealousy, his despotism, and his pride. Left absolutely

to myself I should probably allow all these spontaneous tendencies

to luxuriate in me unchecked, and it would be long before I formed

a distinct notion of the order of their subordination. But having

constantly to pass judgment on my associates, I come ere long to see,

as Herr Horwicz says, my own lusts in the mirror of the lusts of

others, and to _think_ about them in a very different way from that in

which I simply _feel_. Of course, the moral generalities which from

childhood have been instilled into me accelerate enormously the advent

of this reflective judgment on myself.

So it comes to pass that, as aforesaid, men have arranged the various

selves which they may seek in an hierarchical scale according to their

worth. A certain amount of bodily selfishness is required as a basis

for all the other selves. But too much sensuality is despised, or at

best condoned on account of the other qualities of the individual. The

wider material selves are regarded as higher than the immediate body.

He is esteemed a poor creature who is unable to forego a little meat

and drink and warmth and sleep for the sake of getting on in the world.

The social self as a whole, again, ranks higher than the material self

as a whole. We must care more for our honor, our friends, our human

ties, than for a sound skin or wealth. And the spiritual self is so

supremely precious that, rather than lose it, a man ought to be willing

to give up friends and good fame, and property, and life itself.

_In each kind of self, material, social, and spiritual, men distinguish

between the immediate and actual, and the remote and potential,_

between the narrower and the wider view, to the detriment of the former

and advantage of the latter. One must forego a present bodily enjoyment

for the sake of one's general health; one must abandon the dollar in

the hand for the sake of the hundred dollars to come; one must make an

enemy of his present interlocutor if thereby one makes friends of a

more valued circle; one must go without learning and grace, and wit,

the better to compass one's soul's salvation.

Of all these wider, more potential selves, _the potential social self_

is the most interesting, by reason of certain apparent paradoxes to

which it leads in conduct, and by reason of its connection with our

moral and religious life. When for motives of honor and conscience

I brave the condemnation of my own family, club, and 'set'; when,

as a protestant, I turn catholic; as a catholic, freethinker; as a

'regular practitioner,' homœopath, or what not, I am always inwardly

strengthened in my course and steeled against the loss of my actual

social self by the thought of other and better _possible_ social

judges than those whose verdict goes against me now. The ideal social

self which I thus seek in appealing to their decision may be very

remote: it may be represented as barely possible. I may not hope for

its realization during my lifetime; I may even expect the future

generations, which would approve me if they knew me, to know nothing

about me when I am dead and gone. Yet still the emotion that beckons

me on is indubitably the pursuit of an ideal social self, of a self

that is at least _worthy_ of approving recognition by the highest

_possible_ judging companion, if such companion there be.[267] This

self is the true, the intimate, the ultimate, the permanent Me which

I seek. This judge is God, the Absolute Mind, the 'Great Companion.'

We hear, in these days of scientific enlightenment, a great deal of

discussion about the efficacy of prayer; and many reasons are given us

why we should not pray, whilst others are given us why we should. But

in all this very little is said of the reason why we _do_ pray, which

is simply that we cannot _help_ praying. It seems probable that, in

spite of all that 'science' may do to the contrary, men will continue

to pray to the end of time, unless their mental nature changes in a

manner which nothing we know should lead us to expect. The impulse to

pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the innermost

of the empirical selves of a man is a Self of the _social_ sort, it yet

can find its only adequate _Socius_ in an ideal world.

All progress in the social Self is the substitution of higher tribunals

for lower; this ideal tribunal is the highest; and most men, either

continually or occasionally, carry a reference to it in their breast.

The humblest outcast on this earth can feel himself to be real and

valid by means of this higher recognition. And, on the other hand, for

most of us, a world with no such inner refuge when the outer social

self failed and dropped from us would be the abyss of horror. I say

'for most of us,' because it is probable that individuals differ a

good deal in the degree in which they are haunted by this sense of an

ideal spectator. It is a much more essential part of the consciousness

of some men than of others. Those who have the most of it are possibly

the most _religious_ men. But I am sure that even those who say they

are altogether without it deceive themselves, and really have it in

some degree. Only a non-gregarious animal could be completely without

it. Probably no one can make sacrifices for 'right,' without to some

degree personifying the principle of right for which the sacrifice is

made, and expecting thanks from it. _Complete_ social unselfishness,

in other words, can hardly exist; _complete_ social suicide hardly

occur to a man's mind. Even such texts as Job's, "Though He slay me

yet will I trust Him," or Marcus Aurelius's, "If gods hate me and my

children, there is a reason for it," can least of all be cited to

prove the contrary. For beyond all doubt Job revelled in the thought

of Jehovah's recognition of the worship after the slaying should have

been done; and the Roman emperor felt sure the Absolute Reason would

not be all indifferent to his acquiescence in the gods' dislike. The

old test of piety, "Are you willing to be damned for the glory of

God?" was probably never answered in the affirmative except by those

who felt sure in their heart of hearts that God would 'credit' them

with their willingness, and set more store by them thus than if in His

unfathomable scheme He had not damned them at all.

All this about the impossibility of suicide is said on the supposition

of _positive_ motives. When possessed by the emotion of _fear_,

however, we are in a _negative_ state of mind; that is, our desire is

limited to the mere banishing of something, without regard to what

shall take its place. In this state of mind there can unquestionably be

genuine thoughts, and genuine acts, of suicide, spiritual and social,

as well as bodily. Anything, _anything_, at such times, so as to escape

and not to be! But such conditions of suicidal frenzy are pathological

in their nature and run dead against everything that is regular in the

life of the Self in man.

WHAT SELF IS LOVED IN 'SELF-LOVE'?

We must now try to interpret the facts of self-love and self-seeking a

little more delicately from within.

A man in whom self-seeking of any sort is largely developed is said to

be selfish.[268] He is on the other hand called unselfish if he shows

consideration for the interests of other selves than his own. Now what

is the intimate _nature_ of the selfish emotion in him? and what is

the primary _object_ of its regard? We have described him pursuing and

fostering as his self first one set of things and then another; we have

seen the same set of facts gain or lose interest in his eyes, leave him

indifferent, or fill him either with triumph or despair according as

he made pretensions to appropriate them, treated them as if they were

potentially or actually parts of himself, or not. We know how little

it matters to us whether _some_ man, a man taken at large and in the

abstract, prove a failure or succeed in life,--he may be hanged for

aught we care,--but we know the utter momentousness and terribleness

of the alternative when the man is the one whose name we ourselves

bear. _I_ must not be a failure, is the very loudest of the voices

that clamor in each of our breasts: let fail who may, _I_ at least

must succeed. Now the first conclusion which these facts suggest is

that each of us is animated by a _direct feeling of regard for his own

pure principle of individual existence_, whatever that may be, taken

merely as such. It appears as if all our concrete manifestations of

selfishness might be the conclusions of as many syllogisms, each with

this principle as the subject of its major premiss, thus: Whatever is

me is precious; this is me; therefore this is precious; whatever is

mine must not fail; this is mine; therefore this must not fail, etc.

It appears, I say, as if this principle inoculated all it touched with

its own intimate quality of worth; as if, previous to the touching,

everything might be matter of indifference, and nothing interesting in

its own right; as if my regard for my own body even were an interest

not simply in this body, but in this body only so far as it is mine.

But what is this abstract numerical principle of identity, this

'Number One' within me, for which, according to proverbial philosophy,

I am supposed to keep so constant a 'lookout'? Is it the inner nucleus

of my spiritual self, that collection of obscurely felt 'adjustments,'

_plus_ perhaps that still more obscurely perceived subjectivity as

such, of which we recently spoke? Or is it perhaps the concrete stream

of my thought in its entirety, or some one section of the same? Or

may it be the indivisible Soul-Substance, in which, according to the

orthodox tradition, my faculties inhere? Or, finally, can it be the

mere pronoun I? Surely it is none of these things, that self for which

I feel such hot regard. Though all of them together were put within

me, I should still be cold, and fail to exhibit anything worthy of the

name of selfishness or of devotion to 'Number One.' To have a self

that I can _care for_, nature must first present me with some _object_

interesting enough to make me instinctively wish to appropriate it for

its _own_ sake, and out of it to manufacture one of those material,

social, or spiritual selves, which we have already passed in review.

We shall find that all the facts of rivalry and substitution that have

so struck us, all the shiftings and expansions and contractions of

the sphere of what shall be considered me and mine, are but results

of the fact that certain _things_ appeal to primitive and instinctive

impulses of our nature, and that we follow their destinies with an

excitement that owes nothing to a reflective source. These objects our

consciousness treats as the primordial constituents of its Me. Whatever

other objects, whether by association with the fate of these, or in any

other way, come to be followed with the same sort of interest, form our

remoter and more secondary self. _The words_ ME, _then, and_ SELF, _so

far as they arouse feeling and connote emotional worth, are_ OBJECTIVE

_designations, meaning_ ALL THE THINGS _which have the power to produce

in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain peculiar sort._

Let us try to justify this proposition in detail.

The most palpable selfishness of a man is his bodily selfishness;

and his most palpable self is the body to which that selfishness

relates. Now I say that he identifies himself with this body because

he loves _it_, and that he does not love it because he finds it to be

identified with himself. Reverting to natural history-psychology will

help us to see the truth of this. In the chapter on Instincts we shall

learn that every creature has a certain selective interest in certain

portions of the world, and that this interest is as often connate as

acquired. Our _interest in things_ means the attention and emotion

which the thought of them will excite, and the actions which their

presence will evoke. Thus every species is particularly interested in

its own prey or food, its own enemies, its own sexual mates, and its

own young. These things fascinate by their intrinsic power to do so;

they are cared for for their own sakes.

Well, it stands not in the least otherwise with our bodies. They

too are percepts in our objective field--they are simply the most

interesting percepts there. What happens to them excites in us emotions

and tendencies to action more energetic and habitual than any which

are excited by other portions of the 'field.' What my comrades call

my bodily selfishness or self-love, is nothing but the sum of all the

outer acts which this interest in my body spontaneously draws from me.

My 'selfishness' is here but a descriptive name for grouping together

the outward symptoms which I show. When I am led by self-love to keep

my seat whilst ladies stand, or to grab something first and cut out

my neighbor, what I really love is the comfortable seat, is the thing

itself which I grab. I love them primarily, as the mother loves her

babe, or a generous man an heroic deed. Wherever, as here, self-seeking

is the outcome of simple instinctive propensity, it is but a name

for certain reflex acts. Something rivets my attention fatally, and

fatally provokes the 'selfish' response. Could an automaton be so

skilfully constructed as to ape these acts, it would be called selfish

as properly as I. It is true that I am no automaton, but a thinker. But

my thoughts, like my acts, are here concerned only with the outward

things. They need neither know nor care for any pure principle within.

In fact the more utterly 'selfish' I am in this primitive way, the more

blindly absorbed my thought will be in the objects and impulses of my

lusts, and the more devoid of any inward looking glance. A baby, whose

consciousness of the pure Ego, of himself as a thinker, is not usually

supposed developed, is, in this way, as some German has said, '_der

vollendeteste Egoist_.' His corporeal person, and what ministers to its

needs, are the only self he can possibly be said to love. His so-called

self-love is but a name for his insensibility to all but this one set

of things. It may be that he needs a pure principle of subjectivity,

a soul or pure Ego (he certainly needs a stream of thought) to make

him sensible at all to anything, to make him discriminate and love

_überhaupt_,--how that may be, we shall see ere long; but this pure

Ego, which would then be the _condition_ of his loving, need no more

be the _object_ of his love than it need be the object of his thought.

If his interests lay altogether in other bodies than his own, if all

his instincts were altruistic and all his acts suicidal, still he

would need a principle of _consciousness_ just as he does now. Such a

principle cannot then be the principle of his bodily _selfishness_ any

more than it is the principle of any other tendency he may show.

So much for the bodily self-love. But my _social_ self-love, my

interest in the images other men have framed of me, is also an interest

in a set of objects external to my thought. These thoughts in other

men's minds are out of my mind and 'ejective' to me. They come and go,

and grow and dwindle, and I am puffed up with pride, or blush with

shame, at the result, just as at my success or failure in the pursuit

of a material thing. So that here again, just as in the former case,

the pure principle seems out of the game as an _object_ of regard, and

present only as the general form or condition under which the regard

and the thinking go on in me at all.

But, it will immediately be objected, this is giving a mutilated

account of the facts. Those images of me in the minds of other men

are, it is true, things outside of me, whose changes I perceive just

as I perceive any other outward change. But the pride and shame which

I feel are not concerned merely with _those_ changes. I feel as if

something else had changed too, when I perceive my image in your mind

to have changed for the worse, something in me to which that image

belongs, and which a moment ago I felt inside of me, big and strong

and lusty, but now weak, contracted, and collapsed. Is not this latter

change the change I feel the shame about? Is not the condition of this

thing inside of me the proper object of my egoistic concern, of my

self-regard? And is it not, after all, my pure Ego, my bare numerical

principle of distinction from other men, and no empirical part of me at

all?

No, it is no such pure principle, it is simply my total empirical

selfhood again, my historic Me, a collection of objective facts, to

which the depreciated image in your mind 'belongs.' In what capacity

is it that I claim and demand a respectful greeting from you instead

of this expression of disdain? It is not as being a bare I that

I claim it; it is as being an I who has always been treated with

respect, who belongs to a certain family and 'set,' who has certain

powers, possessions, and public functions, sensibilities, duties,

and purposes, and merits and deserts. All this is what your disdain

negates and contradicts; this is 'the thing inside of me' whose changed

treatment I feel the shame about; this is what was lusty, and now, in

consequence of your conduct, is collapsed; and this certainly is an

empirical objective thing. Indeed, the thing that is felt modified

and changed for the worse during my feeling of shame is often more

concrete even than this,--it is simply my bodily person, in which

your conduct immediately and without any reflection at all on my

part works those muscular, glandular, and vascular changes which

together make up the 'expression' of shame. In this instinctive,

reflex sort of shame, the body is just as much the entire vehicle of

the self-feeling as, in the coarser cases which we first took up, it

was the vehicle of the self-seeking. As, in simple 'hoggishness,' a

succulent morsel gives rise, by the reflex mechanism, to behavior which

the bystanders find 'greedy,' and consider to flow from a certain sort

of 'self-regard;' so here your disdain gives rise, by a mechanism

quite as reflex and immediate, to another sort of behavior, which the

bystanders call 'shame-faced' and which they consider due to another

kind of self-regard. But in both cases there may be no particular self

_regarded_ at all by the mind: and the name self-regard may be only a

descriptive title imposed from without the reflex acts themselves, and

the feelings that immediately result from their discharge.

After the bodily and social selves come the spiritual. But which

of my spiritual selves do I really care for? My Soul-substance? my

'transcendental Ego, or Thinker'? my pronoun I? my subjectivity as

such? my nucleus of cephalic adjustments? or my more phenomenal and

perishable powers, my loves and hates, willingnesses and sensibilities,

and the like? Surely the latter. But they, relatively to the central

principle, whatever it may be, are external and objective. They come

and go, and it remains--"so shakes the magnet, and so stands the pole."

It may indeed have to be there for them to be loved, but being there is

not identical with being loved itself.

To sum up, then, _we see no reason to suppose that 'self-love' is

primarily, or secondarily, or ever, love for one's mere principle of

conscious identity._ It is always love for something which, as compared

with that principle, is superficial, transient, liable to be taken up

or dropped at will.

And zoological psychology again comes to the aid of our understanding

and shows us that this must needs be so. In fact, in answering the

question what things it is that a man loves in his self-love, we have

implicitly answered the farther question, of why he loves them.

Unless his consciousness were something more than cognitive, unless

it experienced a partiality for certain of the objects, which, in

succession, occupy its ken, it could not long maintain itself in

existence; for, by an inscrutable necessity, each human mind's

appearance on this earth is conditioned upon the integrity of the body

with which it belongs, upon the treatment which that body gets from

others, and upon the spiritual dispositions which use it as their

tool, and lead it either towards longevity or to destruction. _Its own

body, then, first of all, its friends next, and finally its spiritual

dispositions,_ MUST _be the supremely interesting_ OBJECTS _for each

human mind._ Each mind, to begin with, must have a certain minimum

of selfishness in the shape of instincts of bodily self-seeking in

order to exist. This minimum must be there as a basis for all farther

conscious acts, whether of self-negation or of a selfishness more

subtle still. All minds must have come, by the way of the survival of

the fittest, if by no directer path, to take an intense interest in the

bodies to which they are yoked, altogether apart from any interest in

the pure Ego which they also possess.

And similarly with the images of their person in the minds of others.

I should not be extant now had I not become sensitive to looks of

approval or disapproval on the faces among which my life is cast.

Looks of contempt cast on other persons need affect me in no such

peculiar way. Were my mental life dependent exclusively on some other

person's welfare, either directly or in an indirect way, then natural

selection would unquestionably have brought it about that I should

be as sensitive to the social vicissitudes of that other person as I

now am to my own. Instead of being egoistic I should be spontaneously

altruistic, then. But in this case, only partially realized in actual

human conditions, though the self I empirically love would have

changed, my pure Ego or Thinker would have to remain just what it is

now.

My spiritual powers, again, must interest me more than those of other

people, and for the same reason. I should not be here at all unless I

had cultivated them and kept them from decay. And the same law which

made me once care for them makes me care for them still.

_My own body and what ministers to its needs are thus the primitive

object, instinctively determined, of my egoistic interests. Other

objects may become interesting derivatively_ through association with

any of these things, either as means or as habitual concomitants; _and

so in a thousand ways the primitive sphere of the egoistic emotions may

enlarge_ and change its boundaries.

This sort of interest is really the _meaning of the word 'my.'_

Whatever has it is _eo ipso_ a part of me. My child, my friend dies,

and where he goes I feel that part of myself now is and evermore shall

be:

"For this losing is true dying;

This is lordly man's down-lying;

This his slow but sure reclining,

Star by star his world resigning."

The fact remains, however, that certain special sorts of thing tend

primordially to possess this interest, and form the _natural_ me. But

all these things are _objects_, properly so called, to the subject

which does the thinking.[269] And this latter fact upsets at once the

dictum of the old-fashioned sensationalist psychology, that altruistic

passions and interests are contradictory to the nature of things,

and that if they appear anywhere to exist, it must be as secondary

products, resolvable at bottom into cases of selfishness, taught by

experience a hypocritical disguise. If the zoological and evolutionary

point of view is the true one, there is no reason why any object

whatever _might_ not arouse passion and interest as primitively and

instinctively as any other, whether connected or not with the interests

of the me. The phenomenon of passion is in origin and essence the

same, whatever be the target upon which it is discharged; and what the

target actually happens to be is solely a question of fact. I might

conceivably be as much fascinated, and as primitively so, by the care

of my neighbor's body as by the care of my own. The only check to

such exuberant altruistic interests is natural selection, which would

weed out such as were very harmful to the individual or to his tribe.

Many such interests, however, remain unweeded out--the interest in

the opposite sex, for example, which seems in mankind stronger than

is called for by its utilitarian need; and alongside of them remain

interests, like that in alcoholic intoxication, or in musical sounds,

which, for aught we can see, are without any utility whatever. The

sympathetic instincts and the egoistic ones are thus co-ordinate. They

arise, so far as we can tell, on the same psychologic level. The only

difference between them is, that the instincts called egoistic form

much the larger mass.

* * * * *

The only author whom I know to have discussed the question whether the

'pure Ego,' _per se_, can be an object of regard, is Herr Horwicz,

in his extremely able and acute _Psychologische Analysen_. He too

says that all self-regard is regard for certain objective things. He

disposes so well of one kind of objection that I must conclude by

quoting a part of his own words:

First, the objection:

"The fact is indubitable that one's own children always pass for

the prettiest and brightest, the wine from one's own cellar for the

best--at least for its price,--one's own house and horses for the

finest. With what tender admiration do we con over our own little

deed of benevolence! our own frailties and misdemeanors, how ready

we are to acquit ourselves for them, when we notice them at all, on

the ground of 'extenuating circumstances'! How much more really comic

are our own jokes than those of others, which, unlike ours, will not

bear being repeated ten or twelve times over! How eloquent, striking,

powerful, our own speeches are! How appropriate our own address! In

short, how much more intelligent, soulful, better, is everything about

us than in anyone else. The sad chapter of artists' and authors'

conceit and vanity belongs here.

"The prevalence of this obvious preference which we feel for

everything of our own is indeed striking. Does it not look as if our

dear Ego must first lend its color and flavor to anything in order to

make it please us?... Is it not the simplest explanation for all these

phenomena, so consistent among themselves, to suppose that the Ego,

the self, which forms the origin and centre of our _thinking_ life,

is at the same time the original and central object of our life of

feeling, and the ground both of whatever special ideas and of whatever

special feelings ensue?"

Herr Horwicz goes on to refer to what we have already noticed, that

various things which disgust us in others do not disgust us at all in

ourselves.

"To most of us even the bodily warmth of another, for example the

chair warm from another's sitting, is felt unpleasantly, whereas there

is nothing disagreeable in the warmth of the chair in which we have

been sitting ourselves."

After some further remarks, he replies to these facts and reasonings as

follows;

"We may with confidence affirm that our own possessions in most cases

please us better [not because they are ours], but simply because we

know them better, 'realize' them more intimately, feel them more

deeply. We learn to appreciate what is ours in all its details and

shadings, whilst the goods of others appear to us in coarse outlines

and rude averages. Here are some examples: A piece of music which

one plays one's self is heard and understood better than when it is

played by another. We get more exactly all the details, penetrate

more deeply into the musical thought. We may meanwhile perceive

perfectly well that the other person is the better performer, and

yet nevertheless--at times--get more enjoyment from our own playing

because it brings the melody and harmony so much nearer home to

us. This case may almost be taken as typical for the other cases of

self-love. On close examination, we shall almost always find that a

great part of our feeling about what is ours is due to the fact that

we _live closer_ to our own things, and so feel them more thoroughly

and deeply. As a friend of mine was about to marry, he often bored me

by the repeated and minute way in which he would discuss the details

of his new household arrangements. I wondered that so intellectual a

man should be so deeply interested in things of so external a nature.

But as I entered, a few years later, the same condition myself, these

matters acquired for me an entirely different interest, and it became

my turn to turn them over and talk of them unceasingly.... The reason

was simply this, that in the first instance I _understood_ nothing

of these things and their importance for domestic comfort, whilst in

the latter ease they came home to me with irresistible urgency, and

vividly took possession of my fancy. So it is with many a one who

mocks at decorations and titles, until he gains one himself. And this

is also surely the reason why one's own portrait or reflection in the

mirror is so peculiarly interesting a thing to contemplate ... not

on account of any absolute '_c'est moi_,' but just as with the music

played by ourselves. What greets our eyes is what we know best, most

deeply understand; because we ourselves have felt it and lived through

it. We know what has ploughed these furrows, deepened these shadows,

blanched this hair; and other faces may be handsomer, but none can

speak to us or interest us like this."[270]

Moreover, this author goes on to show that our own things are _fuller_

for us than those of others because of the memories they awaken and

the practical hopes and expectations they arouse. This alone would

emphasize them, apart from any value derived from their belonging

to ourselves. We may conclude with him, then, that _an original

central self-feeling can never explain the passionate warmth of our

self-regarding emotions, which must, on the contrary, be addressed

directly to special things less abstract and empty of content. To these

things the name of 'self' may be given, or to our conduct towards them

the name of 'selfishness,' but neither in the self nor the selfishness

does the pure Thinker play the 'title-role.'_

* * * * *

Only one more point connected with our self-regard need be mentioned.

We have spoken of it so far as active instinct or emotion. It remains

to speak of it as cold _intellectual self-estimation_. We may weigh our

own Me in the balance of praise and blame as easily as we weigh other

people,--though with difficulty quite as fairly. The _just_ man is the

one who can weigh himself impartially. Impartial weighing presupposes

a rare faculty of abstraction from the vividness with which, as

Herr Horwicz has pointed out, things known as intimately as our own

possessions and performances appeal to our imagination; and an equally

rare power of vividly representing the affairs of others. But, granting

these rare powers, there is no reason why a man should not pass

judgment on himself quite as objectively and well as on anyone else. No

matter how he _feels_ about himself, unduly elated or unduly depressed,

he may still truly _know_ his own worth by measuring it by the outward

standard he applies to other men, and counteract the injustice of

the feeling he cannot wholly escape. This self-measuring process has

nothing to do with the instinctive self-regard we have hitherto been

dealing with. Being merely one application of intellectual comparison,

it need no longer detain us here. Please note again, however, how

the pure Ego appears merely as the vehicle in which the estimation

is carried on, the objects estimated being all of them facts of an

empirical sort,[271] one's body, one's credit, one' fame, one's

intellectual ability, one's goodness, or whatever the case may be.

The empirical life of Self is divided, as below, into

MATERIAL. SOCIAL. SPIRITUAL.

SELF- Bodily Appetites Desire to please, be Intellectual, Moral

SEEKING. and Instincts noticed, admired, etc. and Religious

Love of Adornment, Sociability, Emulation, Aspiration,

Foppery, Envy, Love, Conscientiousness.

Acquisitiveness, Pursuit of Honor,

Constructiveness, Ambition, etc.

Love of Home, etc.

SELF- Personal Vanity, Social and Family Sense of Moral or

ESTIMATION. Modesty, etc. Pride, Vainglory, Mental Superiority,

Pride of Wealth, Snobbery, Humility, Purity, etc.

Fear of Poverty Shame, etc. Sense of Inferiority

or of Guilt

THE PURE EGO.

Having summed up in the above table the principal results of

the chapter thus far, I have said all that need be said of the

constituents of the phenomenal self, and of the nature of self-regard.

Our decks are consequently cleared for the struggle with that pure

principle of personal identity which has met us all along our

preliminary exposition, but which we have always shied from and treated

as a difficulty to be postponed. Ever since Hume's time, it has been

justly regarded as the most puzzling puzzle with which psychology

has to deal; and whatever view one may espouse, one has to hold his

position against heavy odds. If, with the Spiritualists, one contend

for a substantial soul, or transcendental principle of unity, one can

give no positive account of what that may be. And if, with the Humians,

one deny such a principle and say that the stream of passing thoughts

is all, one runs against the entire common-sense of mankind, of which

the belief in a distinct principle of selfhood seems an integral part.

Whatever solution be adopted in the pages to come, we may as well make

up our minds in advance that it will fail to satisfy the majority of

those to whom it is addressed. The best way of approaching the matter

will be to take up first--

_The Sense of Personal Identity._

In the last chapter it was stated in as radical a way as possible that

the thoughts which we actually know to exist do not fly about loose,

but seem each to belong to some one thinker and not to another. Each

thought, out of a multitude of other thoughts of which it may think, is

able to distinguish those which belong to its own Ego from those which

do not. The former have a warmth and intimacy about them of which the

latter are completely devoid, being merely conceived, in a cold and

foreign fashion, and not appearing as blood-relatives, bringing their

greetings to us from out of the past.

Now this consciousness of personal sameness may be treated either as

a subjective phenomenon or as an objective deliverance, as a feeling,

or as a truth. We may explain how one bit of thought can come to judge

other bits to belong to the same Ego with itself; or we may criticise

its judgment and decide how far it may tally with the nature of things.

As a mere subjective phenomenon the judgment presents no difficulty or

mystery peculiar to itself. It belongs to the great class of judgments

of sameness; and there is nothing more remarkable in making a judgment

of sameness in the first person than in the second or the third. The

intellectual operations seem essentially alike, whether I say 'I am the

same,' or whether I say 'the pen is the same, as yesterday.' It is as

easy to think this as to think the opposite and say 'neither I nor the

pen is the same.'

This sort of _bringing of things together into the object of a single

judgment_ is of course essential to all thinking. The things are

conjoined _in_ the thought, whatever may be the relation in which they

appear to the thought. The thinking them is _thinking_ them together,

even if only with the result of judging that they do not _belong_

together. This sort of _subjective synthesis_, essential to knowledge

as such (whenever it has a complex object), must not be confounded with

_objective synthesis_ or union instead of difference or disconnection,

known among the things.[272] The subjective synthesis thesis is

involved in thought's mere existence. Even a really disconnected world

could only be _known_ to be such by having its parts temporarily united

in the Object of some pulse of consciousness.[273]

The sense of personal identity is not, then, this mere synthetic form

essential to all thought. It is the sense of a sameness perceived _by_

thought and predicated of things _thought-about_. These things are a

present self and a self of yesterday. The thought not only thinks them

both, but thinks that they are identical. The psychologist, looking on

and playing the critic, might prove the thought wrong, and show there

was no real identity,--there might have been no yesterday, or, at any

rate, no self of yesterday; or, if there were, the sameness predicated

might not obtain, or might be predicated on insufficient grounds. In

either case the personal identity would not exist as a _fact_; but it

would exist as a _feeling_ all the same; the consciousness of it by

the thought would be there, and the psychologist would still have to

analyze that, and show where its illusoriness lay. Let us now be the

psychologist and see whether it be right or wrong when it says, _I am

the same self that I was yesterday_.

* * * * *

We may immediately call it right and intelligible so far as it posits

a past time with past thoughts or selves contained therein--these

were data which we assumed at the outset of the book. Right also and

intelligible so far as it thinks of a present self--that present self

we have just studied in its various forms. The only question for us is

as to what the consciousness may mean when it calls the present self

the _same_ with one of the past selves which it has in mind.

We spoke a moment since of warmth and intimacy. This leads us to the

answer sought. For, whatever the thought we are criticising may think

about its present self, that self comes to its acquaintance, or is

actually felt, with warmth and intimacy. Of course this is the case

with the _bodily_ part of it; we feel the whole cubic mass of our body

all the while, it gives us an unceasing sense of personal existence.

Equally do we feel the inner 'nucleus of the spiritual self,' either

in the shape of yon faint physiological adjustments, or (adopting the

universal psychological belief), in that of the pure activity of our

thought taking place as such. Our remoter spiritual, material, and

social selves, so far as they are realized, come also with a glow

and a warmth; for the thought of them infallibly brings some degree

of organic emotion in the shape of quickened heart-beats, oppressed

breathing, or some other alteration, even though it be a slight one,

in the general bodily tone. The character of 'warmth,' then, in the

present self, reduces itself to either of two things,--something in the

feeling which we have of the thought itself, as thinking, or else the

feeling of the body's actual existence at the moment,--or finally to

both. We cannot realize our present self without simultaneously feeling

one or other of these two things. Any other fact which brings these two

things with it into consciousness will be thought with a warmth and an

intimacy like those which cling to the present self.

Any _distant_ self which fulfils this condition will be thought with

such warmth and intimacy. But which distant selves _do_ fulfil the

condition, when represented?

Obviously those, and only those, which fulfilled it when they were

alive. _Them_ we shall imagine with the animal warmth upon them, to

them may possibly cling the aroma, the echo of the thinking taken in

the act. And by a natural consequence, we shall assimilate them to each

other and to the warm and intimate self we now feel within us as we

think, and separate them as a collection from whatever selves have not

this mark, much as out of a herd of cattle let loose for the winter on

some wide western prairie the owner picks out and sorts together when

the time for the round-up comes in the spring, all the beasts on which

he finds his own particular brand.

The various members of the collection thus set apart are felt to belong

with each other whenever they are thought at all. The animal warmth,

etc., is their herd-mark, the brand from which they can never more

escape. It runs through them all like a thread through a chaplet and

makes them into a whole, which we treat as a unit, no matter how much

in other ways the parts may differ _inter se_. Add to this character

the farther one that the distant selves appear to our thought as having

for hours of time been _continuous_ with each other, and the most

recent ones of them continuous with the Self of the present moment,

melting into it by slow degrees; and we get a still stronger bond of

union. As we think we see an identical bodily thing when, in spite of

changes of structure, it exists continuously before our eyes, or when,

however interrupted its presence, its quality returns unchanged; so

here we think we experience an identical _Self_ when it appears to us

in an analogous way. Continuity makes us unite what dissimilarity might

otherwise separate; similarity makes us unite what discontinuity might

hold apart. And thus it is, finally, that Peter, awakening in the same

bed with Paul, and recalling what both had in mind before they went to

sleep, reidentifies and appropriates the 'warm' ideas as his, and is

never tempted to confuse them with those cold and pale-appearing ones

which he ascribes to Paul. As well might he confound Paul's body, which

he only sees, with his own body, which he sees but also feels. Each of

us when he awakens says, Here's the same old self again, just as he

says, Here's the same old bed, the same old room, the came old world.

_The sense of our own personal identity, then, is exactly like any

one of our other perceptions of sameness among phenomena. It is a

conclusion grounded either on the resemblance in a fundamental respect;

or on the continuity before the mind, of the phenomena compared._

And it must not be taken to mean more than these grounds warrant, or

treated as a sort of metaphysical or absolute Unity in which all

differences are overwhelmed. The past and present selves compared are

the same just so far as they _are_ the same, and no farther. A uniform

feeling of 'warmth,' of bodily existence (or an equally uniform feeling

of pure psychic energy?) pervades them all; and this is what gives them

a _generic_ unity, and makes them the same in _kind_. But this generic

unity coexists with generic differences just as real as the unity.

And if from the one point of view they are one self, from others they

are as truly not one but many selves. And similarly of the attribute

of continuity; it gives its own kind of unity to the self--that of

mere connectedness, or unbrokenness, a perfectly definite phenomenal

thing--but it gives not a jot or tittle more. And this unbrokenness

in the stream of selves, like the unbrokenness in an exhibition of

'dissolving views,' in no wise implies any farther unity or contradicts

any amount of plurality in other respects.

And accordingly we find that, where the resemblance and the continuity

are no longer felt, the sense of personal identity goes too. We hear

from our parents various anecdotes about our infant years, but we do

not appropriate them as we do our own memories. Those breaches of

decorum awaken no blush, those bright sayings no self-complacency.

That child is a foreign creature with which our present self is no

more identified in feeling than it is with some stranger's living

child to-day. Why? Partly because great time-gaps break up all these

early years--we cannot ascend to them by continuous memories; and

partly because no representation of how the child _felt_ comes up with

the stories. We know what he said and did; but no sentiment of his

little body, of his emotions, of his psychic strivings as they felt to

him, comes up to contribute an element of warmth and intimacy to the

narrative we hear, and the main bond of union with our present self

thus disappears. It is the same with certain of our dimly-recollected

experiences. We hardly know whether to appropriate them or to disown

them as fancies, or things read or heard and not lived through. Their

animal heat has evaporated; the feelings that accompanied them are so

lacking in the recall, or so different from those we now enjoy, that

no judgment of identity can be decisively cast.

_Resemblance among the parts of a continuum of feelings_ (especially

bodily feelings) experienced along with things widely different in all

other regards, _thus constitutes the real and verifiable 'personal

identity' which we feel_. There is no other identity than this in the

'stream' of subjective consciousness which we described in the last

chapter. Its parts differ, but under all their differences they are

knit in these two ways; and if either way of knitting disappears,

the sense of unity departs. If a man wakes up some fine day unable

to recall any of his past experiences, so that he has to learn his

biography afresh, or if he only recalls the facts of it in a cold

abstract way as things that he is sure once happened; or if, without

this loss of memory, his bodily and spiritual habits all change during

the night, each organ giving a different tone, and the act of thought

becoming aware of itself in a different way; he _feels_, and he _says_,

that he is a changed person. He disowns his former me, gives himself

a new name, identifies his present life with nothing from out of the

older time. Such cases are not rare in mental pathology; but, as we

still have some reasoning to do, we had better give no concrete account

of them until the end of the chapter.

This description of personal identity will be recognized by the

instructed reader as the ordinary doctrine professed by the empirical

school. Associationists in England and France, Herbartians in Germany,

all describe the Self as an aggregate of which each part, as to its

_being_, is a separate fact. So far so good, then; thus much is true

whatever farther things may be true; and it is to the imperishable

glory of Hume and Herbart and their successors to have taken so much of

the meaning of personal identity out of the clouds and made of the Self

an empirical and verifiable thing.

* * * * *

But in leaving the matter here, and saying that this sum of passing

things is all, these writers have neglected certain more subtle aspects

of the Unity of Consciousness, to which we next must turn.

Our recent simile of the herd of cattle will help us. It will be

remembered that the beasts were brought together into one herd because

their owner found on each of them his brand. The 'owner' symbolizes

here that 'section' of consciousness, or pulse of thought, which we

have all along represented as the vehicle of the judgment of identity;

and the 'brand' symbolizes the characters of warmth and continuity, by

reason of which the judgment is made. There is found a _self_-brand,

just as there is found a herd-brand. Each brand, so far, is the mark,

or cause of our knowing, that certain things belong-together. But if

the brand is the _ratio cognoscendi_ of the belonging, the belonging,

in the case of the herd, is in turn the _ratio existendi_ of the brand.

No beast would be so branded unless he belonged to the owner of the

herd. They are not his because they are branded; they are branded

because they are his. So that it seems as if our description of the

belonging-together of the various selves, as a belonging-together which

is merely _represented_, in a later pulse of thought, had knocked the

bottom out of the matter, and omitted the most characteristic one of

all the features found in the herd--a feature which common-sense finds

in the phenomenon of personal identity as well, and for our omission

of which she will hold us to a strict account. For common-sense

insists that the unity of all the selves is not a mere appearance of

similarity or continuity, ascertained after the fact. She is sure that

it involves a real belonging to a real Owner, to a pure spiritual

entity of some kind. Relation to this entity is what makes the self's

constituents stick together as they do for thought. The individual

beasts do not stick together, for all that they wear the same brand.

Each wanders with whatever accidental mates it finds. The herd's unity

is only potential, its centre ideal, like the 'centre of gravity'

in physics, until the herdsman or owner comes. He furnishes a real

centre of accretion to which the beasts are driven and by which they

are held. The beasts stick together by sticking severally to him.

Just so, common-sense insists, there must be a real proprietor in the

case of the selves, or else their actual accretion into a 'personal

consciousness' would never have taken place. To the usual empiricist

explanation of personal consciousness this is a formidable reproof,

because all the individual thoughts and feelings which have succeeded

each other 'up to date' are represented by ordinary Associationism

as in some inscrutable way 'integrating' or gumming themselves

together on their own account, and thus fusing into a stream. All the

incomprehensibilities which in Chapter VI we saw to attach to the idea

of things fusing without a _medium_ apply to the empiricist description

of personal identity.

But in our own account the medium is fully assigned, the herdsman is

there, in the shape of something not among the things collected, but

superior to them all, namely, the real, present onlooking, remembering,

'judging thought' or identifying 'section' of the stream. This is what

collects,--'owns' some of the past facts which it surveys, and disowns

the rest,--and so makes a unity that is actualized and anchored and

does not merely float in the blue air of possibility. And the reality

of such pulses of thought, with their function of knowing, it will

be remembered that we did not seek to deduce or explain, but simply

assumed them as the ultimate kind of fact that the psychologist must

admit to exist.

But this assumption, though it yields much, still does not yield all

that common-sense demands. The unity into which the Thought--as I

shall for a time proceed to call, with a capital T, the present mental

state--binds the individual past facts with each other and with itself,

does not exist until the Thought is there. It is as if wild cattle

were lassoed by a newly-created settler and then owned for the first

time. But the essence of the matter to common-sense is that the past

thoughts never were wild cattle, they were always owned. The Thought

does not capture them, but as soon as it comes into existence it finds

them already its own. How is this possible unless the Thought have a

_substantial_ identity with a former owner,--not a mere continuity or

a resemblance, as in our account, but a _real unity_? Common-sense

in fact would drive us to admit what we may for the moment call an

Arch-Ego, dominating the entire stream of thought and all the selves

that may be represented in it, as the ever self-same and changeless

principle implied in their union. The 'Soul' of Metaphysics and the

'Transcendental Ego' of the Kantian Philosophy, are, as we shall soon

see, but attempts to satisfy this urgent demand of common-sense. But,

for a time at least, we can still express without any such hypotheses

that appearance of never-lapsing ownership for which common-sense

contends.

For how would it be if the Thought, the present judging Thought,

instead of being in any way substantially or transcendentally identical

with the former owner of the past self, merely inherited his 'title,'

and thus stood as his legal representative now? It would then, if its

birth coincided exactly with the death of another owner, _find_ the

past self already its own as soon as it found it at all, and the past

self would thus never be wild, but always owned, by a title that never

lapsed. We can imagine a long succession of herdsmen coming rapidly

into possession of the same cattle by transmission of an original title

by bequest. May not the 'title' of a collective self be passed from one

Thought to another in some analogous way?

It is a patent fact of consciousness that a transmission like this

actually occurs. Each pulse of cognitive consciousness, each Thought,

dies away and is replaced by another. The other, among the things it

knows, knows its own predecessor, and finding it 'warm,' in the way we

have described, greets it, saying: "Thou art _mine_, and part of the

same self with me." Each later Thought, knowing and including thus the

Thoughts which went before, is the final receptacle--and appropriating

them is the final owner--of all that they contain and own. Each

Thought is thus born an owner, and dies owned, transmitting whatever

it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor. As Kant says,

it is as if elastic balls were to have not only motion but knowledge

of it, and a first ball were to transmit both its motion and its

consciousness to a second, which took both up into _its_ consciousness

and passed them to a third, until the last ball held all that the other

balls had held, and realized it as its own. It is this trick which the

nascent thought has of immediately taking up the expiring thought and

'adopting' it, which is the foundation of the appropriation of most of

the remoter constituents of the self. Who owns the last self owns the

self before the last, for what possesses the possessor possesses the

possessed.

* * * * *

It is impossible to discover any _verifiable_ features in personal

identity, which this sketch does not contain, impossible to imagine

how any transcendent non-phenomenal sort of an Arch-Ego, were he

there, could shape matters to any other result, or be known in

time by any other fruit, than just this production of a stream of

consciousness each 'section' of which should know, and knowing, hug

to itself and adopt, all those that went before,--thus standing as

the _representative_ of the entire past stream; and which should

similarly adopt the objects already adopted by any portion of this

spiritual stream. Such standing-as-representative, and such adopting,

are perfectly clear phenomenal relations. The Thought which, whilst it

knows another Thought and the Object of that Other, appropriates the

Other and the Object which the Other appropriated, is still a perfectly

distinct phenomenon from that Other; it may hardly resemble it; it may

be far removed from it in space and time.

The only point that is obscure is the _act of appropriation_ itself.

Already in enumerating the constituents of the self and their rivalry,

I had to use the word appropriate. And the quick-witted reader probably

noticed at the time, in hearing how one constituent was let drop and

disowned and another one held fast to and espoused, that the phrase

was meaningless unless the constituents were objects in the hands of

something else. A thing cannot appropriate itself; it _is_ itself;

and still less can it disown itself. There must be an agent of the

appropriating and disowning; but that agent we have already named.

It is the Thought to whom the various 'constituents' are known. That

Thought is a vehicle of choice as well as of cognition; and among the

choices it makes are these appropriations, or repudiations, of its

'own.' But the Thought never is an object in its own hands, it never

appropriates or disowns itself. It appropriates _to_ itself, it is

the actual focus of accretion, the hook from which the chain of past

selves dangles, planted firmly in the Present, which alone passes for

real, and thus keeping the chain from being a purely ideal thing. Anon

the hook itself will drop into the past with all it carries, and then

be treated as an object and appropriated by a new Thought in the new

present which will serve as living hook in turn. The present moment of

consciousness is thus, as Mr. Hodgson says, the darkest in the whole

series. It may feel its own immediate existence--we have all along

admitted the possibility of this, hard as it is by direct introspection

to ascertain the fact--but nothing can be known _about_ it till it be

dead and gone. Its appropriations are therefore less to _itself_ than

to the most intimately felt _part of its present Object, the body, and

the central adjustments,_ which accompany the act of thinking, in the

head. _These are the real nucleus of our personal identity,_ and it is

their actual existence, realized as a solid present fact, which makes

us say 'as sure _as I exist_, those past facts were part of myself.'

They are the kernel to which the _represented_ parts of the Self are

assimilated, accreted, and knit on; and even were Thought entirely

unconscious of itself in the act of thinking, these 'warm' parts of

its present object would be a firm basis on which the consciousness

of personal identity would rest.[274] Such consciousness, then, as

a psychologic fact, can be fully described without supposing any

other agent than a succession of perishing thoughts, endowed with the

functions of appropriation and rejection, and of which some can know

and appropriate or reject objects already known, appropriated, or

rejected by the rest.

[Illustration: FIG. 34.]

To illustrate by diagram, let A, B, and C stand for three successive

thoughts, each with its object inside of it. If B's object be A, and

C's object be B; then A, B, and C would stand for three pulses in a

consciousness of personal identity. Each pulse would _be_ something

different from the others; but B would know and adopt A, and C would

know and adopt A and B. Three successive states of the same brain,

on which each experience in passing leaves its mark, might very well

engender thoughts differing from each other in just such a way as this.

* * * * *

The passing Thought then seems to be the Thinker; and though there

_may_ be another non-phenomenal Thinker behind that, so far we do not

seem to need him to express the facts. But we cannot definitively

make up our mind about him until we have heard the reasons that have

historically been used to prove his reality.

THE PURE SELF OR INNER PRINCIPLE OF PERSONAL UNITY.

To a brief survey of the theories of the Ego let us then next proceed.

They are three in number, as follows:

1) The Spiritualist theory;

2) The Associationist theory;

3) The Transcendentalist theory.

_The Theory of the Soul._

In Chapter VI we were led ourselves to the spiritualist theory of the

'Soul,' as a means of escape from the unintelligibilities of mind-stuff

'integrating' with itself, and from the physiological improbability of

a material monad, with thought attached to it, in the brain. But at the

end of the chapter we said we should examine the 'Soul' critically in

a later place, to see whether it had any other advantages as a theory

over the simple phenomenal notion of a stream of thought accompanying a

stream of cerebral activity, by a law yet unexplained.

The theory of the Soul is the theory of popular philosophy and of

scholasticism, which is only popular philosophy made systematic.

It declares that the principle of individuality within us must be

_substantial_, for psychic phenomena are activities, and there can be

no activity without a concrete agent. This substantial agent cannot

be the brain but must be something _immaterial_; for its activity,

thought, is both immaterial, and takes cognizance of immaterial things,

and of material things in general and intelligible, as well as in

particular and sensible ways,--all which powers are incompatible with

the nature of matter, of which the brain is composed. Thought moreover

is simple, whilst the activities of the brain are compounded of the

elementary activities of each of its parts. Furthermore, thought is

spontaneous or free, whilst all material activity is determined _ab

extra_; and the will can turn itself against all corporeal goods and

appetites, which would be impossible were it a corporeal function.

For these objective reasons the principle of psychic life must be

both immaterial and simple as well as substantial, must be what is

called _a Soul_. The same consequence follows from subjective reasons.

Our consciousness of personal identity assures us of our essential

simplicity: the owner of the various constituents of the self, as

we have seen them, the hypothetical Arch-Ego whom we provisionally

conceived as possible, is a real entity of whose existence

self-consciousness makes us directly aware. No material agent could

thus turn round and grasp _itself_--material activities always grasp

something else than the agent. And if a brain _could_ grasp itself and

be self-conscious, it would be conscious of itself _as_ a brain and not

as something of an altogether different kind. The Soul then exists as

a simple spiritual substance in which the various psychic faculties,

operations, and affections inhere.

If we ask what a Substance is, the only answer is that it is a

self-existent being, or one which needs no other subject in which to

inhere. At bottom its only positive determination is Being, and this

is something whose meaning we all realize even though we find it hard

to explain. The Soul is moreover an _individual_ being, and if we

ask what that is, we are told to look in upon our Self, and we shall

learn by direct intuition better than through any abstract reply. Our

direct perception of our own inward being is in fact by many deemed

to be the original prototype out of which our notion of simple active

substance in general is fashioned. The _consequences_ of the simplicity

and substantiality of the Soul are its incorruptibility and natural

_immortality_--nothing but God's direct _fiat_ can annihilate it--and

its _responsibility_ at all times for whatever it may have ever done.

This substantialist view of the soul was essentially the view of Plato

and of Aristotle. It received its completely formal elaboration in the

middle ages. It was believed in by Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Leibnitz,

Wolf, Berkeley, and is now defended by the entire modern dualistic or

spiritualistic or common-sense school. Kant held to it while denying

its fruitfulness as a premise for deducing consequences verifiable

here below. Kant's successors, the absolute idealists, profess to have

discarded it,--how that may be we shall inquire ere long. Let us make

up our minds what to think of it ourselves.

_It is at all events needless for expressing the actual subjective

phenomena of consciousness as they appear._ We have formulated them

all without its aid, by the supposition of a stream of thoughts, each

substantially different from the rest, but cognitive of the rest

and 'appropriative' of each other's content. At least, if I have

not already succeeded in making this plausible to the reader, I am

hopeless of convincing him by anything I could add now. The unity,

the identity, the individuality, and the immateriality that appear in

the psychic life are thus accounted for as phenomenal and temporal

facts exclusively, and with no need of reference to any more simple or

substantial agent than the present Thought or 'section' of the stream.

We have seen it to be single and unique in the sense of having no

_separable_ parts (above, p. 239 ff.)--perhaps that is the only kind

of simplicity meant to be predicated of the soul. The present Thought

also has being,--at least all believers in the Soul believe so--and if

there be no other Being in which it 'inheres,' it ought itself to be a

'substance.' If _this_ kind of simplicity and substantiality were all

that is predicated of the Soul, then it might appear that we had been

talking of the soul all along, without knowing it, when we treated

the present Thought as an agent, an owner, and the like. But the

Thought is a perishing and not an immortal or incorruptible thing. Its

successors may continuously succeed to it, resemble it, and appropriate

it, but they _are_ not it, whereas the Soul-Substance is supposed to

be a fixed unchanging thing. By the Soul is always meant something

_behind_ the present Thought, another kind of substance, existing on a

non-phenomenal plane.

When we brought in the Soul at the end of Chapter VI, as an

entity which the various brain-processes were supposed to affect

simultaneously, and which responded to their combined influence by

single pulses of its thought, it was to escape integrated mind-stuff on

the one hand, and an improbable cerebral monad on the other. But when

(as now, after all we have been through since that earlier passage) we

take the two formulations, first of a brain to whose processes pulses

of thought _simply_ correspond, and second, of one to whose processes

pulses of thought _in a Soul_ correspond, and compare them together,

we see that at bottom the second formulation is only a more roundabout

way than the first, of expressing the same bald fact. That bald fact

is that _when the brain acts, a thought occurs._ The spiritualistic

formulation says that the brain-processes knock the thought, so to

speak, out of a Soul which stands there to receive their influence.

The simpler formulation says that the thought simply _comes_. But

what positive meaning has the Soul, when scrutinized, but the _ground

of possibility_ of the thought? And what is the 'knocking' but the

_determining of the possibility to actuality_? And what is this after

all but giving a sort of concreted form to one's belief that the coming

of the thought, when the brain-processes occur, has _some_ sort of

ground in the nature of things? If the world Soul be understood merely

to express that claim, it is a good word to use. But if it be held to

do more, to gratify the claim,--for instance, to connect rationally

the thought which comes, with the processes which occur, and to

mediate intelligibly between their two disparate natures,--then it is

an illusory term. It is, in fact, with the word Soul as with the word

Substance in general. To say that phenomena inhere in a Substance is

at bottom only to record one's protest against the notion that the

bare existence of the phenomena is the total truth. A phenomenon would

not itself be, we insist, unless there were something _more_ than the

phenomenon. To the more we give the provisional name of Substance.

So, in the present instance, we ought certainly to admit that there

is more than the bare fact of coexistence of a passing thought with a

passing brain-state. But we do not answer the question 'What is that

more?' when we say that it is a 'Soul' which the brain-state affects.

This kind of more _explains_ nothing; and when we are once trying

metaphysical explanations we are foolish not to go as far as we can.

For my own part I confess that the moment I become metaphysical and try

to define the more, I find the notion of some sort of an _anima mundi_

thinking in all of us to be a more promising hypothesis, in spite of

all its difficulties, than that of a lot of absolutely individual

souls. Meanwhile, as _psychologists_, we need not be metaphysical

at all. The phenomena are enough, the passing Thought itself is the

only _verifiable_ thinker, and its empirical connection with the

brain-process is the ultimate known law.

To the other arguments which would prove the need of a soul, we may

also turn a deaf ear. The argument from free-will can convince only

those who believe in free-will; and even they will have to admit that

spontaneity is just as possible, to say the least, in a temporary

spiritual agent like our 'Thought' as in a permanent one like the

supposed Soul. The same is true of the argument from the kinds of

things cognized. Even if the brain could not cognize universal,

immaterials, or its 'Self,' still the 'Thought' which we have relied

upon in our account _is_ not the brain, closely as it seems connected

with it; and after all, if the brain could cognize at all, one does

not well see why it might not cognize one sort of thing as well as

another. The great difficulty is in seeing how a thing can cognize

_anything_. This difficulty is not in the least removed by giving to

the thing that cognizes the name of Soul. The Spiritualists do not

deduce any of the properties of the mental life from otherwise known

properties of the soul. They simply find various characters ready-made

in the mental life, and these they clap into the Soul, saying, "Lo!

behold the source from whence they flow!" The merely verbal character

of this 'explanation' is obvious. The Soul invoked, far from making

the phenomena more intelligible, can only be made intelligible itself

by borrowing their form,--it must be represented, if at all, as a

transcendent stream of consciousness duplicating the one we know.

Altogether, the Soul is an outbirth of that sort of philosophizing

whose great maxim, according to Dr. Hodgson, is: "Whatever you are

_totally_ ignorant of, assert to be the explanation of everything else."

* * * * *

Locke and Kant, whilst still believing in the soul, began the work of

undermining the notion that we know anything about it. Most modern

writers of the mitigated spiritualistic, or dualistic philosophy--the

Scotch school, as it is often called among us--are forward to proclaim

this ignorance, and to attend exclusively to the verifiable phenomena

of self-consciousness, as we have laid them down. Dr. Wayland, for

example, begins his Elements of Intellectual Philosophy with the phrase

"Of the essence of Mind we know nothing," and goes on: "All that we

are able to affirm of it is that it is _something_ which perceives,

reflects, remembers, imagines, and wills; but what that something

_is_ which exerts these energies we know not. It is only as we are

conscious of the action of these energies that we are conscious of the

existence of mind. It is only by the exertion of its own powers that

the mind becomes cognizant of their existence. The cognizance of its

powers, however, gives us no knowledge of that essence of which they

are predicated. In these respects our knowledge of mind is precisely

analogous to our knowledge of matter." This analogy of our two

ignorances is a favorite remark in the Scotch school. It is but a step

to lump them together into a single ignorance, that of the 'Unknowable'

to which any one fond of superfluities in philosophy may accord the

hospitality of his belief, if it so please him, but which any one else

may as freely ignore and reject.

The Soul-theory is, then, a complete superfluity, so far as accounting

for the actually verified facts of conscious experience goes. So far,

no one can be compelled to subscribe to it for definite scientific

reasons. The case would rest here, and the reader be left free to make

his choice, were it not for other demands of a more practical kind.

The first of these is _Immortality_, for which the simplicity and

substantiality of the Soul seem to offer a solid guarantee. A 'stream'

of thought, for aught that we see to be contained in its essence,

may come to a full stop at any moment; but a simple substance is

incorruptible, and will, by its own inertia, persist in Being so

long as the Creator does not by a direct miracle snuff it out.

Unquestionably this is the stronghold of the spiritualistic belief,--as

indeed the popular touchstone for all philosophies is the question,

"What is their bearing on a future life?"

The Soul, however, when closely scrutinized, guarantees no immortality

of a sort _we care for_. The enjoyment of the atom-like simplicity of

their substance _in sæcula sæculorum_ would not to most people seem a

consummation devoutly to be wished. The substance must give rise to a

stream of consciousness continuous with the present stream, in order

to arouse our hope, but of this the mere persistence of the substance

_per se_ offers no guarantee. Moreover, in the general advance of our

moral ideas, there has come to be something ridiculous in the way

our forefathers had of grounding their hopes of immortality on the

simplicity of their substance. The demand for immortality is nowadays

essentially teleological. We believe ourselves immortal because we

believe ourselves _fit_ for immortality. A 'substance' ought surely

to perish, we think, if not worthy to survive; and an insubstantial

'stream' to prolong itself, provided it be worthy, if the nature

of Things is organized in the rational way in which we trust it

is. Substance or no substance, soul or 'stream,' what Lotze says of

immortality is about all that human wisdom can say:

"We have no other principle for deciding it than this general

idealistic belief: that every created thing will continue whose

continuance belongs to the meaning of the world, and so long as it

does so belong; whilst every one will pass away whose reality is

justified only in a transitory phase of the world's course. That this

principle admits of no further application in human hands need hardly

be said. _We_ surely know not the merits which may give to one being a

claim on eternity, nor the defects which would cut others off."[275]

A second alleged necessity for a soul-substance is our forensic

responsibility before God. Locke caused an uproar when he said that

the unity of _consciousness_ made a man the same _person_, whether

supported by the same _substance_ or no, and that God would not, in

the great day, make a person answer for what he remembered nothing of.

It was supposed scandalous that our forgetfulness might thus deprive

God of the chance of certain retributions, which otherwise would have

enhanced his 'glory.' This is certainly a good speculative ground

for retaining the Soul--at least for those who demand a plenitude of

retribution. The mere stream of consciousness, with its lapses of

memory, cannot possibly be as 'responsible' as a soul which _is_ at the

judgment day all that it ever was. To modern readers, however, who are

less insatiate for retribution than their grandfathers, this argument

will hardly be as convincing as it seems once to have been.

* * * * *

One great use of the Soul has always been to account for, and at the

same time to guarantee, the closed individuality of each personal

consciousness. The thoughts of one soul must unite into one self, it

was supposed, and must be eternally insulated from those of every

other soul. But we have already begun to see that, although unity is

the rule of each man's consciousness, yet in some individuals, at

least, thoughts may split away from the others and form separate

selves. As for insulation, it would be rash, in view of the phenomena

of thought-transference, mesmeric influence and spirit-control, which

are being alleged nowadays on better authority than ever before, to

be too sure about that point either. The definitively closed nature

of our personal consciousness is probably an average statistical

resultant of many conditions, but not an elementary force or fact;

so that, if one wishes to preserve the Soul, the less he draws his

arguments from _that_ quarter the better. So long as our self, on the

whole, makes itself good and practically maintains itself as a closed

individual, why, as Lotze says, is not that enough? And why is the

_being_-an-individual in some inaccessible metaphysical way so much

prouder an achievement?[276]

My final conclusion, then, about the substantial Soul is that it

explains nothing and guarantees nothing. Its successive thoughts are

the only intelligible and verifiable things about it, and definitely

to ascertain the correlations of these with brain-processes is as

much as psychology can empirically do. From the metaphysical point

of view, it is true that one may claim that the correlations have a

rational ground; and if the word Soul could be taken to mean merely

some such vague problematic ground, it would be unobjectionable. But

the trouble is that it professes to give the ground in positive terms

of a very dubiously credible sort. I therefore feel entirely free to

discard the word Soul from the rest of this book. If I ever use it,

it will be in the vaguest and most popular way. The reader who finds

any comfort in the idea of the Soul, is, however, perfectly free to

continue to believe in it; for our reasonings have not established the

non-existence of the Soul; they have only proved its superfluity for

scientific purposes.

The next theory of the pure Self to which we pass is

_The Associationist Theory._

Locke paved the way for it by the hypothesis he suggested of the same

substance having two successive consciousnesses, or of the same

consciousness being supported by more than one substance. He made his

readers feel that the _important_ unity of the Self was its verifiable

and felt unity, and that a metaphysical or absolute unity would be

insignificant, so long as a _consciousness_ of diversity might be there.

Hume showed how great the consciousness of diversity actually was.

In the famous chapter on Personal Identity, in his Treatise on Human

Nature, he writes as follows:

"There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment

intimately conscious of what we call our SELF; that we feel its

existence and its continuance in existence, and are certain, beyond

the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and

simplicity.... Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary

to that very experience which is pleaded for them, nor have we any

idea of Self, after the manner it is here explained.... It must be

some one impression that gives rise to every real idea.... If any

impression gives rise to the idea of Self, that impression must

continue invariably the same through the whole course of our lives,

since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no

impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy,

passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the

same time.... For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I

call _myself_, I always stumble on some particular perception or other

of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.

I never can catch _myself_ at any time without a perception, and

never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions

are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible

of _myself_ and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my

perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor

see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I should be

entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to

make me a perfect non-entity. If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced

reflection, thinks he has a different notion of _himself_ I must

confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that

he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially

different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something

simple and continued which he calls _himself_; though I am certain

there is no such principle in me.

"But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to

affirm of the rest of mankind that they are _nothing but a bundle or

collection of different perceptions_, which succeed each other with

an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.

Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions.

Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our

other senses and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there

any single power of the soul which remains unalterably the same,

perhaps for one moment The mind is a kind of theatre, where several

perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide

away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.

_There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity

in different_; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine

that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not

mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute

the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these

scenes are represented, nor of the material of which it is composed."

But Hume, after doing this good piece of introspective work, proceeds

to pour out the child with the bath, and to fly to as great an extreme

as the substantialist philosophers. As they say the Self is nothing

but Unity, unity abstract and absolute, so Hume says it is nothing but

Diversity, diversity abstract and absolute; whereas in truth it is

that mixture of unity and diversity which we ourselves have already

found so easy to pick apart. We found among the objects of the stream

certain feelings that hardly changed, that stood out warm and vivid in

the past just as the present feeling does now; and we found the present

feeling to be the centre of accretion to which, _de proche en proche_,

these other feelings are, _by the judging Thought_, felt to cling.

Hume says nothing of the judging Thought; and he denies this thread

of resemblance, this core of sameness running through the ingredients

of the Self, to exist even as a phenomenal thing. To him there is no

_tertium quid_ between pure unity and pure separateness. A succession

of ideas "connected by a close relation affords to an accurate view as

perfect a notion of diversity as if there was _no manner of relation"

at all._

"All our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and the mind

never perceives any real connection among distinct existences. Did

our perceptions either inhere in something simple or individual, or

_did the mind perceive some real connection_ among them, there would

be no difficulty in the case. For my part, I must plead the privilege

of a sceptic and confess that this difficulty is too hard for my

understanding, I pretend not, however, to pronounce it insuperable.

Others, perhaps,... may discover some hypothesis that will reconcile

these contradictions."[277]

Hume is at bottom as much of a metaphysician as Thomas Aquinas. No

wonder he can discover no 'hypothesis.' The unity of the parts of the

stream is just as 'real' a connection as their diversity is a real

separation; both connection and separation are ways in which the past

thoughts appear to the present Thought;--unlike each other in respect

of date and certain qualities--this is the separation; alike in other

qualities, and continuous in time--this is the connection. In demanding

a more 'real' connection than this obvious and verifiable likeness and

continuity, Hume seeks 'the world behind the looking glass,' and gives

a striking example of that Absolutism which is the great disease of

philosophic Thought.

* * * * *

The chain of distinct existences into which Hume thus chopped up our

'stream' was adopted by all of his successors as a complete inventory

of the facts. The associationist Philosophy was founded. Somehow, out

of 'ideas,' each separate, each ignorant of its mates, but sticking

together and calling each other up according to certain laws, all the

higher forms of consciousness were to be explained, and among them

the consciousness of our personal identity. The task was a hard one,

in which what we called the psychologist's fallacy (p. 196 ff.) bore

the brunt of the work. Two ideas, one of 'A,' succeeded by another of

'B,' were transmuted into a third idea of '_B after A_.' An idea from

last year returning now was taken to be an idea _of last year_; two

similar ideas stood for an _idea of similarity_, and the like; palpable

confusions, in which certain facts _about_ the ideas, possible only to

an outside knower of them, were put into the place of the ideas' own

proper and limited deliverance and content. Out of such recurrences and

resemblances in a series of discrete ideas and feelings a knowledge

was somehow supposed to be engendered in each feeling that it _was_

recurrent and resembling, and that it helped to form a series to whose

unity the name _I_ came to be joined. In the same way, substantially,

Herbart,[278] in Germany, tried to show how a conflict of ideas would

fuse into a _manner of representing itself_ for which _I_ was the

consecrated name.[279]

The defect of all these attempts is that the conclusion pretended to

follow from certain premises is by no means rationally involved in the

premises. A feeling of any kind, if it simply _returns_, ought to be

nothing else than what it was at first. If memory of previous existence

and all sorts of other cognitive functions are attributed to it when it

returns, it is no longer the same, but a widely different feeling, and

ought to be so described. _We_ have so described it with the greatest

explicitness. We have said that feelings never do return. We have not

pretended to _explain_ this; we have recorded it as an empirically

ascertained law, analogous to certain laws of brain-physiology; and,

seeking to define the way in which new feelings do differ from the old,

we have found them to be _cognizant_ and _appropriative_ of the old,

whereas the old were always cognizant and appropriative of something

else. Once more, this account pretended to be nothing more than a

complete description of the facts. It explained them no more than the

associationist account explains them. But the latter both assumes to

explain them and in the same breath falsifies them, and for each reason

stands condemned.

It is but just to say that the associationist writers as a rule seem to

have a lurking bad conscience about the Self; and that although they

are explicit enough about what it is, namely, a train of feelings or

thoughts, they are very shy about openly tackling the problem of how

it comes to be aware of itself. Neither Bain nor Spencer, for example,

directly touch this problem. As a rule, associationist writers keep

talking about 'the mind' and about what 'we' do; and so, smuggling in

surreptitiously what they ought avowedly to have postulated in the form

of a present 'judging Thought,' they either trade upon their reader's

lack of discernment or are undiscerning themselves.

Mr. D. G. Thompson is the only associationist writer I know who

perfectly escapes this confusion, and _postulates_ openly what he

needs. "All states of consciousness," he says, "imply and postulate

a subject Ego, whose substance is unknown and unknowable, to which

[why not say _by_ which?] states of consciousness are referred as

attributes, but which in the process of reference becomes objectified

and becomes itself an attribute of a subject Ego which lies still

beyond, and which ever eludes cognition though ever postulated for

cognition."[280] This is exactly our judging and remembering present

'Thought,' described in less simple terms.

After Mr. Thompson, M. Taine and the two Mills deserve credit for

seeking to be as clear as they can. Taine tells us in the first volume

of his 'Intelligence' what the Ego _is_,--a continuous web of conscious

events no more really distinct from each other[281] than rhomboids,

triangles, and squares marked with chalk on a plank are really

distinct, for the plank itself is one. In the second volume he _says_

all these parts have a common character embedded in them, that of being

_internal_ [this is our character of 'warmness,' otherwise named]. This

character is abstracted and isolated by a mental fiction, and is what

we are _conscious of_ as our self--'this stable _within_ is what each

of us calls _I_ or me.' Obviously M. Taine forgets to tell us what this

'each of us' is, which suddenly starts up and performs the abstraction

and 'calls' its product I or me. The character does not abstract

_itself_. Taine means by 'each of us' merely the present 'judging

Thought' with its memory and tendency to appropriate, but he does not

name it distinctly enough, and lapses into the fiction that the entire

series of thoughts, the entire 'plank,' is the reflecting psychologist.

James Mill, after defining Memory as a train of associated ideas

beginning with that of my past self and ending with that of my

present self, defines my Self as a train of ideas of which Memory

declares the first to be continuously connected with the last. The

successive associated ideas 'run, as it were, into a single point of

consciousness.[282] John Mill, annotating this account, says:

"The phenomenon of Self and that of Memory are merely two sides of the

same fact, or two different modes of viewing the same fact. We may,

as psychologists, set out from either of them, and refer the other to

it.... But it is hardly allowable to do both. At least it must be said

that by doing so we explain neither. We only show that the two things

are essentially the same; that my memory of having ascended Skiddaw

on a given day, and my consciousness of being the same person who

ascended Skiddaw on that day, are two modes of stating the same fact:

a fact which psychology has as yet failed to resolve into anything

more elementary. In analyzing the complex phenomena of consciousness,

we must come to something ultimate; and we seem to have reached two

elements which have a good _prima facie_ claim to that title. There

is, first,... the difference between a fact and the Thought of that

fact: a distinction which we are able to cognize in the past, and

which then constitutes Memory, and in the future, when it constitutes

Expectation; but in neither case can we give any account of it except

that it exists.... Secondly, in addition to this, and setting out from

the belief ... that the idea I now have was derived from a previous

sensation ... there is the further conviction that this sensation ...

was my own; that it happened to my self. In other words, I am aware of

a long and uninterrupted succession of past feelings, going back as

far as memory reaches, and terminating with the sensations I have at

the present moment, all of which are connected by an inexplicable tie,

that distinguishes them not only from any succession or combination

in mere thought, but also from the parallel successions of feelings

which I believe, on satisfactory evidence, to have happened to each

of the other beings, shaped like myself, whom I perceive around me.

This succession of feelings, which I call my memory of the past, is

that by which I distinguish my Self. Myself is the person who had that

series of feelings, and I know nothing of myself, by direct knowledge,

except that I had them. But there is a bond of some sort among all

the parts of the series, which makes me say that they were feelings

of a person who was the same person throughout [according to us this

is their 'warmth' and resemblance to the 'central spiritual self' now

actually felt] and a different person from those who had any of the

parallel successions of feelings; and this bond, to me, constitutes

my Ego. Here I think the question must rest, until some psychologist

succeeds better than anyone else has done, in showing a mode in which

the analysis can be carried further."[283]

The reader must judge of our own success in carrying the analysis

farther. The various distinctions we have made are all parts of an

endeavor so to do. John Mill himself, in a later-written passage, so

far from advancing in the line of analysis, seems to fall back upon

something perilously near to the Soul. He says:

"The fact of recognizing a sensation,... remembering that it has been

felt before, is the simplest and most elementary fact of memory: and

the _inexplicable tie_ ... which connects the present consciousness

with the past one of which it reminds me, is as near as I think we

can get to a positive conception of Self. That there is something

real in this tie, real as the sensations themselves, and not a mere

product of the laws of thought without any fact corresponding to it,

I hold to be indubitable.... This original element,... to which we

cannot give any name but its own peculiar one, without implying some

false or ungrounded theory, is the Ego, or Self. As such I ascribe a

reality to the Ego--to my own mind--different from that real existence

as a Permanent Possibility, which is the only reality I acknowledge

in Matter.... We are forced to apprehend every part of the series as

linked with the other parts by _something in common_ which is not the

feelings themselves, any more than the succession of the feelings is

the feelings themselves; and as that which is the same in the first as

in the second, in the second as in the third, in the third as in the

fourth, and so on, must be the same in the first and in the fiftieth,

this common element is a permanent element. But beyond this we can

affirm nothing of it except the states of consciousness themselves.

The feelings or consciousnesses which belong or have belonged to it,

and its possibilities of having more, are the only facts there are to

be asserted of Self--the only positive attributes, except permanence,

which we can ascribe to it."[284]

Mr. Mill's habitual method of philosophizing was to affirm boldly

some general doctrine derived from his father, and then make so many

concessions of detail to its enemies as practically to abandon it

altogether.[285] In this place the concessions amount, so far as they

are intelligible, to the admission of something very like the Soul.

This 'inexplicable tie' which connects the feelings, this 'something in

common' by which they are linked and which is not the passing feelings

themselves, but something 'permanent,' of which we can 'affirm nothing'

save its attributes and its permanence, what is it but metaphysical

Substance come again to life? Much as one must respect the fairness

of Mill's temper, quite as much must one regret his failure of acumen

at this point. At bottom he makes the same blunder as Hume: the

sensations _per se_, he thinks, have no 'tie.' The tie of resemblance

and continuity which the remembering Thought finds among them is not a

'real tie' but 'a mere product of the laws of thought;' and the fact

that the present Thought 'appropriates' them is also no real tie. But

whereas Hume was contented to say that there might after all _be_ no

'real tie,' Mill, unwilling to admit this possibility, is driven, like

any scholastic, to place it in a non-phenomenal world.

John Mill's concessions may be regarded as the _definitive bankruptcy

of the associationist description_ of the consciousness of self,

starting, as it does, with the best intentions, and dimly conscious of

the path, but 'perplexed in the extreme' at last with the inadequacy

of those 'simple feelings,' non-cognitive, non-transcendent of

themselves, which were the only baggage it was willing to take along.

One must _beg_ memory, knowledge on the part of the feelings of

something outside themselves. That granted, every other true thing

follows naturally, and it is hard to go astray. The knowledge the

present feeling has of the past ones is a real tie between them,

so is their resemblance; so is their continuity; so is the one's

'appropriation' of the other: all are real ties, realized in the

judging Thought of every moment, the only place where _disconnections_

could be realized, did they exist. Hume and Mill both imply that a

disconnection can be realized there, whilst a tie cannot. But the

ties and the disconnections are exactly on a par, in this matter of

self-consciousness. The way in which the present Thought appropriates

the past is a real way, so long as no other owner appropriates it

in a more real way, and so long as the Thought has no grounds for

repudiating it stronger than those which lead to its appropriation.

But no other owner ever does in point of fact present himself for my

past; and the grounds which I perceive for appropriating it--viz.,

continuity and resemblance with the present--outweigh those I perceive

for disowning it--viz., distance in time. My present Thought stands

thus in the plenitude of ownership of the train of my past selves, is

owner not only _de facto_, but _de jure_, the most real owner there can

be, and all without the supposition of any 'inexplicable tie,' but in a

perfectly verifiable and phenomenal way.

Turn we now to what we may call

THE TRANSCENDENTALIST THEORY.

which owes its origin to Kant. Kant's own statements are too lengthy

and obscure for verbatim quotation here, so I must give their substance

only. Kant starts, as I understand him, from a view of the _Object_

essentially like our own description of it on p. 275 ff., that is,

it is a system of things, qualities or facts in relation. "_Object_

is that in the knowledge (Begriff) of which the Manifold of a given

Perception is connected."[286] But whereas we simply begged the vehicle

of this connected knowledge in the shape of what we call the present

Thought, or section of the Stream of Consciousness (which we declared

to be the ultimate fact for psychology), Kant denies this to be an

ultimate fact and insists on analyzing it into a large number of

distinct, though equally essential, elements. The 'Manifoldness' of

the Object is due to Sensibility, which _per se_ is chaotic, and the

unity is due to the synthetic handling which this Manifold receives

from the higher faculties of Intuition, Apprehension, Imagination,

Understanding, and Apperception. It is the one essential spontaneity of

the Understanding which, under these different names, brings unity into

the manifold of sense.

"The Understanding _is_, in fact, nothing more than the faculty of

binding together _a priori_, and of bringing the Manifold of given

ideas under the unity of Apperception, which consequently is the

supreme principle in all human knowledge" (§ 16).

The material connected must be _given_ by lower faculties to the

Understanding, for the latter is not an intuitive faculty, but by

nature 'empty.' And the bringing of this material 'under the unity of

Apperception' is explained by Kant to mean the thinking it always so

that, whatever its other determinations be, it may be known as _thought

by me_.[287] Though this consciousness, that _I think it_, need not be

at every moment explicitly realized, it is always _capable_ of being

realized. For if an object _incapable_ of being combined with the idea

of a thinker were there, how could it be known, how related to other

objects, how form part of 'experience' at all?

The awareness that _I think_ is therefore implied in all experience.

No connected consciousness of anything without that of _Self_ as its

presupposition and 'transcendental' condition! All things, then, so

far as they are intelligible at all, are so through combination with

pure consciousness of _Self_, and apart from this, at least potential,

combination nothing is knowable _to us_ at all.

But this self, whose consciousness Kant thus established deductively

as a _conditio sine quâ non_ of experience, is in the same breath

denied by him to have any positive attributes. Although Kant's name for

it--the 'original transcendental synthetic Unity of Apperception'--is

so long, our consciousness _about_ it is, according to him, short

enough. Self-consciousness of this 'transcendental' sort tells us,

'not how we appear, not how we inwardly are, but only _that_ we are'

(§ 25). At the basis of our knowledge of our selves there lies only

"the simple and utterly empty idea: _I_; of which we cannot even

say we have a notion, but only a consciousness which accompanies

all notions. In this _I_, or _he_ or _it_ (the thing) which thinks,

nothing more is represented than the bare transcendental Subject of the

knowledge = _x_, which is only recognized by the thoughts which are its

predicates, and of which, taken by itself, we cannot form the least

conception" (_ibid._ 'Paralogisms'). The pure Ego of all apperception

is thus for Kant not the soul, but only that 'Subject' which is the

necessary correlate of the Object in all knowledge. There _is_ a soul,

Kant thinks, but this mere ego-form of our consciousness tells us

nothing about it, neither whether it be substantial, nor whether it

be immaterial, nor whether it be simple, nor whether it be permanent.

These declarations on Kant's part of the utter barrenness of the

consciousness of the pure Self, and of the consequent impossibility of

any deductive or 'rational' psychology, are what, more than anything

else, earned for him the title of the 'all-destroyer.' The only self we

know anything positive _about_, he thinks, is the empirical _me_, not

the pure _I_; the self which is an object among other objects and the

'constituents' of which we ourselves have seen, and recognized to be

phenomenal things appearing in the form of space as well as time.

This, for our purposes, is a sufficient account of the 'transcendental'

Ego.

Those purposes go no farther than to ascertain whether anything in

Kant's conception ought to make us give up our own, of a remembering

and appropriating Thought incessantly renewed. In many respects Kant's

meaning is obscure, but it will not be necessary for us to squeeze the

texts in order to make sure what it actually and historically was. If

we can define clearly two or three things which it may _possibly_ have

been, that will help us just as much to clear our own ideas.

On the whole, a defensible interpretation of Kant's view would take

somewhat the following shape. Like ourselves he believes in a Reality

outside the mind of which he writes, but the critic who vouches for

that reality does so on grounds of faith, for it is not a verifiable

phenomenal thing. Neither is it manifold. The 'Manifold' which the

intellectual functions combine is a mental manifold altogether, which

thus _stands between_ the Ego of Apperception and the outer Reality,

but still stands inside the mind. In the function of knowing there is a

multiplicity to be connected, and Kant brings this multiplicity inside

the mind. The Reality becomes a mere empty _locus_, or unknowable, the

so-called Noumenon; the manifold phenomenon is in the mind. We, on the

contrary, put the Multiplicity with the Reality outside, and leave

the mind simple. Both of us deal with the same elements--thought and

object--the only question is in which of them the multiplicity shall

be lodged. Wherever it is lodged it must be 'synthetized' when it

comes to be thought. And that particular way of lodging it will be the

better, which, in addition to describing the facts naturally, makes the

'mystery of synthesis' least hard to understand.

Well, Kant's way of describing the facts is mythological. The notion

of our thought being this sort of an elaborate internal machine-shop

stands condemned by all we said in favor of its simplicity on pages

276 ff. Our Thought is not composed of parts, however so composed

its objects may be. There is no originally chaotic manifold in it

to be reduced to order. There is something almost shocking in the

notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurly-burly in

her womb. If we are to have a dualism of Thought and Reality at all,

the multiplicity should be lodged in the latter and not in the former

member of the couple of related terms. The parts and their relations

surely belong less to the knower than to what is known.

But even were all the mythology true, the process of synthesis would

in no whit be _explained_ by calling the inside of the mind its seat.

No mystery would be made lighter by such means. It is just as much

a puzzle _how_ the 'Ego' can employ the productive Imagination to

make the Understanding use the categories to combine the data which

Recognition, Association, and Apprehension receive from sensible

Intuition, as how the Thought can combine the objective facts.

Phrase it as one may, the difficulty is always the same: _the Many

known by the One_. Or does one seriously think he understands better

_how_ the knower 'connects' its objects, when one calls the former a

transcendental Ego and the latter a 'Manifold of Intuition' than when

one calls them Thought and Things respectively? Knowing must have a

vehicle. Call the vehicle Ego, or call it Thought, Psychosis, Soul,

Intelligence, Consciousness, Mind, Reason, Feeling,--what you like--it

must _know_. The best grammatical subject for the verb _know_ would,

if possible, be one from whose other properties the knowing could

be deduced. And if there be no such subject, the best one would be

that with the fewest ambiguities and the least pretentious name. By

Kant's confession, the transcendental Ego has no properties, and from

it nothing can be deduced. Its name is pretentious, and, as we shall

presently see, has its meaning ambiguously mixed up with that of the

substantial soul. So on every possible account we are excused from

using it instead of our own term of the present passing 'Thought,' as

the principle by which the Many is simultaneously known.

* * * * *

The _ambiguity_ referred to in the meaning of the transcendental Ego is

as to whether Kant signified by it an _Agent_, and by the Experience

it helps to constitute, an operation; or whether the experience is an

event _produced_ in an unassigned way, and the Ego a mere indwelling

_element_ therein contained. If an operation be meant, then Ego and

Manifold must both be existent prior to that collision which results

in the experience of one by the other. If a mere analysis is meant,

there is no such prior existence, and the elements only _are_ in so

far as they are in union. Now Kant's tone and language are everywhere

the very words of one who is talking of operations and the agents by

which they are performed.[288] And yet there is reason to think that

at bottom he may have had nothing of the sort in mind.[289] In this

uncertainty we need again do no more than decide what to think of his

transcendental Ego _if it be_ an agent.

Well, if it be so, Transcendentalism is only Substantialism grown

shame-faced, and the Ego only a 'cheap and nasty' edition of the soul.

All our reasons for preferring the 'Thought' to the 'Soul' apply with

redoubled force when the Soul is shrunk to this estate. The Soul truly

explained nothing; the 'syntheses,' which she performed, were simply

taken ready-made and clapped on to her as expressions of her nature

taken after the fact; but at least she had some semblance of nobility

and outlook. She was called active; might select; was responsible, and

permanent in her way. The Ego is simply _nothing_: as ineffectual and

windy an abortion as Philosophy can show. It would indeed be one of

Reason's tragedies if the good Kant, with all his honesty and strenuous

pains, should have deemed this conception an important outbirth of his

thought.

But we have seen that Kant deemed it of next to no importance at all.

It was reserved for his Fichtean and Hegelian successors to call it

the first Principle of Philosophy, to spell its name in capitals and

pronounce it with adoration, to act, in short, as if they were going

up in a balloon, whenever the notion of it crossed their mind. Here

again, however, I am uncertain of the facts of history, and know that

I may not read my authors aright. The whole lesson of Kantian and

post-Kantian speculation is, it seems to me, the lesson of simplicity.

With Kant, complication both of thought and statement was an inborn

infirmity, enhanced by the musty academicism of his Königsberg

existence. With Hegel it was a raging fever. Terribly, therefore, do

the sour grapes which these fathers of philosophy have eaten set our

teeth on edge. We have in England and America, however, a contemporary

continuation of Hegelism from which, fortunately, somewhat simpler

deliverances come; and, unable to find any definite psychology in what

Hegel, Rosenkranz, or Erdmann tells us of the Ego, I turn to Caird and

Green.

* * * * *

The great difference, practically, between these authors and Kant is

their complete abstraction from the onlooking Psychologist and from

the Reality he thinks he knows; or rather it is the absorption of

both of these outlying terms into the proper topic of Psychology,

viz., the mental experience of the mind under observation. The Reality

coalesces with the connected Manifold, the Psychologist with the Ego,

knowing becomes 'connecting,' and there results no longer a finite or

criticisable, but an 'absolute' Experience, of which the Object and

the Subject are always the same. Our finite 'Thought' is virtually and

potentially this eternal (or rather this 'timeless'), absolute Ego,

and only provisionally and speciously the limited thing which it seems

_prima facie_ to be. The later 'sections' of our 'Stream,' which come

and appropriate the earlier ones, _are_ those earlier ones, just as

in substantialism the Soul is throughout all time the same.[290] This

'solipsistic' character of an Experience conceived as absolute really

annihilates psychology as a distinct body of science.

Psychology is a natural science, an account of particular finite

streams of thought, coexisting and succeeding in time. It is of course

conceivable (though far from clearly so) that in the last metaphysical

resort all these streams of thought may be thought by one universal

All-thinker. But in this metaphysical notion there is no profit for

psychology; for grant that one Thinker does think in all of us, still

what He thinks in me and what in you can never be deduced from the

bare idea of Him. The idea of Him seems even to exert a positively

paralyzing effect on the mind. The existence of finite thoughts is

suppressed altogether. Thought's characteristics, as Professor Green

says, are

"not to be sought in the incidents of individual lives which last but

for a day.... No knowledge, nor any mental act involved in knowledge,

can properly be called a 'phenomenon of consciousness.'... For a

phenomenon is a sensible event, related in the way of antecedence or

consequence to other sensible events, but the consciousness which

constitutes a knowledge ... is not an event so related nor made up of

such events."

Again, if

"we examine the constituents of any perceived object,... we shall find

alike that it is only for consciousness that they can exist, and that

the consciousness for which they thus exist cannot be merely a series

of phenomena or a succession of states.... It then becomes clear

that there is a function of consciousness, as exercised in the most

rudimentary experience [namely, the function of _synthesis_] which

is incompatible with the definition of consciousness as any sort of

succession of any sort of phenomena."[291]

Were we to follow these remarks, we should have to abandon our notion

of the 'Thought' (perennially renewed in time, but always cognitive

thereof), and to espouse instead of it an entity copied from thought

in all essential respects, but differing from it in being 'out of

time.' What psychology can gain by this barter would be hard to divine.

Moreover this resemblance of the timeless Ego to the Soul is completed

by other resemblances still. The monism of the post-Kantian idealists

seems always lapsing into a regular old-fashioned spiritualistic

dualism. They incessantly talk as if, like the Soul, their All-thinker

were an Agent, operating on detached materials of sense. This may come

from the accidental fact that the English writings of the school have

been more polemic than constructive, and that a reader may often take

for a positive profession a statement _ad hominem_ meant as part of a

reduction to the absurd, or mistake the analysis of a bit of knowledge

into elements for a dramatic myth about its creation. But I think the

matter has profounder roots. Professor Green constantly talks of the

'activity' of Self as a 'condition' of knowledge taking place. Facts

are said to become incorporated with other facts only through the

'_action_ of a combining self-consciousness upon data of sensation.'

"Every object we perceive ... requires, in order to its presentation,

the _action_ of a principle of consciousness, not itself subject to

conditions of time, upon successive appearances, such action as may

_hold the appearances together_, without fusion, in an apprehended

fact."[292]

It is needless to repeat that the connection of things in our

knowledge is in no whit _explained_ by making it the deed of an agent

whose essence is self-identity and who is out of time. The agency

of phenomenal thought coming and going in time is just as easy to

_understand_. And when it is furthermore said that the agent that

combines is the same 'self-distinguishing subject' which 'in another

mode of its activity' presents the manifold object to itself, the

unintelligibilities become quite paroxysmal, and we are forced to

confess that the entire school of thought in question, in spite of

occasional glimpses of something more refined, still dwells habitually

in that mythological stage of thought where phenomena are explained

as results of dramas enacted by entities which but reduplicate the

characters of the phenomena themselves. The self must not only _know_

its object,--that is too bald and dead a relation to be written down

and left in its static state. The knowing must be painted as a 'famous

victory' in which the object's distinctness is in some way 'overcome.'

"The self exists as one self only as it opposes itself, as object,

to itself as subject, and immediately denies and transcends that

opposition. Only because it is such a concrete unity, which has in

itself a resolved contradiction, can the intelligence cope with all

the manifoldness and division of the mighty universe, and hope to

master its secrets. As the lightning sleeps in the dew-drop, so in

the simple and transparent unity of self-consciousness there is held

in equilibrium that vital antagonism of opposites which ... seems to

rend the world asunder. The intelligence is able to understand the

world, or, in other words, to break down the barrier between itself

and things and find itself in them, just because its own existence

is implicitly the solution of all the division and conflict of

things."[293]

This dynamic (I had almost written dynamitic) way of representing

knowledge has the merit of not being tame. To turn from it to our

own psychological formulation is like turning from the fireworks,

trap-doors, and transformations of the pantomime into the insipidity of

the midnight, where

"ghastly through the drizzling rain,

On the bald street breaks the blank day!"[294]

And yet turn we must, with the confession that our 'Thought'--a

cognitive phenomenal event in time--is, if it exist at all, itself

the only Thinker which the facts require. The only service that

transcendental egoism has done to psychology has been by its protests

against Hume's 'bundle'-theory of mind. But this service has been

ill-performed; for the Egoists themselves, let them say what they will,

believe in the bundle, and in their own system merely _tie it up_,

with their special transcendental string, invented for that use alone.

Besides, they talk as if, with this miraculous tying or 'relating,'

the Ego's duties were done. Of its far more important duty of choosing

some of the things it ties and appropriating them, to the exclusion of

the rest, they tell us never a word. To sum up, then, my own opinion

of the transcendentalist school, it is (whatever ulterior metaphysical

truth it may divine) a school in which psychology at least has naught

to learn, and whose deliverances about the Ego in particular in no wise

oblige us to revise our own formulation of the Stream of Thought.[295]

* * * * *

With this, all possible rival formulations have been discussed. The

literature of the Self is large, but all its authors may be classed

as radical or mitigated representatives of the three schools we have

named, substantialism, associationism, or transcendentalism. Our own

opinion must be classed apart, although it incorporates essential

elements from all three schools. _There need never have been a quarrel

between associationism and its rivals if the former had admitted the

indecomposable unity of every pulse of thought, and the latter been

willing to allow that 'perishing' pulses of thought might recollect and

know._

We may sum up by saying that personality implies the incessant presence

of two elements, an objective person, known by a passing subjective

Thought and recognized as continuing in time. _Hereafter let us use the

words_ ME _and_ I _for the empirical person and the judging Thought._

* * * * *

_Certain vicissitudes in the me demand our notice._

In the first place, although its changes are gradual, they become in

time great. The central part of the _me_ is the feeling of the body

and of the adjustments in the head; and in the feeling of the body

should be included that of the general emotional tones and tendencies,

for at bottom these are but the habits in which organic activities

and sensibilities run. Well, from infancy to old age, this assemblage

of feelings, most constant of all, is yet a prey to slow mutation.

Our powers, bodily and mental, change at least as fast.[296] Our

possessions notoriously are perishable facts. The identity which

the _I_ discovers, as it surveys this long procession, can only be a

relative identity, that of a slow shifting in which there is always

some common ingredient retained.[297] The commonest element of all, the

most uniform, is the possession of the same memories. However different

the man may be from the youth, both look back on the same childhood,

and call it their own.

Thus the identity found by the _I_ in its _me_ is only a loosely

construed thing, an identity 'on the whole,' just like that which

any outside observer might find in the same assemblage of facts. We

often say of a man 'he is so changed one would not know him'; and so

does a man, less often, speak of himself. These changes in the _me_,

recognized by the I, or by outside observers, may be grave or slight.

They deserve some notice here.

THE MUTATIONS OF THE SELF

may be divided into two main classes:

1. Alterations of memory; and

2. Alterations in the present bodily and spiritual selves.

* * * * *

1. _Alterations of memory_ are either _losses_ or false recollections.

In either case the _me_ is changed. Should a man be punished for what

he did in his childhood and no longer remembers? Should he be punished

for crimes enacted in post-epileptic unconsciousness, somnambulism,

or in any involuntarily induced state of which no recollection is

retained? Law, in accord with common-sense, says: "No; he is not the

same person forensically now which he was then." These losses of memory

are a normal incident of extreme old age, and the person's _me_ shrinks

in the ratio of the facts that have disappeared.