The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

To the usual empiricist explanation of personal conscious. ness 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. A.11 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 col lects, — ' 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 ad mit 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 indi vidual 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 con tinuity 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 en tire stream of thought and all the selves that may be represented in it. as the ever selfsame and changeless

principle implied in their union. The 'Soul' of Meta physics and the * Transcendental Ego' of the Kantian Philosophy, are, as we shall soon see, but attempts to sat isfy 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 com mon-sense contends. For how would it be if the Thought, the present judg ing 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 conscious ness, each Thought, dies away and is replaced by another. The other, among the things it knows, knows its own prede cessor, and finding it 'warm,' in the way we have de scribed, greets it, saying : " Thou art mine, and part of the same self with me." Each later Thought, knowing and in cluding 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 nas cent 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, im possible 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-asrepresentative, and such adopting, are perfectly clear phe nomenal relations. The Thought which, whilst it knows another Thought and the Object of that Other, appro priates the Other and the Object which the Other appro priated, 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 appropria tion 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 appro priates to itself, it is the actual focus of accretion, the hook from which the chain of r>ast selves dangles, planted firmlv

in the Present, which alone passes for real, and thus keep ing 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 in trospection 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.* Such consciousness, then,

* Some subtle rentier will object that the Thought cannot call any part of its Object 'I ' and knit other parts on to it, without first knitting that part on to Itself; and that it cannot knit it on to Itself without knowing Itself ; — so that our supposition (above, p. 304) that the Thought may conceivably have no immediate knowledge of Itself is thus overthrown. To which the reply is that we must take care not to be duped by words. The words /and me signify nothing mysterious and unexampled— they are at bottom only names of empJiasis ; and Thought is always emphasizing something. Within a tract of space which it cognizes, it contrasts a here with a there ; within a tract of time a now with a then : of a pair of things it calls one this, the other that. I and thou, I and it, are distinctions exactly on a par with these, — distinctions possible in an exclusively objective field of knowledge, the ' I ' meaning for the Thought nothing but the bodily life which it momentarily feels. The sense of my bodily existence, however obscurely recognized as such, may then be the absolute original of my con scious selfhood, the fundamental perception Hint lam. All appropriations may be made to it, by a Thought not at the moment immediately cognized by itself. Whether these are not only logical possibilities but actual facts is something not yet dogmatically decided in the text.

as a psychologic fact, can be fully described without sup« posiiig 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. 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 iden tity. Each pulse would le 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 his torically been used to prove his reality. To a brief survey of the theories of the Ego let us then next proceed. They are three in number, as follows : In Chapter YI we were led ourselves to the spiritualist theory of the ' Soul,' as a means of escape from the unintelligibilities of inind-stutf ' 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 jdt unexplained. The theory of the Soul is the theory of popular philoso phy and of scholasticism, which is only popular philosophy made systematic. It declares that the principle of individ uality within us must be substantial, for psychic phenomena are activities, and there can be no activity without a con crete 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 in compatible with the nature of matter, of which the brain is composed. Thought moreover is simple, whilst the ac tivities of the brain are compounded of the elementary ac tivities of each of its parts. Furthermore, thought is spon taneous 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 prin ciple 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 essen tial 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 en tity of whose existence self-consciousness makes us directly aware. No material agent could thus turn round and grasp itsdf — material activities always grasp something else than the agent. And if a brain could grasp itself and be selfconscious, 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 sub ject in which to inhere. At bottom its only positive deter mination 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 substan tiality of the Soul are its incorruptibility and natural im mortality — 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 spirit ualistic or common-sense school. Kant held to it while denying its fruitfulness as a premise for deducing conse quences verifiable here below. Kant's successors, the abso lute 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 sub jective phenomena of consciousness as they appear. We have formulated them all without its aid, by the supposi tion of a stream of thoughts, each substantially different from the rest, but cognitive of the rest and ' appropriate ' 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 row. The unity, the identity, the individuality, and the immateri ality that appear in the psychic life are thus accounted tol 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 ia 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 im mortal or incorruptible thing. Its successors may contin uously 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 sup posed 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 ivhen 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 corning of the thought, when the brain-processes

occur, has some sort of ground in the nature of things ? U 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 exist ence 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 pro visional 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 ex planations 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 promis ing hypothesis, in spite of all its difficulties, than that of a lot of absolutely individual souls. Meanwhile, as psycholo gists, 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 universals, immate rials, 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 cog nize one sort of thing as well as another. The great diffi culty 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 charac ter 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 con sciousness duplicating the one we know.

Altogether, the Soul is an outbirth of that sort of phi losophizing 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 spiritual istic, or dualistic philosophy — the Scotch school, as it is often called among us — are forward to proclaim this igno rance, 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, remem bers, 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 exer tion of its own powers that the mind becomes cognizant of their existence. The cognizance of its powers, however, gives us no knoAvledge 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 sub scribe 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 simpli city 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 Cre ator does not by a direct miracle snuff it out. Unques tionably 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 scecula sceculorum 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 rediculous n\ 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 ' sub stance ' ought surely to perish, we think, if not worthy to survive; and an insubstantial 'stream7 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 immor tality is about all that human wisdom can say : " We have no other principle for deciding it than this general ideal istic 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 tran sitory 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." *

A second alleged necessity for a soul-substance is our forensic responsibility before God. Locke caused an up roar when he said that the unity of consciousness made a man the same person, whether supported by the same sub stance 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 mem ory, cannot possibly be as ' responsible ' as a soul which is at the judgment day all that it ever was. To modern read ers, however, who are less insatiate for retribution than their grandfathers, this argument will hardly be as con vincing 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 individu ality 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 sepa-

* Metaphysik, §245 fin. This writer, who In his early work, the Mediziuisohe Psychologic, was (to my reading) a strong defender of the Soul- Substance theory, has written in §§ 243-5 of Ins Metaphysik the most beautifnl criticism of this theory which exists. rate 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 prac tically maintains itself as a closed individual, why, as Lotze says, is not that enough ? And why is the frem^-an-individual in some inaccessible metaphysical way so much prouder an achievement ? *

My final conclusion, then, about the substantial Soul is that it explains nothing and guarantees nothing. Its suc cessive 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 ra tional 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 cred ible sort. I therefore feel entirely free to discard the word Soul from the rest of this book. If I ever use it, it will bo in the vaguest and most popular way. The reader who finds any comfort in the idea of the Soul, is, however, per fectly 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.

Locke paved the way for it by the hypothesis he sug< gested of the same substance having two successive con- * On the empirical and transcendental conceptions of the self's unity. see Lotzfi- Metaphysic, § 244. Bciousnesses, or of tlie 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.