The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

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 exist ence and its continuance in existence, and are certain, beyond the evi dence 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 im pression that gives rise to every real idea. ... If any impression givea 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 moat 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 rever 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 cap 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 infi nite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it atone 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 percep tions 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 phe nomenal 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.

1 1 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. \ pretend not, however, to pronounce it insuperable. Others, perhaps, . . may discover some hypothesis that will reconcile these con tradictions." *

Hume is at bottom as much of a metaphysician as Thomas Aquinas. No wonder he can discover no ' hypoth esis.' 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 ' con nection than this obvious and verifiable likeness and con tinuity, 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 succes sors 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 de liverance and content. Out of such recurrences and resem blances in a series of discrete ideas and feelings a knowl edge 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 / came to be joined. In the same way, substantially, Herbavt,* in

* Herbart believed in the Soul, too; but for him the ' Self of which we are ' conscious ' is the empirical Self — not the soul. Germany, tried to show how a conflict of ideas would fuse into a manner of representing itself for which I was the con secrated name.* 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 re turns, it is no longer the same, but a widely different feel ing, and ought to be so described. We have so described it with the greatest explicitness. We have said that feel ings 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 cogni zant 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 falsi fies 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 isv 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 sub stance is unknown and unknowable, to which [why not say by which?] states of consciousness are referred as attri butes, but which in the process of reference becomes ob jectified and becomes itself an attribute of a subject Ego which lies still beyond, and which ever eludes cognition though ever postulated for cognition.' * 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 dis tinct from each other f 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 iso lated by a mental fiction, and is what we are conscious of as our self — ' this stable within is what each of us calls / or me.' Obviously M. Taine forgets to tell us what this ' each of us ' is, which suddenly starts up and performs the ab straction and * calls ' its product I or me. The character does not abstract itself. Taine means by 'each of us1 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 associ ated 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 f ' Distinct only to observation,' he adds. To whose observation? the outside psychologist's, the Ego's, their own, or the plank's? Darauf kommt es (in ! ' run, as it were, into a single point of consciousness.' * 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 as cended Skiddaw on a given day, and my consciousness of being the same person who ascended Skiddaw on that day, are two modes of stat ing the same fact : a fact which psychology has as yet failed to resolve into anything more elementary. In analyzing the complex phenomena of consciousness, v/e must come to something ultimate ; and we seem to have reached two elements which have a good prim a 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, wrhen 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 de rived 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 con nected 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 per ceive 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." f

* Analysis, etc., J. S. Mill's Edition, vol. i. p. 331. The ' as it were is delightfully characteristic of the school. f J. Mill's Analysis, vol. n. p. 175. 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 him self, in a laterwritten passage, so far from advancing in the line of analysis, seems to fall back upon something peril ously 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 mem ory : and the inexplicable tie . . . which connects tha present con sciousness 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 some thing real in this tie, real as the sensations themselves, and not a mere product of the laws of thought without any i'ac: 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 com mon element is a permanent element. But beyond this we can affirm nothing of it except the states of consciousness themselves. The feel ings 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." *

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. f In this place the f His chapter on the Psychological Theory of Mind is a beautiful case in point, and his concessions there have become so celebrated that they must be quoted for the reader's benefit. He ends the chapter with these words (loc. cit. p. 247): "The theory, therefore, which resolves Mind into a series of feelings, with a background of possibilities of feeling, can effectually withstand the most invidious of the arguments directed against it. But groundless as are the extrinsic objections, the theory has intrinsic difficul-

concessions amount, so far as they are intelligible, to the admission of something very like the Soul. This 'inex plicable 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

ties which we have not set forth, and which it seems to me beyond the power of metaphysical analysis to remove. . . , " The thread of consciousness which composes the mind's phenomenal life consist not only of present sensations, but likewise, iu part, of mem ories and expectations. Now what are these ? In themselves, they are present feelings, states of present consciousness, and in that respect not dis tinguished from sensations. They all, moreover, resemble some given sen sations or feelings, of which we have previously had experience. But they are attended with the peculiarity that each of them involves a belief in more than its own present existence. A sensation involves only this ; but a remembrance of sensation, even it' not referred to any particular date, in volves the suggestion and belief that a sensation, of which it is a copy or representation, actually existed in the past ; and an expectation involves the belief, more or less positive, that a sensation or other feeling to which it directly refers will exist in the future. Nor can the phenomena in volved in these two states of consciousness be adequately expressed, with out saying that the belief they include is, that I myself formerly had, or that I myself, and no other, shall hereafter have, the sensations remembered or expected. The fact believed is, that the sensations did actually form, or will hereafter form, part of the self-same series of states, or thread of con sciousness, of which the remembrance or expectation of those sensations is the part now present. If, therefore, we speak of the mind as a series of feelings we are obliged to complete the statement by calling it a series of feelings which is aware of itself as past and future ; and we are reduced to the alternative of believing that tho mind, or Ego, is something different from any series of feelings, or possibilities of them, or of accepting the paradox that something which ex hy pothesi is but a series of feelings, can be aware of itself as a series.

" The truth is. that we are here face to face with that final inexplicwno real tie. But whereas Hume was contented to say that there might after all be no ' real tie,' Mill, unwilling to ad mit this possibility, is driven, like any scholastic, to place it in a non-phenomenal world. John Mill's concessions may be regarded as the defini tive bankruptcy of the associationist description of the con sciousness 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 muse beg memory, knowledge on the part of the feel ings 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

bility, at which, as Sir W. Hamilton observes, we inevitably arrive when we reach ultimate facts ; and in general, one mode of stating it only appears more incomprehensible than another, because the whole of human lan guage is accommodated to the one, and is so incongruous with the other that it cannot be expressed in any terms which do not deny its truth. The real stumbling-block is perhaps not in any theory of the fact, but in the fact itself. The true incomprehensibly perhaps is, that something which has ceased, or is not yet in existence, can still be, in a manner, present; that a series of feelings, the infinitely greater part of which is past or future, can be gathered up, as it were, into a simple present conception, accompanied by a belief of reality. I think by far the wisest thing we can do is to accept the inexplicable fact, without any theory of how it takes place ; and when we are obliged to speak of it in terms which assume a theory, to use them with a reservation as to their meaning."

In a later place in the same book (p. 561) Mill, speaking of what may rightly be demanded of a theorist, says: "He is not entitled to frame a theory from one class of phenomena, extend it to another class which it does not fit, and excuse himself by saying that if we cannot make it fit, it is because ultimate facts are inexplicable." The class of phenomena which the associationist school takes to frame its theory of the Ego are feel ings unaware of each other. The class of phenomena the Ego presents are feelings of which the later ones are intensely aware of those that went be fore. The two classes do not 'fit,' and no exercise of ingenuity can ever make them fit. No shuffling of unaware feelings can make them aware. To get the awareness we must openly beg it by postulating a new feel ing which has it. This new feeling is no ' Theory ' of the phenomena, but a simple statement of them ; and as such I postulate in the text the present passing Thought as a psychic integer, with its knowledge of so much that has gone before.

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 disconnec tions 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 ex actly 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 resem blance with the present — outweigh those I perceive for dis owning it — viz., distance in time. My present Thought stands thus in the plenitude of ownership of the train oi my past selves, is owner not only de facto, but de jure, the most real owner there can be, and all without the supposi tion of any 'inexplicable tie,' but in a perfectly verifiable and phenomenal way.

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 de scription of it on p. 275 ft, that is, it is a system of things, qualities or facts in relation. "Object is that in the knowl edge (Begriff) of which the Manifold of a given Perception is connected." * But whereas we simply begged the vehi cle of this connected knowledge in the shape of what we call the present Thought, or section of the Stream of Con sciousness (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 Appercep tion. It is the one essential spontaneity of the Under standing 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 fac ulties to the Understanding, for the latter is not an intui tive faculty, but by nature ' empty.' And the bringing of this material ' under the unity of Apperception ' is ex plained by Kant to mean the thinking it always so that, whatever its other determinations be, it may be known as thought by me.* Though this consciousness, that / 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 ex perience. No connected consciousness of anything without that of Self&H its presupposition and ' transcendental ' condi tion ! All things, then, so far as they are intelligible at all, are so through combination with pure consciousness of Self, * It must be noticed, in justice to what was said above on page 274 ff., that neither Kant nor his successors anywhere discriminate between the presence of the apperceiving Ego to the combined object, and the aware ness by that Ego of its own presence and of its distinctness from what it apperceives. That the Object must be known to something which thinks, and that it must be known to something which thinks that it thinks, are treated by them as identical necessities, — by what logic, does not appear. Kant tries to soften the jump in the reasoning by saying the thought of it self on the part of the Ego need only be potential — " the 'I think ' must be capable of accompanying all other knowledge " — but a thought which is only potential is actually no thought at all, which practically gives up the

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 qua 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 con sciousness about it is, according to him, short enough. Selfconsciousness 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: /; of which we cannot even say we have a notion, but only a con sciousness which accompanies all notions. In this /, or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing more u represented than the bare transcendental Subject of the knowledge —x, which is only recognized by the thoughts which are its pre dicates, 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 imma terial, nor whether it be simple, nor whether it be per manent.

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 /; 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 ob scure, 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.