Can we say that the permanent consciousness is this selection?
An analogy between Kant and Darwin comes into light. That which is swings clear of the fleeting, in virtue of its presenting a feature of permanence. There is no need to suppose any function of “attending to.” A consciousness capable of giving an account of itself is one which is characterised by this combination. All combinations exist—of this kind is the consciousness which can give an account of itself. And the very duality which we have presupposed may be regarded as originated by a process of selection.
Darwin set himself to explain the origin of the fauna and flora of the world. He denied specific tendencies. He assumed an indefinite variability—that is, chance—but a chance confined within narrow limits as regards the magnitude of any consecutive variations. He showed that organisms possessing features of permanence, if they occurred would be preserved. So his account of any structure or organised being was that it possessed features of permanence.
Kant, undertaking not the explanation of any particular phenomena but of that which we call nature as a whole, had an origin of species of his own, an account of the flora and fauna of consciousness. He denied any specific tendency of the elements of consciousness, but taking our own consciousness, pointed out that in which it resembled any consciousness which could survive, which could give an account of itself.
He assumes a chance or random world, and as great and small were not to him any given notions of which he could make use, he did not limit the chance, the randomness, in any way. But any consciousness which is permanent must possess certain features—those attributes namely which give it permanence. Any consciousness like our own is simply a consciousness which possesses those attributes. The main thing is that which he calls the unity of apperception, which we have seen above is simply the statement that a particular set of phases of consciousness on the basis of complete randomness will be self-conjugate, and so permanent.
As with Darwin so with Kant, the reason for existence of any feature comes to this—show that it tends to the permanence of that which possesses it.
We can thus regard Kant as the creator of the first of the modern evolution theories. And, as is so often the case, the first effort was the most stupendous in its scope. Kant does not investigate the origin of any special part of the world, such as its organisms, its chemical elements, its social communities of men. He simply investigates the origin of the whole—of all that is included in consciousness, the origin of that “thought thing” whose progressive realisation is the knowable universe.
This point of view is very different from the ordinary one, in which a man is supposed to be placed in a world like that which he has come to think of it, and then to learn what he has found out from this model which he himself has placed on the scene.
We all know that there are a number of questions in attempting an answer to which such an assumption is not allowable.
Mill, for instance, explains our notion of “law” by an invariable sequence in nature. But what we call nature is something given in thought. So he explains a thought of law and order by a thought of an invariable sequence. He leaves the problem where he found it.