How the human individual forms these concepts and finds them verified in his own “self,” how he gradually comes into conscious possession of the knowledge of his own individual being as an Ego, self, or person, are problems for Psychology.[305] It will be sufficient here to point out that there are grounds for distinguishing between the individual's implicit subjective awareness of his subsistence or “selfhood”—an awareness which accompanies all his conscious mental functions, and which becomes more explicit and definite as the power of introspection and reflex consciousness develops—and the “abstract quasi-objective notion of his own personality habitually possessed by every human being”.[306]
The individual human being immediately apprehends his own existence, and his abiding unity or sameness throughout incessantly changing states, in the temporal series of his conscious activities; but his knowledge of the nature of his own being can be the result only of a long and carefully conducted analysis of his own activities, and of inferences based on the character of these activities. The former or implicit knowledge of the self in the concrete is direct and intuitive. The individual Ego apprehends itself in its states. This knowledge comes mainly from within, and is subject to gradual development. Father Maher thus describes how the child comes gradually into possession of it:—
As thoughts of pleasures and pains repeated in the past and expected in the future grow more distinct, the dissimilarity between these and the permanent abiding self comes to be more fully realized. Passing emotions of fear, anger, vanity, pride, or sympathy, accentuate the difference. But [pg 275] most probably it is the dawning sense of power to resist and overcome rising impulse, and the dim nascent consciousness of responsibility, which lead up to the final revelation, until at last, in some reflective act of memory or choice, or in some vague effort to understand the oft-heard “I,” the great truth is manifested to him: the child enters, as it were, into possession of his personality, and knows himself as a Self-conscious Being. The Ego does not create but discovers itself. In Jouffroy's felicitous phrase, it “breaks its shell,” and finds that it is a Personal Agent with an existence and individuality of its own, standing henceforward alone in opposition to the universe.[307]
After this stage is reached, the human individual easily distinguishes between the “self” as the cause or subject of the states, and the states as modifications of the self. This distinction is implicit in the concomitant awareness of self which accompanies all exercise of direct cognitive consciousness. It is explicit in all deliberate acts of reflex, introspective self-consciousness. The data from which we form the abstract concepts of substance, nature, individual, person, self, etc., and from which we arrive by reasoning at a philosophical knowledge of the nature and personality of the human individual, are furnished mainly by introspection; but also in part by external observation of the universe around us.
Concomitantly, however, with the process by which we become implicitly but immediately aware of the Ego or self as an abiding self-identical person in and through our own mental activity, we gradually form a quasi-objective and historical view of our own personality as one of a number of similar personalities around us in the universe. This view, says Father Maher,
gathers into itself the history of my past life—the actions of my childhood, boyhood, youth, and later years. Interwoven with them all is the image of my bodily organism, and clustering around are a fringe of recollections of my dispositions, habits, and character, of my hopes and regrets, of my resolutions and failures, along with a dim consciousness of my position in the minds of other selves.
Under the form of a representation of this composite art, bound together by the thread of memory, each of us ordinarily conceives his complete abiding personality. This idea is necessarily undergoing constant modification; and it is in comparing the present form of the representation with the past, whilst adverting to considerable alterations in my character, bodily appearance, and the like, that I sometimes say: “I am completely changed,” “I am quite another person,” though I am, of course, convinced that it is the same “I” who am changed in accidental qualities. It is because this complex notion of my personality is an abstraction from my remembered experiences [pg 276] that a perversion of imagination and a rupture of memory can sometimes induce the so-called “illusions or alterations of personality”.[308]
When we remember that this objective conception of the self is so dependent on the function of memory, and that the normal exercise of this faculty is in turn so dependent on the normal functioning of the brain and the nervous system,[309] we can hazard an intelligible explanation of the abnormal facts recorded by most modern psychologists concerning hypnotism, somnambulism and “double” or “multiple” consciousness.[310] Father Maher, ascribing these phenomena partly to dislocations of memory, partly to unusual groupings of mental states according to the laws of mental association—groupings that arise from peculiar physiological connexions between the various neural functionings of the brain centres,—and partly to semi-conscious or reflex nerve processes, emphasizes an important fact that is sometimes lost sight of: the fact that some section at least of the individual's conscious mental life is common to, and present throughout, the two or more “states” or “conditions” between which any such abnormal individual is found to alternate. This consideration is itself sufficient to disprove the theory—to which we shall presently refer—that there is or may be in the individual human being a double, or even a multiple “human personality”.
75. False Theories of Personality.—It is plain that conscious mental activity cannot constitute human personality, or subconscious mental activity either, for all activity is of the accidental mode of being, is an accident, whereas a person must be a substance. Of course it is the self-conscious cognitive activity of the human individual that reveals to the latter his own self as a person: it is the exercise of reflex consciousness combined with memory that gives us the feeling of personal identity with ourselves throughout the changing events of our mental and bodily life. Furthermore, this self-consciousness has its root in the rational nature of the human individual; and rationality of nature is the differentiating principle which makes the subsisting individual a “person” as distinct from a (subsisting) “thing”. But then, it is not the feeling of personal identity that constitutes the person. Actual consciousness is neither the essence, nor the [pg 277] source, nor even the index of personality; for it is only an activity, and an activity which reveals immediately not the person as such, but the nature as rational;[311] nor does the rational (substantial) principle of a composite nature constitute the latter a person; but only the subsistence of the complete (composite) individual nature itself.
These considerations are sufficiently obvious; they presuppose, however, the truth of the traditional doctrine already explained in regard to the existence, nature and cognoscibility of substance. Philosophers who have misunderstood and rejected and lost this traditional doctrine of substance have propounded many varieties of unsatisfactory and inconsistent theories in regard to what constitutes “person” and “personality”. The main feature of all such theories is their identification of personality with the habitual consciousness of self, or habitual feeling of personal identity: a feeling which, however, must be admitted to include memory in some form, while the function of memory in any shape or form cannot be satisfactorily explained on any theory of the human Ego which denies that there is a human substance persisting permanently as a unifying principle of successive mental states ([63-4]).