The Unity of Consciousness.
2. The same holds true of the unity of consciousness, of which we are directly convinced. It is quite inexplicable [pg 315] if consciousness is a function of the extended and divisible physical substratum which is built up of nerve-cells and nerve-fibres. And yet this unity is the fundamental condition of our whole inner life.
Even the facts of association demonstrate it. Two images could not come together, the one could not call up the other, if they were not possessed in the same consciousness, and could unite in it. It is the preliminary condition of every higher mode of thought, of every relating of things, of every comparison and abstraction. No judgment can be formed, no conclusion drawn without this. How could a predicate become associated with its subject, or a principal clause with its subordinate clause, if they were in separate consciousnesses, and how could the conclusion be drawn from them?
Consciousness of the Ego.
3. This unified self-consciousness is consciousness of the ego. It is only by means of an artificial abstraction that we can leave out of account in the consideration of processes of thought the peculiar factor of personal relationship that absolutely attaches to every thought within us. There are no thoughts in general that play their part of themselves alone. “It” never “thinks” in me. On the contrary, all sensation, thought, and will has in every human being a peculiar central relationship to which we refer when we say “my idea,” “my sensation.” What the “I” is cannot be defined. It is that through which the relation of all [pg 316] experiences and actions is referred to a point, and through which the treasuring of them for good or ill, the appreciation, the valuation of them is accomplished. And it plays its part even in the case of cold and indifferent items of knowledge. For instance, that twice two are four is not simply a perception, it is my perception. Of the ego itself nothing more can be said than that it is the thought of me as the subject of all experience, willing, and action, and if we try to take hold of it nothing more than this formula remains. Yet the fact that the ego is the subject of all this, gives conduct, will, and experience that peculiar character which distinguishes them from mere action and reaction. For it is directly certain that all the psychical contents are not only co-existences in one consciousness but that they are possessed by it.
Thus in summing up we have to say, that it is through the ego that all psychical activities and experiences are centred and related, that the ego is itself the point of relation, that it is the reason of the unity of consciousness and of the possibility of self-consciousness, and that in all this it is the most certain reality, without which the simplest psychical life would be impossible. At the same time, it is difficult to state what the “ego” is in itself, apart from the effects in which it reveals itself.