"The fact of recognizing a sensation,... remembering that it has been felt before, is the simplest and most elementary fact of memory: and the inexplicable tie ... which connects the present consciousness 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 something real in this tie, real as the sensations themselves, and not a mere product of the laws of thought without any fact 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 common element is a permanent element. But beyond this we can affirm nothing of it except the states of consciousness themselves. The feelings 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."[284]
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.[285] In this place the concessions amount, so far as they are intelligible, to the admission of something very like the Soul. This 'inexplicable 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 no real tie. But whereas Hume was contented to say that there might after all be no 'real tie,' Mill, unwilling to admit this possibility, is driven, like any scholastic, to place it in a non-phenomenal world.
John Mill's concessions may be regarded as the definitive bankruptcy of the associationist description of the consciousness 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 must beg memory, knowledge on the part of the feelings 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 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 disconnections 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 exactly 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 resemblance with the present—outweigh those I perceive for disowning it—viz., distance in time. My present Thought stands thus in the plenitude of ownership of the train of my past selves, is owner not only de facto, but de jure, the most real owner there can be, and all without the supposition of any 'inexplicable tie,' but in a perfectly verifiable and phenomenal way.
Turn we now to what we may call
THE TRANSCENDENTALIST THEORY.
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 description of it on [p. 275] ff., that is, it is a system of things, qualities or facts in relation. "Object is that in the knowledge (Begriff) of which the Manifold of a given Perception is connected."[286] But whereas we simply begged the vehicle of this connected knowledge in the shape of what we call the present Thought, or section of the Stream of Consciousness (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 Apperception. It is the one essential spontaneity of the Understanding 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 faculties to the Understanding, for the latter is not an intuitive faculty, but by nature 'empty.' And the bringing of this material 'under the unity of Apperception' is explained by Kant to mean the thinking it always so that, whatever its other determinations be, it may be known as thought by me.[287] Though this consciousness, that I 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 experience. No connected consciousness of anything without that of Self as its presupposition and 'transcendental' condition! All things, then, so far as they are intelligible at all, are so through combination with pure consciousness of Self, 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 quâ 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 consciousness about it is, according to him, short enough. Self-consciousness 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: I; of which we cannot even say we have a notion, but only a consciousness which accompanies all notions. In this I, or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing more is represented than the bare transcendental Subject of the knowledge = x, which is only recognized by the thoughts which are its predicates, 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 immaterial, nor whether it be simple, nor whether it be permanent. 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 I; 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.