consciousness as a name for it, a term strictly denoting only knowledge, and that mediate knowledge. The objection we are combating is largely due to this most equivocal term and falls to the ground when that equivocation is exposed1.

It would come nearer to our crucial question if the objection just considered were amended by asking with what right we make an intellectual abstraction the subject of an existential proposition. There is certainly no such right, and the psychologists who substitute the abstract 'consciousness' for the concrete conscious subject, alone forget this. The I of the 'I am,' the sole text of the 'rational psychology' that Kant criticized and equally the I of the 'I think' of Descartes' Cogito ergo sum, if taken as a res completa, is an abstraction. But that pure subject or Ego which we reach in our analysis of experience at its rational level stands for no abstraction so long as we are content to distinguish it without attempting to separate it from its objective complement, the non-Ego. When in some supreme issue a man affirms himself saying, like Caesar crossing the Rubicon or Luther entering Worms, 'I will,' to tell him then that this I of which he speaks is itself an utter abstraction, because our concept of it is the limit of a long process of intellection-surely this would be outrageous.

At any rate, it may be rejoined, the I in such a case is the empirical Ego that figures in history, not some ideal or transcendental Ego that is never to be found and will never be missed. Plausible as such a defence might appear to the man in the street, it is nevertheless partly demonstrably false, partly false in fact. To identify I and Me is logically impossible, for, ex vi terminorum, it is to identify subject and object. Moreover it is the I-not the Me-that, as feeling and acting, is essential to any experience, whilst the Me is essential only to some. Again the attempt to discredit the concept of the pure Ego or experient

1 Cf. above, ch. i, § 5, pp. 21 f.

2 Cf. Herbart, Psychologie als Wissenschaft u.s.w. § 29.

3 Cf. W. James, Principles of Psychology, 1890, i. pp. 360 ff.

An appeal to the law of identity' might perplex some (cf. F. H. Bradley's Appearance and Reality, ch. ix. On Self, and elsewhere) but would not really help. We may say I=1 and Me=Me. But as soon as we say I= Me, as in the French je me connais, already cited, we have two terms asymmetrically related and therefore on the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, the I cannot be the Me nor the Me the I. At the same time the objective Me is impossible without the subjective I.

subject by confusing or ignoring the wide difference of meaning between transcendental and transcendent is an attempt that can only impress the ill-informed. We do not maintain that the subject transcends experience, but on the contrary that it is always immanent in experience. This necessary immanencethe fact that experience without an experient is unintelligible— is just what transcendental here implies. The concept of a synthesizing subject, that is to say, is epistemologically a priori. To call Kant's transcendental unity only "substantialism grown shame-faced, and the Ego only 'a cheap and nasty' edition of the soul" is a blunder simply1.

The objector may, however, persist: Is it then pretended that there is no difficulty in maintaining that this pure subject is immanent in experience while yet maintaining that it is never a direct object of experience? And we can only repeat: There would certainly be a difficulty if we maintained that the subject of experience could ever be the direct object of its own experience2. At the same time it is noteworthy that Kant, who made this logical impossibility clear, did admit a difficulty. "The whole difficulty," he said, "lies in this, how a subject can internally intuite itself; only this is a difficulty common to all theories alike." But then Kant is speaking as an advocate of an inner sense and of theories which accept this position. The question is whether there is a like difficulty for those who, rejecting that doctrine, regard self-consciousness as an intellectual process possible only at the social and rational level of experience.

It may be held that Kant's difficulty does remain, changed in form but essentially the same. How the I can appropriate the Me as a presentation of itself is now the difficulty, even if the account here given of the content and the genesis of this presentation is sound. We are confronted, it might be said, with a

1 Cf. W. James, op. cit. i. p. 365.

2 Cf. Kant, Kritik, 1st ed. p. 346, M. M.'s trans. p. 301 (better rendered by Watson, Selections, p. 148), and especially his Fortschritte der Metaphysik, written ten years later, Hartenstein's ed. of his works, viii. pp. 530 f., to which Dr G. Dawes Hicks has referred me.

3 Op. cit. 2nd ed. p. 68. Later on Kant professed himself at a loss to know why people saw so much difficulty (see footnote at the end of § 24). Nevertheless the trouble it gave him is well known and his failure to remove it widely admitted. Cf. B. Erdmann, Kant's Kriticismus, 1878, pp. 212 ff.

problem like that raised by Locke's doctrine of external perception. How can you talk of ideas as copies if you cannot compare them with the originals? asked Berkeley and Reid. Similarly here we have to ask: What justification is there for calling the Me a 'reflexion' of the I if this, the subject of experience, is, as knower, precluded from being immediately known? But no, the cases are not similar. There the impression was a 'sense-datum' passively and privately received, here reflexion yields an 'intellective system,' a 'notion' as Berkeley termed it, actively and socially achieved. There the 'original' was another being here it is my own being. The existence of that might be denied, but the existence of this is indubitable; for if the existential proposition I am were false it could not be asserted. The I is known reflectively in the Me because the Me has been synthetically constructed by it, much as an artist paints his own portrait by means of a mirror. The mirror for self-consciousness is the social medium, and as this is perfected the portraiture improves. But the entire process from first to last-the cross lights of social intercourse, where each, as

...eye to eye opposed

Salutes each other with each other's form,

and the power 'to behold itself by going from itself,' the outward advance that becomes an inward revealing-all has depended not alone on what was 'given' to the self but also on what it has itself done.

We conclude then that we know intellectually what we are as experients into the empty 'form of consciousness' our being fits. Such empirical knowledge falls far short of the metaphysical doctrines which the old so-called rational psychology claimed to establish. On the other hand epistemologically it is worth far more. Psychology without a soul-as the 'rational psychologists' described soul-is quite possible but not psychology without a self, a being that in its acquaintance and intercourse with objects—that is, directly or indirectly, with other selves— feels and acts. Let the substantiality of this being be interpreted how it may, the actuality of it is past question and therefore never questioned1. It is here at length that being and knowing

1 The flagrant absurdity of the doctrine of W. James, already quoted, which transfers this actuality to the thought and recognizes a cogitatur but no cogito, maintaining that "the thoughts themselves are the thinkers is the final word of psychology"

meet and our original assumption is justified'. This, moreover, is the only kind of being that we can understand; and two things seem clear. First, we cannot, if we call this being a substance, use this term in the sense in which we use it of matter2; for we cannot conceive the self as actual at all, if we imagine it as experiencing nothing. Inertia, if applicable to what we call matter, is at least not applicable to what only is as it lives and acts. In a word, if we call this being a substance we must give that term the meaning that Leibniz gave it and not that given to it by Descartes and Spinoza. Secondly, we cannot call this actuality of the subject of experience, phenomenal. The reactions of A are indeed phenomenal for B who perceives them and whom they affect. So we come to describe experience as reciprocal interaction or mutuum commercium. This implies two agents and not merely two kinds of phenomena-one external, the other internal-whatever that may mean. Of what nature the agency is to which we owe our sense-data is a problem but to suppose that we ourselves are only phenomenal and resolvable into sense-data is after all impossible; for how then do we come to talk of the phenomenal as distinct from the real? But when we know both it is possible perhaps to talk of 'degrees of reality'; not, however, if we deny our own reality altogether.

It

(cf. above, ch. ii, § 2, p. 39 n.), is surely now apparent without detailed comment. is, in fact, inconsistent as well as absurd since James accepted Herbart's exposition of apperception to which his own is diametrically opposed (cf. his Principles of Psychology, ii. pp. 107-11). If however any reader desires further comment, I find I have already supplied it: see a 'critical notice' of James's Textbook of Psychology, Mind, 1892, p. 537.

1 Cf. above, ch. ii, § 2, p. 35.

3 Cf. Lotze, Metaphysik, § 307 fin.

2 Cf. above, ch. xiii, § 6, pp. 338 ff.

4 Cf. above, ch. i, § 3, pp. 14-16.

CHAPTER XVI

CONDUCT: VALUE, CHOICE and freeDOM

General Survey.

§ 1. The development of intellection and self-consciousness -with which in the last three chapters we have been exclusively occupied—is in reality accompanied by a corresponding development of the affective and active side of mind'. To describe in detail all the various sources of feeling and desire that arise in the course of this further advance-all the new interests, emotions, and sentiments called into being by intersubjective intercourse is altogether beyond the scope of a brief systematic essay like the present. But at least a general survey of this highest or rational level of affection and action is indispensable. To gain any oversight over a domain of such complexity, there is one fact to be kept steadily in view as the causes of feeling become more ideational and more 'internal,' lie more among the possibilities of the future and less among the actualities of the present, so our personal attitude or action changes in like manner2. We have noted this correspondence already at the lower level at which desires emerge, and we have seen too that desire, in prompting to the search for means to its realisation, is the primum movens of intellection whereby the haphazard gropings and failures of sense are largely avoided. And now— in keeping with what has just been said-we have to notice that

1 This we left last at what we may call the middle or ideational level: cf. above, ch. xi, § 3, pp. 281 ff.

* Cf. above, ch. x, § 4, pp. 268 f.

3 Cf. above, ch. xii, § 1 init., § 2 fin.