ART. IX.-ILLINGWORTH'S BAMPTON LECTURES.

Personality, Human and Divine: being the Bampton Lectures for the Year 1894. By J. R. ILLINGWORTH, M.A. (London, 1894)

THE Bampton Lecturer for 1894 has selected a subject immense both in compass and importance. It would deserve this description even if he treated it merely in the abstract. But he chose-and we heartily applaud his choice to regard personality not merely as a question of metaphysics and theology, but as one of religion and of life, both intellectual and moral; to watch the progress of thought upon the mighty theme, to observe the place it holds in the stages of social progress from barbarism to civilization and in the various religions, heathen, Jewish, and Christian, and in the forms of revelation through nature, through prophecy, and through Christ. Nor does the great history stop even there; for the developments of the idea of personality in the course of Christian theology furnish a further stage of the subject as important as all that has preceded. The author is well equipped even for such a task; but it is impossible that within the space allotted to him he should discuss with thorough sufficiency every department of his theme. Though his treatment of each head is never superficial, yet we often have to pass away from a branch of the subject still hungry for more of the intellectual food which is so excellent in the portion we have. Personality in the hands of the great thinkers of Greece; personality in the Fathers and the Councils of the Church; personality in relation to the doctrines of evolution, are each of them subjects well worthy to be considered alone, and upon any one of which we could wish a treatise from so competent a hand, as large as the whole volume which deals with so many more branches besides.

But this is no fit ground of complaint. We have always to make our choice between comprehensiveness and detail, and the light which comes to us upon the parts of a great whole in the course of a general survey are often full of guidance which we should not have received from a longer sojourn in separate parts. In the admirable Fourth Lecture, in which the ancient arguments-Cosmological, Teleological, Ontological, and Moral-are restated for the author's purpose, we are bound to say that the treatment of each branch, though short, contains the matter of many a volume.

have constantly found ourselves wishing that we could place the little treatise, though but a few pages long, in the hands of some thinker with whom we are acquainted through his books, and learn what he could say in reply.

But we are minded to essay the task of criticism rather than of eulogy, as the more useful and respectful both to the author and our readers. We are not, however, about to spend our time in showing what might have been said about points on which nothing more or better could have been said within the necessary limits. We shall choose quite another line, upon which, if we be right, our readers will allow that our difference with the author is not unimportant to his argument. We disagree with his metaphysic, and believe that he largely underrates the mystery of human personality, and describes it with a precision which is not legitimately possible to the human mind.

Such a charge may, perhaps, surprise some readers of Mr. Illingworth's lectures, since he repeatedly acknowledges the impossibility of defining personality. It cannot be exhaustively analysed, and cannot, therefore, be accurately defined' (p. 23). 'We cannot, strictly speaking, define personality, for the simple reason that we cannot place ourselves outside it' (p. 28).' But these, and many other like statements of the mystery, are insufficient so long as it is laid down that 'the fundamental character of personality is self-consciousness, the quality in the subject, of becoming an object to itself, or, in Locke's language, considering itself as itself and saying "I am I."' 2

The terms in which Mr. Illingworth describes the operation of his 'fundamental characteristic' prove that we are under no misconception when we suppose him to regard our self-consciousness, not as a primary and inscrutable condition of our human life, which, like life itself, ever escapes our understanding, but as a conclusion which our intellect draws in a reflection of somewhat advanced and educated character upon the phenomena which we discover. For, he proceeds. 'as in the very act of becoming thus self-conscious, I discover in myself desires and a will, the quality of self-consciousness immediately involves that of self-determination.' We, for our part, place self-consciousness, and with it personality, at a far earlier stage in human progress. It is discerned wherever the human being says, or even implies, I, with any verb whatever attached to the pronoun. To become self-conscious in Mr. 1 See also pp. 24, 25, 39, 41, 47, 74, 135, 153.

2 See pp. 28-9, 31-2, 38-9.

Illingworth's sense of the word, or to discover anything whatever within one's mind, is a reflex mental action which cannot be the fundamental characteristic of self-consciousness because it arises at a later period. We must not deny the self-consciousness or the personality of those millions of human beings who never yet discovered in themselves either desires or a will. To use our faculties is not necessarily to discern

them.

The identical proposition 'I am I'amounts to no more than the well-known dictum of the old hermit of Prague, 'that that is, is.' The second I is no more an object than the first. And the real truth is that nothing which constitutes matter of objective knowledge enters into our conception of the Ego in its inmost meaning. We say 'I have a body, an intellect, a will, and affections.' We do not say, I am intellect, will, or love any more properly than we can say, I am a body, or a brain. An object of thought must have certain known and definite characters which can be presented to the mind. What, then, are the definite characters which the self can present to itself, and say, these are not mere possessions of the self nor powers or instruments in which the self is interested; they are the actual self? Let the reader try the experiment upon himself. Let him essay to make himself the object of his own thought. He can readily think of properties, capacities, and acts which he has called and continues to call his own. But are they himself? are they the Ego within him? The very fact that he calls them his, is evidence that he does not identify them with himself. And he cannot explain the method in which himself is united to them, and claims them as belonging to him, or himself as belonging to them.

Mr. Illingworth concedes that the primary use of the word 'I' is to denote the subject when he says that 'the subject becomes an object.' But if it lets go its subjectivity for the purpose of becoming an object, what is the subject that comes in its place? Or how can the self be at the same moment subjective for the purpose of knowing itself and objective for the purpose of being known? The Ego can never catch itself as an object of knowledge at the moment of its own activity. Kant well says that it is the empirical consciousness which informs me that there are in myself perceptions, remembrances, and internal diversity; it is the transcendental consciousness which furnishes me with the idea represented by the word "I," the subject, always the same and identical.'

Do we, therefore, deny that our personality can ever be

known to ourselves? No; but we deny that it can be known objectively except by taking for the Ego that which, however close to it and in common language included in it, is not the real Ego. We are conscious of our personality subjectively, and no otherwise; but subjective knowledge is real though indefinite. I am conscious that I will, that I think, that I act. It is the willing, the thinking, and the acting that really become objects of my understanding. But it is not these acts-it is the primary original power of the I to do themthat constitutes personality. The I which lies behind them hides itself from the understanding. That it does these

things we know; but how it does them or what it is we know not. We are much surprised that Mr. Illingworth should write (p. 70), ' When I say, "I think this, I like that, I will do the other," I am considering myself as an object quite as much as this, that, and the other.' This amounts to a claim that he has succeeded in constructing three propositions cach of which contains two objects and no subject at all.

The Marquis of Salisbury has said that the ether has been invented merely to furnish a nominative case to the verb undulate. The list of verbs to which the word 'I' furnishes a nominative case is larger; but the amount of objective knowledge which that fact implies regarding the Ego is no larger. The verb to undulate is comprehensible. It is a known fact in nature and the object of observation in many various forms. But of the ether we only know that it undulates. It is the subject of the proposition. If it were entirely unknown we could not lay down the proposition at all. But the knowledge we have of it may be of the vaguest kindlimited, indeed, to the mere fact that we predicate undulation of it, together with the additional circumstance that in order to undulate it must exist as something distinct from abstract undulation. Cardinal Newman, with his admirable acuteness, displays to us the logical account of such an assent:

'It is the predicate of a proposition that must be apprehended. In a proposition one term is predicated of another, the subject is referred to the predicate, and the predicate gives us information about the subject; therefore to apprehend the proposition is to have that information, and to assent to it is to acquiesce in it as true. Therefore, I apprehend a proposition when I apprehend its predicate. The subject itself need not be apprehended per se in order to a genuine assent, for it is the very thing which the predicate has to elucidate, and, therefore, by its formal place in the proposition, so far as it is the subject, it is something unknown, something which VOL. XL.-NO. LXXIX.

the predicate makes known; but the predicate cannot make it known unless it be known itself.' '

Now all that we can know objectively about the Ego, the self, the personality, is this, that we can predicate an immeasurable multitude of intelligible actions and experiences concerning the subject 'I.' We understand the predicates but not their subject, except so far as the predicates make it known. It is ever the predicates which become the object of our knowledge, never the subject. If Mr. Illingworth desires to lay down a sentence which shall prove that self is an object to self it must not be 'I am I.' I know myself' will not do; for 'myself' is a composite phrase implying a self which I own. I must be 'I know I,' the bad grammar of which proposition only corresponds to its false thought. Is it possible that there can be a subject which shall objectively regard its own subjectivity? It is impossible.

Not only do we deny that the Ego can become an object to itself, but we regard it as a proposition full of danger. Physical science has included human nature in the range of its research. In the mighty system of such a writer as Herbert Spencer every fact of man's surroundings and constitution, of his organism and his environment, is included. Nothing that presents itself as a phenomenon-that is to say, as an object to the observation of science-is omitted, either in its origin or in its working. And Mr. Spencer 2 maintains that it is an illusion to suppose that the self at each moment is anything more than the aggregate of feelings and ideas, actual and nascent, which then exists. The universal language of man contradicts him. For what is it that talks of 'my feelings and ideas, actual or nascent,' if there be nothing present but the feelings and ideas themselves? But if the Ego which makes our personality is capable of being made an object, the courts of science are fit to take cognizance of it. We maintain, on the contrary, that the facts accumulated by science are of necessity imperfect as accounts of personality, and unable to present its essential nature to our view. But what justification can we give of our belief except this: that when everything that can be made the object of our thought has been dealt with there still remains something elsenamely, our subjectivity—which cannot be objectively thought, yet is the spring of every action both of mind and body? And under its protection free will and conscience find a

1 Grammar of Assent, chap. ii.

2 Elements of Psychology, vol. i. p. 500.