maintaining seriously that one man may look alike or may walk in single file.

It is merely playing with words to attempt to split any one thing into the thing and itself, distinguishing the two as knower and known, and at the same time asserting that knower and known are not really two but only one. The subject-object of the old psychology, the self as self-knower, is a monstrosity. It needs but a moment of unprejudiced reflection, it seems to me, to see that what is said about it is absurd and unmeaning. The only question of real interest is: How have men come to speak in this way? The answer has been given above, and it seems a sufficiently plausible one. A notion derived from experience of the body is carried over into a realm in which it wholly loses significance, and it is held on to notwithstanding this fact.

In the preceding pages three different selves have been distinguished from each other and subjected to criticism; they are the self as noumenon, the self as a group of phenomena in consciousness, and the self as the neo-Kantian self-activity, whatever that may mean. Were we discussing any other subject, it would seem a work of supererogation to endeavor to show that these should not be confounded with each other. But here such confusion has reigned that it cannot be out of place to emphasize the truth that a noumenon - by definition a something which cannot by any possibility enter consciousness-cannot be strictly identical with a group of elements in consciousness; and that neither of these can be strictly identical with a unitary activity which is supposed to hold together the divers elements of which a consciousness is composed.

When a man talks about the self, therefore, he should know clearly to which of the three he refers. They are evidently not one, and they should not be treated as one. They are not only numerically distinct, but they are not even conceived to be similar; and to the question why they should be given the same name and thus put into the one class, no answer save an historical one seems to be forthcoming. Those who hold to the existence of all three or of any two of these are apt to identify them loosely with each other, and to pass in their reasonings from the one to the other without clearly marking the transition. Such a procedure evidently is born of and gives birth to confusion of thought.

The preceding pages have, I hope, made it clear that the nou

menal self must be thrown aside as a mere figment of the imagination, as an entity the real existence of which cannot be proved by any legitimate evidence based on experience, and one which furnishes no real explanation of anything. Its loss can cause no annoyance to the man who realizes what it is, and distinguishes between the three selves we have been discussing.

It can surely matter nothing to me if an "I" of which I have, by hypothesis, never been conscious and can never be conscious; an "I" which is not the "I" that I perceive myself to be and that I distinguish from other selves; an "I" so different from the "I" of which I am conscious that its bearing the same name can only be explained as due to a misapprehension; an "I" which accounts for nothing in my conscious experience and, indeed, turns out upon examination to be nothing but a name for an unknown-it can surely matter nothing to me if such an "I" be divested of the misconceptions which appear to give to it a semblance of substantiality and be made to appear the unsubstantial cipher that it is. He who clearly realizes just what is meant by the noumenal self, who sees how completely it stands outside the circle of his actual and possible experiences, and how totally without significance it must be for them, can have no sense of loss in the discovery that it must be discarded.

But it is not easy to strip off inherited misconceptions, and such reflections as are contained in the preceding pages are apt to bring to many a sense that they are being defrauded of something, a feeling that the self that is left them is little better than a hollow shell, without substance and without true reality. The feeling is a vague one, and cannot justify itself in the face of analysis, but it is rather persistent. Its disappearance can only be brought about by substituting a habit for a habit—the habit of clear thinking, for the habit of thinking loosely and vaguely.

As to the shadowy successor of the old noumenal self, namely, the self as timeless self-activity, that must evidently be rejected also. And since it is the only self brought forward as a something in consciousness or in experience to be set over against all else that is in consciousness, and as being different in nature from all the elements indicated in the preceding chapter, its rejection leaves us only what has been called the empirical self as a proper subject of investigation for the psychologist and the metaphysician.

That the investigation of the nature and constitutive elements of

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the empirical self is no easy task has already been made clear, but it is equally clear that the task is not in its nature a hopeless one. It does not differ in kind from the task which confronts us every time that we undertake to obtain an analytic knowledge of any complex in consciousness. This is true no matter what aspect of the empirical self we are concerned with. When we say, "I know," "I think," "I feel," these expressions indicate the presence of certain complex states of consciousness. When we say, "I know myself as knowing," "I think about myself," etc., we indicate the presence of conscious states in some respects different from those above mentioned. It is the duty of the analyst to try to substitute for the vagueness which usually characterizes the recognition of these states of consciousness and their differences from each other some degree of clearness and definiteness.

Much has been said, and much is still said, about the unity of consciousness. Undoubtedly, the thought of one man as knowing two things and the thought of two men as each knowing one thing are not to be confounded. When we speak of "a mind," we mean something, and it is perfectly just to seek to know clearly what we mean. But it is one thing to find in consciousness a unity and to endeavor to determine with definiteness what is meant by the unity of consciousness; and it is another thing to attempt to explain how the unity of consciousness is brought about, by the assumption of hypothetical entities not to be found in consciousness, or by ascribing inconceivable virtues to hypostatized spiritual activities. Hence the rejection of the two selves which we have weighed and found wanting, the noumenon and its post-Kantian successor, need not in the least compel us to deny to consciousness a certain unity. It is merely the rejection of two unsatisfactory attempts to explain how that unity has been brought about attempts which not only fail in the aim which they have set before them, but which leave untouched the much more important problem of what manner of thing the unity of consciousness actually is. To this problem nothing but a careful analysis of our experience can furnish a satisfactory

answer.1

1 See Chapter XXIX.

PART II

THE EXTERNAL WORLD

CHAPTER VI

WHAT WE MEAN BY THE EXTERNAL WORLD

THE word "consciousness," taken in the broad sense, embraces every element of our experience and all combinations of such elements. That it is impossible to pass, in any intelligible sense of that word, beyond this realm, we have already seen.1 We cannot, of course, know directly what is outside of our experience, and an examination of representative or symbolic knowledge reveals that it is impossible, by putting together consciousnesselements, to construct something truly representative of an external world supposed to be of a quite different nature of a world which in no sense belongs to our experience or forms a part of it, but lies over against experience as a whole, and is contrasted with it.

But if we take the word "consciousness" in a narrower sense, if we think of a consciousness as the particular group of experiences forming an individual mind, there is nothing to prevent us from distinguishing between consciousness and an external material world standing over against it, nor is there anything to prevent us from distinguishing between one consciousness and another. We certainly mean something when we speak of a world of matter and contrast it with the world of minds; and we are not talking mere nonsense when we say that we think of this man or that as thinking this or that.

These modes of expression denote real distinctions within our experience; distinctions that may be, it is true, imperfectly apprehended, as much that belongs to our experience may be imperfectly apprehended, and may even be seriously misinterpreted. 2 Chapter III.

1 Chapter II.