The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 · William James
THE PURE EGO.
If we ask what a Substance is, the only answer is that it is a self-existent being, or one which needs no other subject in which to inhere. At bottom its only positive determination is Being, and this is something whose meaning we all realize even though we find it hard to explain. The Soul is moreover an _individual_ being, and if we ask what that is, we are told to look in upon our Self, and we shall learn by direct intuition better than through any abstract reply. Our direct perception of our own inward being is in fact by many deemed to be the original prototype out of which our notion of simple active substance in general is fashioned. The _consequences_ of the simplicity and substantiality of the Soul are its incorruptibility and natural _immortality_--nothing but God's direct _fiat_ can annihilate it--and its _responsibility_ at all times for whatever it may have ever done. This substantialist view of the soul was essentially the view of Plato and of Aristotle. It received its completely formal elaboration in the middle ages. It was believed in by Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Leibnitz, Wolf, Berkeley, and is now defended by the entire modern dualistic or spiritualistic or common-sense school. Kant held to it while denying its fruitfulness as a premise for deducing consequences verifiable here below. Kant's successors, the absolute idealists, profess to have discarded it,--how that may be we shall inquire ere long. Let us make up our minds what to think of it ourselves.
_It is at all events needless for expressing the actual subjective phenomena of consciousness as they appear._ We have formulated them all without its aid, by the supposition of a stream of thoughts, each substantially different from the rest, but cognitive of the rest and 'appropriative' of each other's content. At least, if I have not already succeeded in making this plausible to the reader, I am hopeless of convincing him by anything I could add now. The unity, the identity, the individuality, and the immateriality that appear in the psychic life are thus accounted for as phenomenal and temporal facts exclusively, and with no need of reference to any more simple or substantial agent than the present Thought or 'section' of the stream. We have seen it to be single and unique in the sense of having no _separable_ parts (above, p. 239 ff.)--perhaps that is the only kind of simplicity meant to be predicated of the soul. The present Thought also has being,--at least all believers in the Soul believe so--and if there be no other Being in which it 'inheres,' it ought itself to be a 'substance.' If _this_ kind of simplicity and substantiality were all that is predicated of the Soul, then it might appear that we had been talking of the soul all along, without knowing it, when we treated the present Thought as an agent, an owner, and the like. But the Thought is a perishing and not an immortal or incorruptible thing. Its successors may continuously succeed to it, resemble it, and appropriate it, but they _are_ not it, whereas the Soul-Substance is supposed to be a fixed unchanging thing. By the Soul is always meant something _behind_ the present Thought, another kind of substance, existing on a non-phenomenal plane.
When we brought in the Soul at the end of Chapter VI, as an entity which the various brain-processes were supposed to affect simultaneously, and which responded to their combined influence by single pulses of its thought, it was to escape integrated mind-stuff on the one hand, and an improbable cerebral monad on the other. But when (as now, after all we have been through since that earlier passage) we take the two formulations, first of a brain to whose processes pulses of thought _simply_ correspond, and second, of one to whose processes pulses of thought _in a Soul_ correspond, and compare them together, we see that at bottom the second formulation is only a more roundabout way than the first, of expressing the same bald fact. That bald fact is that _when the brain acts, a thought occurs._ The spiritualistic formulation says that the brain-processes knock the thought, so to speak, out of a Soul which stands there to receive their influence. The simpler formulation says that the thought simply _comes_. But what positive meaning has the Soul, when scrutinized, but the _ground of possibility_ of the thought? And what is the 'knocking' but the _determining of the possibility to actuality_?
And what is this after all but giving a sort of concreted form to one's belief that the coming of the thought, when the brain-processes occur, has _some_ sort of ground in the nature of things? If the world Soul be understood merely to express that claim, it is a good word to use. But if it be held to do more, to gratify the claim,--for instance, to connect rationally the thought which comes, with the processes which occur, and to mediate intelligibly between their two disparate natures,--then it is an illusory term. It is, in fact, with the word Soul as with the word Substance in general. To say that phenomena inhere in a Substance is at bottom only to record one's protest against the notion that the bare existence of the phenomena is the total truth. A phenomenon would not itself be, we insist, unless there were something _more_ than the phenomenon. To the more we give the provisional name of Substance. So, in the present instance, we ought certainly to admit that there is more than the bare fact of coexistence of a passing thought with a passing brain-state. But we do not answer the question 'What is that more?' when we say that it is a 'Soul' which the brain-state affects.
This kind of more _explains_ nothing; and when we are once trying metaphysical explanations we are foolish not to go as far as we can. For my own part I confess that the moment I become metaphysical and try to define the more, I find the notion of some sort of an _anima mundi_ thinking in all of us to be a more promising hypothesis, in spite of all its difficulties, than that of a lot of absolutely individual souls. Meanwhile, as _psychologists_, we need not be metaphysical at all. The phenomena are enough, the passing Thought itself is the only _verifiable_ thinker, and its empirical connection with the brain-process is the ultimate known law. To the other arguments which would prove the need of a soul, we may also turn a deaf ear. The argument from free-will can convince only those who believe in free-will; and even they will have to admit that spontaneity is just as possible, to say the least, in a temporary spiritual agent like our 'Thought' as in a permanent one like the supposed Soul. The same is true of the argument from the kinds of things cognized. Even if the brain could not cognize universal, immaterials, or its 'Self,' still the 'Thought' which we have relied upon in our account _is_ not the brain, closely as it seems connected with it; and after all, if the brain could cognize at all, one does not well see why it might not cognize one sort of thing as well as another. The great difficulty is in seeing how a thing can cognize _anything_. This difficulty is not in the least removed by giving to the thing that cognizes the name of Soul. The Spiritualists do not deduce any of the properties of the mental life from otherwise known properties of the soul. They simply find various characters ready-made in the mental life, and these they clap into the Soul, saying, "Lo! behold the source from whence they flow!" The merely verbal character of this 'explanation' is obvious. The Soul invoked, far from making the phenomena more intelligible, can only be made intelligible itself by borrowing their form,--it must be represented, if at all, as a transcendent stream of consciousness duplicating the one we know.
Altogether, the Soul is an outbirth of that sort of philosophizing whose great maxim, according to Dr. Hodgson, is: "Whatever you are _totally_ ignorant of, assert to be the explanation of everything else." * * * * * Locke and Kant, whilst still believing in the soul, began the work of undermining the notion that we know anything about it. Most modern writers of the mitigated spiritualistic, or dualistic philosophy--the Scotch school, as it is often called among us--are forward to proclaim this ignorance, and to attend exclusively to the verifiable phenomena of self-consciousness, as we have laid them down. Dr. Wayland, for example, begins his Elements of Intellectual Philosophy with the phrase "Of the essence of Mind we know nothing," and goes on: "All that we are able to affirm of it is that it is _something_ which perceives, reflects, remembers, imagines, and wills; but what that something _is_ which exerts these energies we know not. It is only as we are conscious of the action of these energies that we are conscious of the existence of mind. It is only by the exertion of its own powers that the mind becomes cognizant of their existence. The cognizance of its powers, however, gives us no knowledge of that essence of which they are predicated. In these respects our knowledge of mind is precisely analogous to our knowledge of matter." This analogy of our two ignorances is a favorite remark in the Scotch school. It is but a step to lump them together into a single ignorance, that of the 'Unknowable' to which any one fond of superfluities in philosophy may accord the hospitality of his belief, if it so please him, but which any one else may as freely ignore and reject.
The Soul-theory is, then, a complete superfluity, so far as accounting for the actually verified facts of conscious experience goes. So far, no one can be compelled to subscribe to it for definite scientific reasons. The case would rest here, and the reader be left free to make his choice, were it not for other demands of a more practical kind. The first of these is _Immortality_, for which the simplicity and substantiality of the Soul seem to offer a solid guarantee. A 'stream' of thought, for aught that we see to be contained in its essence, may come to a full stop at any moment; but a simple substance is incorruptible, and will, by its own inertia, persist in Being so long as the Creator does not by a direct miracle snuff it out. Unquestionably this is the stronghold of the spiritualistic belief,--as indeed the popular touchstone for all philosophies is the question, "What is their bearing on a future life?"
The Soul, however, when closely scrutinized, guarantees no immortality of a sort _we care for_. The enjoyment of the atom-like simplicity of their substance _in sæcula sæculorum_ would not to most people seem a consummation devoutly to be wished. The substance must give rise to a stream of consciousness continuous with the present stream, in order to arouse our hope, but of this the mere persistence of the substance _per se_ offers no guarantee. Moreover, in the general advance of our moral ideas, there has come to be something ridiculous in the way our forefathers had of grounding their hopes of immortality on the simplicity of their substance. The demand for immortality is nowadays essentially teleological. We believe ourselves immortal because we believe ourselves _fit_ for immortality. A 'substance' ought surely to perish, we think, if not worthy to survive; and an insubstantial 'stream' to prolong itself, provided it be worthy, if the nature of Things is organized in the rational way in which we trust it is. Substance or no substance, soul or 'stream,' what Lotze says of immortality is about all that human wisdom can say: "We have no other principle for deciding it than this general idealistic belief: that every created thing will continue whose continuance belongs to the meaning of the world, and so long as it does so belong; whilst every one will pass away whose reality is justified only in a transitory phase of the world's course. That this principle admits of no further application in human hands need hardly be said. _We_ surely know not the merits which may give to one being a claim on eternity, nor the defects which would cut others off."[275]
One great use of the Soul has always been to account for, and at the same time to guarantee, the closed individuality of each personal consciousness. The thoughts of one soul must unite into one self, it was supposed, and must be eternally insulated from those of every other soul. But we have already begun to see that, although unity is the rule of each man's consciousness, yet in some individuals, at least, thoughts may split away from the others and form separate selves. As for insulation, it would be rash, in view of the phenomena of thought-transference, mesmeric influence and spirit-control, which are being alleged nowadays on better authority than ever before, to be too sure about that point either. The definitively closed nature of our personal consciousness is probably an average statistical resultant of many conditions, but not an elementary force or fact; so that, if one wishes to preserve the Soul, the less he draws his arguments from _that_ quarter the better. So long as our self, on the whole, makes itself good and practically maintains itself as a closed individual, why, as Lotze says, is not that enough? And why is the _being_-an-individual in some inaccessible metaphysical way so much prouder an achievement?[276]
My final conclusion, then, about the substantial Soul is that it explains nothing and guarantees nothing. Its successive thoughts are the only intelligible and verifiable things about it, and definitely to ascertain the correlations of these with brain-processes is as much as psychology can empirically do. From the metaphysical point of view, it is true that one may claim that the correlations have a rational ground; and if the word Soul could be taken to mean merely some such vague problematic ground, it would be unobjectionable. But the trouble is that it professes to give the ground in positive terms of a very dubiously credible sort. I therefore feel entirely free to discard the word Soul from the rest of this book. If I ever use it, it will be in the vaguest and most popular way. The reader who finds any comfort in the idea of the Soul, is, however, perfectly free to continue to believe in it; for our reasonings have not established the non-existence of the Soul; they have only proved its superfluity for scientific purposes. The next theory of the pure Self to which we pass is _The Associationist Theory._ Locke paved the way for it by the hypothesis he suggested of the same substance having two successive consciousnesses, or of the same consciousness being supported by more than one substance. He made his readers feel that the _important_ unity of the Self was its verifiable and felt unity, and that a metaphysical or absolute unity would be insignificant, so long as a _consciousness_ of diversity might be there.
Hume showed how great the consciousness of diversity actually was. In the famous chapter on Personal Identity, in his Treatise on Human Nature, he writes as follows: "There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our SELF; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence, and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity.... Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very experience which is pleaded for them, nor have we any idea of Self, after the manner it is here explained.... It must be some one impression that gives rise to every real idea.... If any impression gives rise to the idea of Self, that impression must continue invariably the same through the whole course of our lives, since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time.... For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call _myself_, I always stumble on some particular perception or other of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch _myself_ at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of _myself_ and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of _himself_ I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued which he calls _himself_; though I am certain there is no such principle in me.
"But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind that they are _nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions_, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of the soul which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. _There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different_; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented, nor of the material of which it is composed."
But Hume, after doing this good piece of introspective work, proceeds to pour out the child with the bath, and to fly to as great an extreme as the substantialist philosophers. As they say the Self is nothing but Unity, unity abstract and absolute, so Hume says it is nothing but Diversity, diversity abstract and absolute; whereas in truth it is that mixture of unity and diversity which we ourselves have already found so easy to pick apart. We found among the objects of the stream certain feelings that hardly changed, that stood out warm and vivid in the past just as the present feeling does now; and we found the present feeling to be the centre of accretion to which, _de proche en proche_, these other feelings are, _by the judging Thought_, felt to cling. Hume says nothing of the judging Thought; and he denies this thread of resemblance, this core of sameness running through the ingredients of the Self, to exist even as a phenomenal thing. To him there is no _tertium quid_ between pure unity and pure separateness. A succession of ideas "connected by a close relation affords to an accurate view as perfect a notion of diversity as if there was _no manner of relation" at all._ "All our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and the mind never perceives any real connection among distinct existences. Did our perceptions either inhere in something simple or individual, or _did the mind perceive some real connection_ among them, there would be no difficulty in the case. For my part, I must plead the privilege of a sceptic and confess that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding, I pretend not, however, to pronounce it insuperable. Others, perhaps,... may discover some hypothesis that will reconcile these contradictions."[277]
The chain of distinct existences into which Hume thus chopped up our 'stream' was adopted by all of his successors as a complete inventory of the facts. The associationist Philosophy was founded. Somehow, out of 'ideas,' each separate, each ignorant of its mates, but sticking together and calling each other up according to certain laws, all the higher forms of consciousness were to be explained, and among them the consciousness of our personal identity. The task was a hard one, in which what we called the psychologist's fallacy (p. 196 ff.) bore the brunt of the work. Two ideas, one of 'A,' succeeded by another of 'B,' were transmuted into a third idea of '_B after A_.' An idea from last year returning now was taken to be an idea _of last year_; two similar ideas stood for an _idea of similarity_, and the like; palpable confusions, in which certain facts _about_ the ideas, possible only to an outside knower of them, were put into the place of the ideas' own proper and limited deliverance and content. Out of such recurrences and resemblances in a series of discrete ideas and feelings a knowledge was somehow supposed to be engendered in each feeling that it _was_ recurrent and resembling, and that it helped to form a series to whose unity the name _I_ came to be joined. In the same way, substantially, Herbart,[278] in Germany, tried to show how a conflict of ideas would fuse into a _manner of representing itself_ for which _I_ was the consecrated name.[279]
The defect of all these attempts is that the conclusion pretended to follow from certain premises is by no means rationally involved in the premises. A feeling of any kind, if it simply _returns_, ought to be nothing else than what it was at first. If memory of previous existence and all sorts of other cognitive functions are attributed to it when it returns, it is no longer the same, but a widely different feeling, and ought to be so described. _We_ have so described it with the greatest explicitness. We have said that feelings never do return. We have not pretended to _explain_ this; we have recorded it as an empirically ascertained law, analogous to certain laws of brain-physiology; and, seeking to define the way in which new feelings do differ from the old, we have found them to be _cognizant_ and _appropriative_ of the old, whereas the old were always cognizant and appropriative of something else. Once more, this account pretended to be nothing more than a complete description of the facts. It explained them no more than the associationist account explains them. But the latter both assumes to explain them and in the same breath falsifies them, and for each reason stands condemned.
It is but just to say that the associationist writers as a rule seem to have a lurking bad conscience about the Self; and that although they are explicit enough about what it is, namely, a train of feelings or thoughts, they are very shy about openly tackling the problem of how it comes to be aware of itself. Neither Bain nor Spencer, for example, directly touch this problem. As a rule, associationist writers keep talking about 'the mind' and about what 'we' do; and so, smuggling in surreptitiously what they ought avowedly to have postulated in the form of a present 'judging Thought,' they either trade upon their reader's lack of discernment or are undiscerning themselves. Mr. D. G. Thompson is the only associationist writer I know who perfectly escapes this confusion, and _postulates_ openly what he needs. "All states of consciousness," he says, "imply and postulate a subject Ego, whose substance is unknown and unknowable, to which [why not say _by_ which?] states of consciousness are referred as attributes, but which in the process of reference becomes objectified and becomes itself an attribute of a subject Ego which lies still beyond, and which ever eludes cognition though ever postulated for cognition."[280] This is exactly our judging and remembering present 'Thought,' described in less simple terms.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.