The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 · William James
THE TRANSCENDENTALIST THEORY.
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.
This, for our purposes, is a sufficient account of the 'transcendental' Ego. Those purposes go no farther than to ascertain whether anything in Kant's conception ought to make us give up our own, of a remembering and appropriating Thought incessantly renewed. In many respects Kant's meaning is obscure, but it will not be necessary for us to squeeze the texts in order to make sure what it actually and historically was. If we can define clearly two or three things which it may _possibly_ have been, that will help us just as much to clear our own ideas. On the whole, a defensible interpretation of Kant's view would take somewhat the following shape. Like ourselves he believes in a Reality outside the mind of which he writes, but the critic who vouches for that reality does so on grounds of faith, for it is not a verifiable phenomenal thing. Neither is it manifold. The 'Manifold' which the intellectual functions combine is a mental manifold altogether, which thus _stands between_ the Ego of Apperception and the outer Reality, but still stands inside the mind. In the function of knowing there is a multiplicity to be connected, and Kant brings this multiplicity inside the mind. The Reality becomes a mere empty _locus_, or unknowable, the so-called Noumenon; the manifold phenomenon is in the mind. We, on the contrary, put the Multiplicity with the Reality outside, and leave the mind simple. Both of us deal with the same elements--thought and object--the only question is in which of them the multiplicity shall be lodged. Wherever it is lodged it must be 'synthetized' when it comes to be thought. And that particular way of lodging it will be the better, which, in addition to describing the facts naturally, makes the 'mystery of synthesis' least hard to understand.
Well, Kant's way of describing the facts is mythological. The notion of our thought being this sort of an elaborate internal machine-shop stands condemned by all we said in favor of its simplicity on pages 276 ff. Our Thought is not composed of parts, however so composed its objects may be. There is no originally chaotic manifold in it to be reduced to order. There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurly-burly in her womb. If we are to have a dualism of Thought and Reality at all, the multiplicity should be lodged in the latter and not in the former member of the couple of related terms. The parts and their relations surely belong less to the knower than to what is known.
But even were all the mythology true, the process of synthesis would in no whit be _explained_ by calling the inside of the mind its seat. No mystery would be made lighter by such means. It is just as much a puzzle _how_ the 'Ego' can employ the productive Imagination to make the Understanding use the categories to combine the data which Recognition, Association, and Apprehension receive from sensible Intuition, as how the Thought can combine the objective facts. Phrase it as one may, the difficulty is always the same: _the Many known by the One_. Or does one seriously think he understands better _how_ the knower 'connects' its objects, when one calls the former a transcendental Ego and the latter a 'Manifold of Intuition' than when one calls them Thought and Things respectively? Knowing must have a vehicle. Call the vehicle Ego, or call it Thought, Psychosis, Soul, Intelligence, Consciousness, Mind, Reason, Feeling,--what you like--it must _know_. The best grammatical subject for the verb _know_ would, if possible, be one from whose other properties the knowing could be deduced. And if there be no such subject, the best one would be that with the fewest ambiguities and the least pretentious name. By Kant's confession, the transcendental Ego has no properties, and from it nothing can be deduced. Its name is pretentious, and, as we shall presently see, has its meaning ambiguously mixed up with that of the substantial soul. So on every possible account we are excused from using it instead of our own term of the present passing 'Thought,' as the principle by which the Many is simultaneously known.
Were we to follow these remarks, we should have to abandon our notion of the 'Thought' (perennially renewed in time, but always cognitive thereof), and to espouse instead of it an entity copied from thought in all essential respects, but differing from it in being 'out of time.' What psychology can gain by this barter would be hard to divine. Moreover this resemblance of the timeless Ego to the Soul is completed by other resemblances still. The monism of the post-Kantian idealists seems always lapsing into a regular old-fashioned spiritualistic dualism. They incessantly talk as if, like the Soul, their All-thinker were an Agent, operating on detached materials of sense. This may come from the accidental fact that the English writings of the school have been more polemic than constructive, and that a reader may often take for a positive profession a statement _ad hominem_ meant as part of a reduction to the absurd, or mistake the analysis of a bit of knowledge into elements for a dramatic myth about its creation. But I think the matter has profounder roots. Professor Green constantly talks of the 'activity' of Self as a 'condition' of knowledge taking place. Facts are said to become incorporated with other facts only through the '_action_ of a combining self-consciousness upon data of sensation.' "Every object we perceive ... requires, in order to its presentation, the _action_ of a principle of consciousness, not itself subject to conditions of time, upon successive appearances, such action as may _hold the appearances together_, without fusion, in an apprehended fact."[292]
It is needless to repeat that the connection of things in our knowledge is in no whit _explained_ by making it the deed of an agent whose essence is self-identity and who is out of time. The agency of phenomenal thought coming and going in time is just as easy to _understand_. And when it is furthermore said that the agent that combines is the same 'self-distinguishing subject' which 'in another mode of its activity' presents the manifold object to itself, the unintelligibilities become quite paroxysmal, and we are forced to confess that the entire school of thought in question, in spite of occasional glimpses of something more refined, still dwells habitually in that mythological stage of thought where phenomena are explained as results of dramas enacted by entities which but reduplicate the characters of the phenomena themselves. The self must not only _know_ its object,--that is too bald and dead a relation to be written down and left in its static state. The knowing must be painted as a 'famous victory' in which the object's distinctness is in some way 'overcome.' "The self exists as one self only as it opposes itself, as object, to itself as subject, and immediately denies and transcends that opposition. Only because it is such a concrete unity, which has in itself a resolved contradiction, can the intelligence cope with all the manifoldness and division of the mighty universe, and hope to master its secrets. As the lightning sleeps in the dew-drop, so in the simple and transparent unity of self-consciousness there is held in equilibrium that vital antagonism of opposites which ... seems to rend the world asunder. The intelligence is able to understand the world, or, in other words, to break down the barrier between itself and things and find itself in them, just because its own existence is implicitly the solution of all the division and conflict of things."[293]
This dynamic (I had almost written dynamitic) way of representing knowledge has the merit of not being tame. To turn from it to our own psychological formulation is like turning from the fireworks, trap-doors, and transformations of the pantomime into the insipidity of the midnight, where "ghastly through the drizzling rain, On the bald street breaks the blank day!"[294] And yet turn we must, with the confession that our 'Thought'--a cognitive phenomenal event in time--is, if it exist at all, itself the only Thinker which the facts require. The only service that transcendental egoism has done to psychology has been by its protests against Hume's 'bundle'-theory of mind. But this service has been ill-performed; for the Egoists themselves, let them say what they will, believe in the bundle, and in their own system merely _tie it up_, with their special transcendental string, invented for that use alone. Besides, they talk as if, with this miraculous tying or 'relating,' the Ego's duties were done. Of its far more important duty of choosing some of the things it ties and appropriating them, to the exclusion of the rest, they tell us never a word. To sum up, then, my own opinion of the transcendentalist school, it is (whatever ulterior metaphysical truth it may divine) a school in which psychology at least has naught to learn, and whose deliverances about the Ego in particular in no wise oblige us to revise our own formulation of the Stream of Thought.[295]
In the first place, although its changes are gradual, they become in time great. The central part of the _me_ is the feeling of the body and of the adjustments in the head; and in the feeling of the body should be included that of the general emotional tones and tendencies, for at bottom these are but the habits in which organic activities and sensibilities run. Well, from infancy to old age, this assemblage of feelings, most constant of all, is yet a prey to slow mutation. Our powers, bodily and mental, change at least as fast.[296] Our possessions notoriously are perishable facts. The identity which the _I_ discovers, as it surveys this long procession, can only be a relative identity, that of a slow shifting in which there is always some common ingredient retained.[297] The commonest element of all, the most uniform, is the possession of the same memories. However different the man may be from the youth, both look back on the same childhood, and call it their own. Thus the identity found by the _I_ in its _me_ is only a loosely construed thing, an identity 'on the whole,' just like that which any outside observer might find in the same assemblage of facts. We often say of a man 'he is so changed one would not know him'; and so does a man, less often, speak of himself. These changes in the _me_, recognized by the I, or by outside observers, may be grave or slight. They deserve some notice here.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.