162 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



requisite for all psychical development. Unless we can compare the 

 experience of yesterday with the experience of to-day, any advance of 

 ourselves from the brute condition is impossible. Now, such compari- 

 son demands that the first experience should have been known as mine. 

 From this demand there is no escape. Complying with it, something, 

 some form of being called personality, must lie at the bottom of the 

 inner side of our nature. Lotze has pertinently said : " We have this 

 unity of consciousness not because we appear to ourselves to have it ; 

 we have it because we appear to ourselves to have it." 



In each sensation there is consciousness of self in a particular state. 

 Our sensations are varied and successive. We hear the sound of a 

 bell, then of a railway-train, then of the wind ; we see cloud, moon, 

 and mountain-top. Here we have the sensation, the succession of sen- 

 sations, the discrimination of sensations, and discrimination of things 

 by the sensations. Devolve this whole business upon nerve-matter in 

 the cei'ebral hemispheres. Is such ascription of functions rational ? 

 Is it in keeping with our knowledge of brain-structure ? If we sur- 

 mount the difficulty of transformation of motions into non-motions 

 (that is, consciousness), what provision do we anywhere find in the 

 hemispheres for the unification of such sensations as above described, 

 their unification in self ? 



A further question at once arises. Physiology has arranged for 

 diversity of result. What has it done toward comparing these differ- 

 ences ? By comparison, and by that alone, each sensation is known as 

 distinct from every other. All that physiology offers or can offer is 

 the integrity of each nerve-fiber. As has been justly said, this fiber 

 is like every other in construction and action. What provision have 

 we, apart from personality, for detecting difference in sensations? 



Personality is the place at which both parties should expend their 

 strength. Mr. Mill and Mr. Bain, understanding this, have sought to 

 obliterate the distinction between feeling and self-consciousness. They 

 have maintained the priority of an impersonal feeling. Here is the 

 starting-point, not in personality, but in feeling. Personality is a de- 

 velopment from impersonality by what Mr. Mill calls a " process of 

 reference." This is one of those magical terms, like the newer word 

 "functionate," which serve to obscure the failure of an undertak- 

 ing. Mr. Bain also starts with a nervous system and feeling, and 

 gives what may be taken as the latest expression of the movement to- 

 ward unification of soul and body. He says : " The arguments for 

 the two substances mind and matter have, we believe, entirely lost 

 their validity ; they are no longer compatible with ascertained science 

 and clear thinking. One substance with two sets of attributes, two 

 sides (a physical and a mental), a double-faced unity, would appear to 

 comply with all the exigencies of the case." This assertion of a 

 double-faced unity not only fails to bridge the chasm that is rationally 

 impassable, not only increases the confusion by uniting contradictory 



