Z12r FROM FISH TO PHILOSOPHER 



of continuity to what are, in actual fact, extremely brief 

 and isolated events in the nervous system. In this sense it 

 may be likened to a television tube which glows for a 

 fraction of a second after it has been electrically excited, 

 and thus affords a continuous instead of a flickering 

 image. 



The psychologist William James was one of the first 

 to espouse the natural history' of consciousness and it 

 was also he who (after Hume) introduced the 'stream 

 of consciousness' motif into psychology and Hterature. 

 But the kaleidoscopic fragments presented in the stream 

 of consciousness comprise only one-half of the problem 

 —What binds these fragments into a lesser or greater 

 whole, into a temporal continuum? To return to Hume's 

 point, in the appendix to his Treatise of Human Nature 

 (1739) he suddenly realized that in confining all cog- 

 nition to single perceptions and supplying no faculty for 

 unifying, recording or classifying these perceptions, he 

 had destroyed the possibility of knowledge: 



*When I turn my reflection on myself, I never can 

 perceive this self without some one or more perceptions; 

 nor can I ever perceive any thing but the perceptions. 

 'Tis the composition of these, therefore, which forms the 

 self. . . . But all my hopes vanish, when I come to ex- 

 plain the principles, that unite our successive percep- 

 tions in our thought or consciousness. ... In short, 

 there are two principles, which I cannot render con- 

 sistent; nor is it in my power to renounce either of them, 

 viz. that all our distinct perceptions are distinct exist- 

 ences, and that the mind never perceives any real con- 

 nexion among distinct existences. Did our perceptions 

 either inhere in something simple or individual, or did 

 the mind perceive some real connexion among them, 

 there would be diflSculty in the case.' 



Today neurophysiologists, generally rejecting, as 

 Hume did, anything more than a figurative meaning for 

 the word mind, are scarcely any closer to resolving the 

 difficulty presented by temporal continuity in conscious- 



