GENERAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING REMARKS. 397 



whereby the mind is able, as it were, to stand apart from 

 itself, to render one of its states objective to others, and thus 

 to contemplate its own ideas as such. Now, we are not con- 

 cerned with the philosophy of this fact, but only with its 

 history. How it is that such a faculty as self-consciousness 

 is possible ; what it is that can thus be simultaneously the 

 subject and the object of thought ; whether or not it is con- 

 ceivable that the great abyss of personality can ever be 

 fathomed ; these and all such questions are quite alien to the 

 scope of the present work. All that we have here to do is to 

 analyze the psychological conditions out of which, as a matter 

 of observable fact, this unique peculiarity emerges — to trace 

 the history of the process, and tabulate the results. Well, we 

 have seen that here, again, every one agrees in regarding the 

 possibility of self-consciousness to be given in the faculty 

 of language. Whether or not we suppose that these two 

 faculties are one — that neither could exist without the other, 

 and, therefore, that we may follow the Greeks in assigning to 

 them the single name of Logos, — at least it is as certain as 

 the science of psychology can make it, that within the four 

 corners of human experience a self-conscious personality can- 

 not be led up to in any other way than through the medium 

 of language. For it is by language alone that, so far as we 

 have any means of knowing, a mind is rendered capable of so 

 far fixing — or rendering definite to itself — its own ideas, as to 

 admit of any subsequent contemplation of them as ideas. It 

 is only by means of marking ideas by names that the faculty 

 of conceptual thought is rendered possible, as we saw at con- 

 siderable length in Chapter IV. 



Such, then, was my classification of ideas. And it is a 

 classification over which no dispute is likely to arise, seeing 

 that it merely sets in some kind of systematic order a body 

 of observable facts with regard to which writers of every 

 school are nowadays in substantial agreement. Now, if this 

 classification be accepted, it follows that the question before 

 us is thrown back upon the faculty of language. This faculty, 

 therefore, I considered in a series of chapters. First it was 



