ON THE REALITY OF THE SELF. 197 
a real, substantial, unphysical thing called mind, and if so, 
what is the relation in which it stands to the substantial and 
physical thing called brain. By discovering what the mind 
is not, we can indirectly get at what it is: for the rest, we 
can only fall back on the verdict of immediate consciousness. 
Tv6t ceavrovy is the only ultimate method of a true 
psychology. 
“ Once read thy own breast right, 
And thou hast done with fears ; 
Man gets no other light 
Search he a thousand years. 
Sink in thyself! there ask what ails thee at that shrine !” 
The exact problem before us, together with an attempted 
solution, is so well illustrated by Descartes that it is worth 
while to refer to his historic dogma on the subject. Is mind 
real? Nay, is it not the only reality? Such is practically 
the outcome of Descartes’ celebrated “ Discours de la 
Méthode.” Descartes had determined amid a changing sea 
of doubts, to find some solid rock or even some floating spar 
to which to cling. What is the one reality, the one un- 
changing fact in all that a man knows and thinks? = Itis that 
he is conscious, and that therefore he exists. All thought 
testifies at least to this fact—even the sceptical doubt itself, 
for it too is a conscious attitude or phase which also argues 
existence. Cogito ergo sum, je pense done je swis—here is 
at least a fixed pomt of certamty which no scepticism can 
shake. Whatever else a man may doubt, however much he 
may mistrust the evidence of his senses in telling him of the 
world in which he lives; however much there may be in 
him “the blank misgivings of a creature, moving about in 
worlds unrealised,” still on one point there can be no shadow 
of a cloud—that his existence is proved by his thinking. Is 
this but a meagre result? But see how much is involved for 
Descartes in this dogma. I think therefore I am. There 
must, therefore, be a self, this self is real, and the real essence 
of this real self is thinking. It follows that man is a living, 
thinking soul, which is immaterial and imperishable. Such 
conclusions can no longer be called meagre, for there is in 
them the foundation of a psychology and even of a religion. 
Nor did Descartes hesitate to localise the soul thus proved ; 
it exists in the brain, in that small lobe or gland which is 
called the pineal gland or the conarion. 
But ifthe mind, with all its characteristic modes of activity, 
be thus of a nature absolutely distinct from the body or 
material brain, the one being spiritual and immaterial, while 
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