ON THE REALITY OF THE SELF. 207 
The Cuarrman (D. Howarp, Esq., D.L., F.C.S.).—We have all 
listened with very great interest to Dr. Courtney’s admirable Paper, 
and I am sure I may present to him our best thanks. (Applause.) 
It is somewhat disheartening to find the very old donbts about 
personality and about self-identity coming back as the result of 
our modern learning, and yet on the other hand it is, perhaps, 
encouraging to find that they are the same old doubts. When one 
finds that the doubts about personality which existed at the time 
of Buddha and the Yogas, that the very problems which per- 
plexed the mind 2,000 years ago and a good deal more, are brought 
up as the result of our nineteenth century science, [ think it is 
encouraging to know that they cannot be the necessary result of 
modern science, because they existed so long ago. They may be 
brought into prominence by it, but they cannot be the result of it 
as they pre-existed so long, and it is well to have brought to us, 
clearly and distinctly, as we have in this Paper, how little modern 
discoveries about the brain and consciousness from the physical 
side really affect the question. It is well to remember that the 
old difficulty of the problem put by Descartes, about the mind and 
the physical basis of the mind, is not the only perplexity. It is no 
worse perplexity than that of attempting really to understand how 
the sun’s light reaches the earth through a medium which we call 
ether, but of which we know absolutely nothing—the properties 
of which are so perplexing that if we reason about them we 
arrive at the conclusion that it is an absolutely non-elastic solid. 
When we find these hopeless perplexities in the best understood 
branches of science, no wonder in the more obscure ones there 
should be quite as great perplexities. Therefore I think we may 
take comfort from that. 
It is well that we should frankly acknowledge that the mind is 
so much connected with the brain that it is hardly too much to 
say that the brain’s connection with the mind is as intimate as the 
dependence of a violinist on his violin. It would be easy to give 
him one so bad that it would be impossible for him to play on it, 
and yet nobody in their senses would say that the violin was the 
cause of Joachim’s wonderful playing. It is the necessary organ 
thereof, but certainly not the cause of it, and one does not confuse 
in one’s thoughts the violin and the violinist. 
Tam specially strack by the explanation on the point so clearly 
put in the Paper in reference to attention. We must remember 
