SIR WILLIAM Hamilton's philosophy. 83 



any of the elements which he exhibits, nor is there anything in their 

 combination, that should oblige or even authorize us to identify such a 

 combination with that of which we are conscious as our selves. We 

 might indeed allow some probability to the above explanation of the 

 manner in which self-consciousness arises, if we supposed that mental, 

 like chemical, combination may produce effects whose properties are 

 entirely different from those possessed by any of the combining ele- 

 ments. Such an hypothesis is not to be discarded without examination; 

 it requires only from psychologists a proof similar to that which is fur- 

 nished by chemistry. Now, of an immense number of chemical com- 

 pounds we know the composition with certainty, not only by being able 

 to decompose them into their constituent elements, but also by our 

 ability to reproduce the compounds by a combination of their elements. 

 Even those organic compounds, however, which have not yet been 

 reproduced in the laboratory of the chemist, still exhibit the most 

 satisfactory evidence of their composition ; the substances may be 

 placed before the senses, and, under perfectly reliable tests, be shown 

 to yield a definite number of recognisable elements. Can anything like 

 this process be carried out in reference to the self? If it can, it cer- 

 tainly has not yet been done. " I" cannot submit to any psychological 

 reagents which compel me to give up the elementary mental stuff of 

 which "I" am constituted. Every analj'sis of "me" is wholly hypo- 

 thetical. Ever present in all human consciousness, •'!" am still to 

 science a mystery — an " open secret," and perhaps, from the very 

 openness of the secrecy, a limit to the opening of secrets by man. 



It has been mentioned, that Mr. Mill admits a certain imperfection 

 iu his analysis of self-consciousness. His admission amounts to this, 

 that, while he professes to explain how the notion of self, considered 

 solely as the notion of a permanent something, could arise, yet there 

 is another element in the notion of self, and this element is not involved 

 in the given explanation. " If," he says,* " we speak of the mind as 

 a series of feelings, we are obliged to complete the statement by calling 

 it a series of feelings which is aware of itself as past and future ; and 

 we are reduced to the alternative of believing that the mind or ego is 

 something different from any series of feelings or possibilities of them, 

 or of accepting the paradox, that something which ex hypothesi is but 

 a series of feelings, can be aware of itself as a series. The truth is, 



* Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy, pp. 212-13. 



