226 PSYCHOLOGY. 



but each belongs with certain others and with none beside. 

 My thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your 

 thought with your other thoughts. Whether anywhere in 

 the room there be a mere thought, which is nobody's 

 thought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we have no 

 experience of its like. The only states of consciousness 

 that we naturally deal with are found in personal con- 

 sciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I's and 

 you's. 



Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. 

 There is no giving or bartering between them. No thought 

 even comes into direct sight of a thought in another per- 

 sonal consciousness than its own. Absolute insulation, 

 irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the ele- 

 mentary psychic fact were not tlioiiglit or tliis thought or that 

 thought, but my thought, every thought being oiuned. Neither 

 contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of 

 quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together 

 which are sundered by this barrier of belonging to differ- 

 ent personal minds. The breaches between such thoughts 

 are the most absolute breaches in nature. Everyone will 

 recognize this to be true, so long as the existence of some- 

 thing corresponding to the term * personal mind ' is all that 

 is insisted on, without any particular view of its nature 

 being implied. On these terms the personal self rather 

 than the thought might be treated as the immediate datum 

 in psychology. The universal conscious fact is not 'feel- 

 ings and thoughts exist,' but 'I think' and 'I feel.'* No 

 psychology, at any rate, can question the existence of per- 

 sonal selves. The worst a psychology can do is so to 

 interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of their 

 worth. A French writer, speaking of our ideas, says some- 

 where in a fit of anti-spiritualistic excitement that, misled 

 by certain peculiaritities which they display, we ' end by 

 personifying' the procession which they make, — such per- 

 sonification being regarded by him as a great philosophic 

 blunder on our part. It could only be a blunder if the 

 notion of personality meant something essentially different 



* B. P. Bowne : Metaphysics, p. 362. 



