S'S2 PSYCII0L0G7. 



thesis is involved iu tliouglit's mere existence. Even a 

 really disconnected world could only be known to be such 

 by having its parts temporarily united in the Object of some 

 pulse of consciousness.* 



The sense of personal identity is not, then, this mere 

 synthetic form essential to all thought. It is the sense of a 

 sameness perceived by thought and predicated of things 

 thoiight-abonf. These things are a present self and a self 

 of yesterday. The thought not only thinks them both, but 

 thinks that they are identica 1. The psychologist, looking on 

 and playing the critic, might prove the thought wrong, and 

 show there was no real identity, — there might have been no 

 yesterday, or, at any rate, no self of yesterday; or, if there 

 were, the sameness j)i'edicated might not obtain, or might 

 be predicated on insufficient grounds. In either case the 

 personal identity would not exist as a fact; but it would 

 exist as a feeling all the same ; the consciousness of it by 

 the thought would be there, and the psychologist would 

 still have to analyze that, and show where its illusoriuess 

 lay. Let us now be the ps3-chologist and see whether it be 

 right or wrong when it says, I am the same self that I ivas 

 y ester clqy. 



We may immediately call it right and intelligible so far 

 as it posits a past time with past thoughts or selves con- 

 tained therein — these were data which we assumed at the 

 outset of the book. Eight also and intelligible so far as it 

 thinks of a present self — that present self we hai^e just 

 studied in its various forms. The only question for us is 

 as to what the consciousness may mean when it calls the 



apperception what we here mean by objective and subjective synthesis 

 respectively. It were much to be desired that some one might invent a 

 good pair of terms iu which to record the distinction — those used in the 

 text are certainly very bad, but Kant's seem to me still worse. ' Categorical 

 imity' and 'transcendental synthesis' would also be good Kantian, but 

 hardly good human, speech. 



* So that we might say, by a sort of bad pun, "only a connected world 

 can be known as disconnected." I say bad pun, because the point of view 

 shifts between the connectedness and the disconnectedness. The discon- 

 nectedness is of the realities known ; the connectedness is of the knowl- 

 edge of them ; and reality and knowledge of it are, from the psychological 

 foiut of view held fast to in these pages, two different facts. 



