THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 337 



Our recent simile of tlie herd of cattle will lielp us. It 

 will be remembered that the beasts were brought together 

 into one herd because their owner found on each of them 

 his brand. The ' owner ' symbolizes here that ' section ' of 

 consciousness, or pulse of thought, which we have all along 

 represented as the vehicle of the judgment of identity ; and 

 the ' brand ' symbolizes the characters of warmth and con- 

 tinuity, by reason of which the judgment is made. There 

 is found a seZ/'-brand, just as there is found a herd-brand. 

 Each brand, so far, is the mark, or cause of our know- 

 ing, that certain things belong-together. But if the brand 

 is the ratio cognoscendi of the belonging, the belonging, 

 in the case of the herd, is in turn the ratio existendi of 

 the brand. No beast would be so branded unless he be- 

 longed to the owner of the herd. They are not his because 

 they are branded ; they are branded because they are his. 

 So that it seems as if our description of the belonging- 

 together of the various selves, as a belonging-together which 

 is merely represented, in a later pulse of thought, had 

 knocked the bottom out of the matter, and omitted the 

 most characteristic one of all the features found in the herd 

 — a feature which common-sense finds in the phenomenon 

 of personal identity as well, and for our omission of which 

 she will hold us to a strict account. For common-sense 

 insists that the unity of all the selves is not a mere ap- 

 pearance of similarity or continuity, ascertained after the 

 fact. She is sure that it involves a real belonging to a real 

 Owner, to a pure spiritual entity of some kind. Relation 

 to this entity is what makes the self's constituents stick to- 

 gether as they do for thought. The individual beasts do 

 not stick together, for all that they wear the same brand. 

 Each wanders with whatever accidental mates it finds. The 

 herd's unity is only potential, its centre ideal, like the 

 * centre of gravity ' in physics, until the herdsman or owner 

 comes. He furnishes a real centre of accretion to which 

 the beasts are driven and by which they are held. The 

 beasts stick together by sticking severally to him. Just so, 

 common-sense insists, there must be a real proprietor in 

 the case of the selves, or else their actual accretion into a 

 ' personal consciousness ' would never have taken place. 



