338 PSYCHOLOGY. 



To the usual empiricist explanation of personal conscious' 

 uess this is a formidable reproof, because all the individual 

 thoughts and feelings Avhich have succeeded each other ' up 

 to date ' are represented by ordinary Associaticmism as in 

 some inscrutable way 'integrating' or gumming themselves 

 together on their own account, and thus fusing into a stream. 

 A-U the incomprehensibilities which in Chapter YI Ave saw 

 to attach to the idea of things fusing without a medium 

 apply to the empiricist description of personal identity. 



But in our own account the medium is fully assigned, 

 the herdsman is there, in the shape of something not among 

 the things collected, but superior to them all, namely, the 

 real, present onlooking, remembering, ' judging thought ' 

 or identifying ' section ' of the stream. This is what col- 

 lects, — ' owns ' some of the past facts which it surveys, and 

 disowns the rest, — and so makes a unity that is actualized 

 and anchored and does not merely float in the blue air of 

 possibility. And the reality of such pulses of thought, with 

 their function of knowing, it will be remembered that we 

 did not seek to deduce or explain, but simply assumed them 

 as the ultimate kind of fact that the psychologist must ad- 

 mit to exist. 



But this assumption, though it yields much, still does 

 not yield all that common-sense demands. The unity into 

 which the Thought — as I shall for a time proceed to call, 

 with a capital T, the present mental state — binds the indi- 

 vidual past facts with each other and with itself, does not 

 exist until the Thought is there. It is as if wild cattle were 

 lassoed by a newly-created settler and then owned for the 

 first time. But the essence of the matter to common-sense 

 is that the past thoughts never were wild cattle, they w^ere 

 ahvays owned. The Thought does not capture them, but 

 as soon as it comes into existence it finds them already its 

 own. How is this possible unless the Thought have a 

 suhstanticd identity with a former owner, — not a mere con- 

 tinuity or a resemblance, as in our account, but a reed unity ? 

 Common-sense in fact would drive us to admit what we 

 may for the moment call an Arch-Ego, dominating the en- 

 tire stream of thought and all the selves that may be 

 represented in it, as the ever self- same and changeless 



