THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 339 



principle implied in tlieir union. The 'Soul' of Meta- 

 physics and the 'Transcendental Ego' of the Kantian 

 Philosophy, are, as we shall soon see, but attempts to sat- 

 isfy this urgent demand of common-sense. But, for a time 

 at least, we can still express without any such hypotheses 

 that ajDpearance of never-lapsing ownership for which com- 

 mon-sense contends. 



For how would it be if the Thought, the present judg^ 

 ing Thought, instead of being in any way substantially or 

 transeendentally identical with the former owner of the 

 past self, merely inherited his ' title,' and thus stood as 

 his legal representative now? It would then, if its birth 

 coincided exactly with the death of another owner, Jind 

 the past self already its own as soon as it found it at all, 

 and the past self would thus never be wild, but always 

 owned, bj' a title that never lapsed. We can imagine a 

 long succession of herdsmen coming rapidly into possession 

 of the same cattle by transmission of an original title by 

 bequest. May not the 'title' of a collective self be passed 

 from one Thought to another in some analogous way? 



It is a patent fact of consciousness that a transmission 

 like this actually occurs. Each pulse of cognitive conscious- 

 ness, each Thought, dies away and is replaced by another. 

 The other, among the things it knows, knows its own prede- 

 cessor, and finding it 'warm,' in the way we have de- 

 scribed, greets it, saying : " Thou art mine, and part of the 

 same self with me." Each later Thought, knowing and in- 

 cluding thus the Thoughts which went before, is the final 

 receptacle — and appropriating them is the final owner — 

 of all that they contain and own. Each Thought is thus 

 born an owner, and dies owned, transmitting whatever it 

 realized as its Self to its own later proprietor. As Kant 

 says, it is as if elastic balls were to have not only motion 

 but knowledge of it, and a first ball were to transmit both 

 its motion and its consciousness to a second, which took 

 both up into its consciousness and passed them to a third, 

 until the last ball held all that the other balls had held, 

 and realized it as its own. It is this trick Avhich the nas- 

 cent thought has of immediately taking up the expiring 

 thought and ' adopting ' it, which is the foundation of the 



