THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 341 



in the Present, which alone passes for real, and thus keep- 

 ing the chain from being a purely ideal thing. Anon the 

 hook itself will drop into the joast with all it carries, and 

 then be treated as an object and appropriated by a new 

 Thought in the new present which will serve as living 

 hook in turn. The present moment of consciousness is 

 thus, as Mr. Hodgson says, the darkest in the whole series. 

 It may feel its own immediate existence — we have all along 

 admitted the possibility of this, hard as it is by direct in- 

 trospection to ascertain the fact — but nothing can be known 

 about it till it be dead and gone. Its appropriations are 

 therefore less to itself than to the most intimately felt part 

 of its present Object, the body, and the central adjustments, 

 which accompany the act of thinking, in the head. These 

 are the real nucleus of our personal identity, and it is their 

 actual existence, realized as a solid present fact, which 

 makes us say ' as sure as I exist, those past facts were part 

 of myself.' They are the kernel to which the represented 

 parts of the Self are assimilated, accreted, and knit on ; 

 and even were Thought entirely unconscious of itself in 

 the act of thinking, these ' warm ' parts of its present 

 object would be a firm basis on which the consciousness 

 of personal identity would rest.* Such consciousness, then. 



* Some subtle reader will object that the Thought cannot call any part 

 of its Object ' I ' and knit other parts on to it, without tirst knitting that 

 part on to /?sf(/"/ and that it cannot knit it on to Itself -v^-ithout knowing 

 Itself ; — so that our supposition (above, p. 304) that the Thought may con- 

 ceivably have no immediate knowledge of Itself is thus overthrown. To 

 which the reply is that we must take care not to be duped by words. The 

 words /and we signify nothing mysterious and unexampled— they are at 

 bottom only names of empJiam ; and Thought is always emphasizing 

 something. Within a tract of space which it cognizes, it contrasts a Jiere 

 with a tliere ; within a tract of time a now with a tlien : of a pair of things 

 it calls one tliis, the other that. I and thou, I and^■<, are distinctions exactly 

 on a par with these. — distinctions possible in an exclusively oft/eciirc field of 

 knowledge, the ' I ' meaning for the Thought nothing but the bodily life 

 which it momentarily feels. The sense of my bodily existence, however 

 obscurely recognized as such, may then be the absolute original of my con- 

 scious selfhood, the fundamental perception Wx^Xl am. All appropriations 

 vmy be made to it. hy a Thought not at the moment immediately cognized 

 by itself. Whether these are not only logical possibilities but actual facts 

 is something not yet dogmatically decided in the text. 



