TEE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 345 



have seen it to be single and unique in the sense of having 

 no separable parts (above, p. 239 ff.) — perhaps that is the only 

 kind of simplicity meant to be predicated of the soul. The 

 present Thought also has being, — at least all believers in 

 the Soul believe so — and if there be no other Being in 

 which it 'inheres,' it ought itself to be a ' substance.' If 

 this kind of simplicity and substantiality w ere all that is 

 pi-edicated of the Soul, then it might apj)ear that we had 

 been talking of the soul all along, without knowing it, when 

 we treated the present Thought as an agent, an owner, and 

 the like. But the Thought is a perishing and not an im- 

 mortal or incorruptible thing. Its successors may contin- 

 uously succeed to it, resemble it, and ajjpropriate it, but 

 they are not it, whereas the Soul-Substance is supj^osed to 

 be a fixed unchanging thing. By the Soul is always meant 

 something heliind the j)resent Thought, another kind of 

 substance, existing on a non-phenomenal plane. 



When we brought in the Soul at the end of Chapter YI, 

 as an entity which the various brain-processes were sup- 

 posed to affect simultaneously, and which resj)onded to 

 their combined influence by single pulses of its thought, it 

 was to escape integrated mind-stuff on the one hand, and 

 an improbable cerebral monad on the other. But when 

 (as now, after all we have been through since that earlier 

 passage) we take the two formulations, first of a brain to 

 whose processes pulses of thought simply correspond, and 

 second, of one to whose processes pulses of thought in a 

 Soul correspond, and compare them together, we see that at 

 bottom the second formulation is only a more roundabout 

 way than the first, of expressing the same bald fact. 

 That bald fact is that token the brain acts, a thought occurs. 

 The spiritualistic formulation says that the brain-processes 

 knock the thought, so to speak, out of a Soul wliich stands 

 there to receive their influence. The simpler formulation 

 says that the thought simply comes. But Avhat positive 

 meaning has the Soul, when scrutinized, but the ground of 

 possibility of the thought ? And what is the ' knocking ' but 

 the determining of the possibility to act uality ? And what is this 

 after all but giving a sort of concreted form to one's belief 

 that the coming of the thought, when the brain-j^rocesses 



