THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 349 



in the rational way in which we trust it is. Substance or 

 no substance, soul or ' stream,' what Lotze sajs of immor- 

 tality is about all that human wisdom can say : 



" We have no other principle for deciding it than this general ideal- 

 istic belief : that every created thing will continue whose continuance 

 belongs to the meaning of the w^orld, and so long as it does so belong ; 

 whilst every one will pass away whose reality is justified only in a tran- 

 sitory phase of the world's course. That this principle admits of no 

 further application in human hands need hardly be said. We surely 

 know not the merits which may give to one being a claim on eternity, 

 nor the defects which would cut others off. " * 



A second alleged necessity for a soul-substance is our 

 forensic responsibility before God. Locke caused an up- 

 roar when he said that the unit}' of consciousness made a 

 man the same person, whether supported by the same sub- 

 stance or no, and that God would not, in the great day, 

 make a person answer for what he remembered nothing of. 

 It was supposed scandalous that our forgetfulness might 

 thus deprive God of the chance of certain retributions, 

 which otherwise would have enhanced his ' glory.' This is 

 certainly a good speculative ground for retaining the Soul — 

 at least for those who demand a plenitude of retribution. 

 The mere stream of consciousness, with its laj)ses of mem- 

 ory, cannot possibly be as ' res^jonsible ' as a soul which is 

 at the judgment day all that it ever was. To modern read- 

 ers, however, who are less insatiate for retribution than 

 their grandfathers, this argument will hardly be as con- 

 vincing as it seems once to have been. 



One great use of the Soul has always been to account 

 for, and at the same time to guarantee, the closed individu- 

 ality of each personal consciousness. The thoughts of one 

 soul must unite into one self, it was supposed, and must be 

 eternally insulated from those of every other soul. But we 

 have already begun to see that, although unity is the rule of 

 each man's consciousness, yet in some individuals, at least, 

 thoughts may split away from the others and form sepa- 



* Metaphysik. %245fin. This writer, who in his early work, the Medi- 

 zinische Psychologie, was (to my reading) a strong defender of the Soul- 

 Substance theory, has written in §§ 24^-5 of his Metaphysik the most beau- 

 tiful criticism of this theory which exists. 



