THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 357 



The reader must judge of our own success in carrying 

 the analysis farther. The various distinctions we have 

 made are all parts of an endeavor so to do. John Mill him- 

 self, in a later- written passage, so far from advancing in the 

 line of analysis, seems to fall back upon something peril- 

 ously near to the Soul. He says : 



" The fact of recognizing a sensation, . . . remembering that it 

 has been felt before, is the simplest and most elementary fact of mem- 

 ory : and the inexplicable tie . . . which connects the present con- 

 sciousness with the past one of which it reminds me, is as near as I 

 think we can get to a positive conception of Self. That there is some- 

 thing real in this tie, real as the sensations themselves, and not a mere 

 product of the laws of thought without any fact corresponding to it, I 

 hold to be indubitable. . . . This original element, ... to which we 

 cannot give any name but its own peculiar one, without implying some 

 false or ungrounded theory, is the Ego, or Self. As such I ascribe a 

 reality to the Ego— to my own mind— different from that real existence 

 as a Permanent Possibility, which is the only reality I acknowledge in 

 Matter. . . . We are forced to apprehend every part of the series as 

 linked with the other parts by something in common which is not the 

 feelings themselves, any more than the succession of the feelings is the 

 feelings themselves ; and as that which is the same in the first as in the 

 second, in the second as in the third, in the third as in the fourth, 

 and so on, must be the same in the first and in the fiftieth, this com- 

 mon element is a permanent element. But beyond this we can affirm 

 nothing of it except the states of consciousness themselves. The feel- 

 ings or consciousnesses which belong or have belonged to it, and its 

 possibilities of having more, are the only facts there are to be asserted 

 of Self — the only positive attributes, except permanence, which we caa 

 ascribe to it." * 



Mr. Mill's habitual method of philosophizing was to 

 affirm boldly some general doctrine derived from his father, 

 and then make so many concessions of detail to its enemies 

 as practically to abandon it altogether. f In this place the 



* Examination of Hamilton, 4th ed. p. 263. 



f His chapter on the Psychological Theory of Mind is a beautiful case in 

 point, and his concessions there have become so celebrated that they must 

 be quoted for the reader's benefit. He ends the chapter with these words 

 {loc. cit. p. 247): "The theory, therefore, which resolves Mind into a series 

 of feelings, with a background of possibilities of feeling, can effectually 

 withstand the most invidious of the arguments directed against it. But 

 groundless as are the extrinsic objections, the theory has intrinsic difficul- 



