360 PSYCUOLOGY. 



ones is a real tie between them , so is their resemblance ; 

 so is their continuity ; so is the one's ' appropriation ' 

 of the other : all are real ties, realized in the judging 

 Thought of every moment, the only place where disconnec- 

 tions could be realized, did they exist. Hume and Mill 

 both imply that a disconnection can be realized there, whilst 

 a tie cannot. But the ties and the disconnections are ex- 

 actly on a par, in this matter of self-consciousness. The 

 way in which the present Thought appropriates the past is 

 a real way, so long as no other owner appropriates it in a 

 more real way, and so long as the Thought has no grounds 

 for repudiating it stronger than those which lead to its 

 appropriation. But no other owner ever does in point of 

 fact present himself for my past ; and the grounds which I 

 perceive for appropriating it — viz., continuity and resem- 

 blance with the present — outweigh those I perceive for dis- 

 owning it — viz., distance in time. My present Thought 

 stands thus in the plenitude of ownership of the train of 

 my past selves, is owner not only de facto, but de jure, the 

 most real owner there can be, and all without the supposi- 

 tion of any 'inexplicable tie,' but in a perfectly verifiable 

 and phenomenal way. 



Turn we now to what we may call 



THE TRANSCENDENTALIST THEORY. 



which owes its origin to Kant. Kant's own statements are 

 too lengthy and obscure for verbatim quotation here, so I 

 must give their substance only. Kant starts, as I understand 

 him, from a view of the Object essentially like our own de- 

 scription of it on p. 275 fi., that is, it is a system of things, 

 qualities or facts in relation. "Object is that in the knowl- 

 edge (Begriff) of which the Manifold of a given Perception 

 is connected." * But whereas we simply begged the vehi- 

 cle of this connected knowledge in the shape of what we 

 call the present Thought, or section of the Stream of Con- 

 sciousness (which we declared to be the ultimate fact 

 for psychology), Kant denies this to be an ultimate fact 

 and insists on analyzing it into a large number of distinct, 



* Kritik d. reinen Vernunft, 3te Aufl. § 17. 



