362 PSYCIIOLOO Y. 



and apart from tliis, at least i)otential, combination nothing 

 is knowal)le to us at all. 



But tliis self, whose consciousness Kant thus estahlished 

 deductively as a comlitio sine qua non of experience, is in the 

 same breath denied by him to have any positive attributes. 

 Although Kant's name for it — the ' original transcendental 

 synthetic Unity of Apperception ' — is so long, our con- 

 sciousness about it is, according to him, short enough. Self- 

 consciousness of this ' transcendental ' sort tells us, ' not 

 how we appear, not how we inwardly are, but only that we 

 are' (§25), At the basis of our knowledge of our selves 

 there lies only "the simple and utterly empty idea: /; of 

 which we cannot even say we have a notion, but only a con- 

 sciousness which accompanies all notions. In this /, or Tu. 

 or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing more 13 represented 

 than the bare transcendental Subject of the knowledge =Xy 

 which is only recognized by the thoughts which are its pre- 

 dicates, and of which, taken by itself, we cannot form the 

 least conception" {ihid. ' Paralogisms '), The pure Ego of 

 all apperception is thus for Kant not the soul, but only tliat 

 ' Subject ' which is the necessary correlate of the Object in 

 all knowledge. There is a soul, Kant thinks, but this mere 

 ego-form of our consciousness tells us nothing about it, 

 neither wdiether it be substantial, nor whether it be imma- 

 terial, nor whether it be simple, nor whether it be per- 

 manent. These declarations on Kant's part of the utter 

 barrenness of the consciousness of the pure Self, and of the 

 consequent impossibility of any deductive or ' rational * 

 psychology, are what, more than anything else, earned for 

 him the title of the ' all-destroyer.' The only self we know 

 anything positive about, he thinks, is the empirical me, not 

 the pure /; the self which is an object among other objects 

 and the ' constituents ' of which we ourselves have seen, and 

 recognized to be phenomenal things appearing in the form 

 of space as well as time. 



This, for oiir purjDoses, is a sufficient account of the 

 * transcendental ' Ego, 



Those purposes go no farther than to ascertain whether 

 anything in Kant's conception ought to make us give up our 

 own, of a remembering and appropriating Thought inces- 



