THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 365 



words of one who is talking of operations and the agents 

 bj which they are performed.* And yet there is reason to 

 think that at bottom he may have had nothing of the sort 

 in mind.f In this uncertainty we need again do no more 

 than decide what to think of his transcendental Ego if it he 

 AH agent. 



Well, if it be so, Transcendentalism is only Substantial- 

 ism grown shame-faced, and the Ego only a * cheap and 

 nasty ' edition of the soul. All our reasons for preferring 

 the ' Thought ' to the ' Soul ' apply with redoubled force 

 when the Soul is shrunk to this estate. The Soul truly ex- 

 plained nothing ; the ' syntheses,' which she performed, 

 were simjDly taken ready-made and clapped on to her as 

 expressions of her nature taken after the fact ; but at least 

 she had some semblance of nobility and outlook. She 

 was called active ; might select ; was responsible, and per- 

 manent in her way. The Ego is simply nothing : as in- 

 effectual and windy an abortion as Philosojjhy can show. 

 It would indeed be one of Reason's tragedies if the good 

 Kant, with all his honesty and strenuous pains, should 

 have deemed this conception an important outbirth of his 

 thought. 



But we have seen that Kant deemed it of next to no im- 

 portance at all. It was reserved for his Fichtean and He- 

 gelian successors to call it the first Princij)le of Philosophy, 

 to spell its name in capitals and pronounce it with adora- 

 tion, to act, in short, as if they were going up in a balloon, 

 whenever the notion of it crossed their mind. Here again, 

 however, I am uncertain of the facts of history, and know 

 that I may not read my authors aright. The whole lesson 

 of Kantian and post-Kantian speculation is, it seems to me, 

 the lesson of simplicity. With Kant, comi^lication both of 

 thought and statement was an inborn infirmity, enhanced 



* "As regards the soul, now, or the 'I,' the ' thinker,' the whole drift of 

 Kant's advance upon Hume and sensational psychology is towards the 

 demonstration that the subject of knowledge is an Agent. " (G. S. Morris, 

 Kant's Critique, etc. (Chicago, 1882), p. 224.) 



f "In Kant's Prolegomena," says II. Cohen,— I do not myself find the 

 passage, — "it is expressly said that the problem is not to show how expe- 

 rience arises (ensteht), but of what it consists (besteht)." (Kant's Theoiie 

 d. Erfahrung (1871). p 138.1 



