368 PSYCHOLoar. 



it an entity copied from thought in all essential respects, "but 

 differing from it in being ' out of time.' What psychology 

 can gain by this barter would be hard to divine. More- 

 over this resemblance of the timeless Ego to the Soul is 

 completed by other resemblances still. The monism of 

 the post-Kantian idealists seems always lapsing into a 

 regular old-fashioned spiritualistic dualism. They inces- 

 santly talk as if, like the Soul, their All-thinker were an 

 Agent, operating on detached materials of sense. This may 

 come from the accidental fact that the English writings of 

 the school have been more polemic than constructive, and 

 that a reader may often take for a positive profession a 

 statement ad hominem meant as part of a reduction to the 

 absurd, or mistake the analysis of a bit of knowledge into 

 elements for a dramatic myth about its creation. But I 

 think the matter has profounder roots. Professor Green 

 constantly talks of the ' activity ' of Self as a ' condition ' of 

 knowledge taking place. Facts are said to become incor- 

 porated with other facts only through the * action of a com- 

 bining self-consciousness upon data of sensation.' 



"Every object we perceive . . . requires, in order to its presen- 

 tation, the ac^^rt of a principle of consciousness, not itself subject to 

 conditions of time, upon successive a])pearances, such action as may 

 hold the appearances together, without fusion, in an apprehended 

 fact." * 



It is needless to repeat that the connection of things in 

 our knowledge is in no whit explained by making it the 

 deed of an agent whose essence is self-identity and who is 

 out of time. The agency of phenomenal thought coming 

 and going in time is just as easy to understand. And when 

 it is furthermore said that the agent that combines is the 

 same * self-distinguishing subject ' which ' in another mode 

 of its activity' presents the manifold object to itself, the 

 unintelligibilities become quite paroxysmal, and we are 

 forced to confess that the entire school of thought in ques- 

 tion, in spite of occasional glimpses of something more re- 

 fined, still dwells habitually in that mythological stage of 

 thought where phenomena are explained as results of 



* Loc. dt. § 64. 



