370 PSYCHOLOGY. 



theory of mind. But tliis service lias been ill-performed ; 

 for the Egoists themselves, let them say what they will, 

 believe in the bundle, and in their own system merely tie it 

 tip, with their special transcendental string, invented for 

 that use alone. Besides, they talk as if, with this miraculous 

 tying or 'relating,' the Ego's duties were done. Of its far 

 more important duty of choosing some of the things it ties 

 and appropriating them, to the exclusion of the rest, they 

 tell us never a word. To sum up, then, my own opinion of 

 the transcendentalist school, it is (whatever ulterior meta- 

 physical truth it may divine) a school in Avliich psychology 

 at least has naught to learn, and whose deliverances about 

 the Ego in particular in no wise oblige us to revise our own 

 formulation of the Stream of Thought.* 



With this, all jjossible rival formulations have been dis- 

 cussed. The literature of the Self is large, but all its 



* The reader will please understand that I am quite willing to leave the 

 hypothesis of the transcendental Ego as a substitute for the passing 

 Thought open to discussion on general speculative grounds. Only in this 

 book I prefer to stick by the common sense assumption that we have suc- 

 cessive conscious states, because all psychologists make it, and because one 

 does not see how there can be a Psychology written which does not postulate 

 such thoughts as its ultimate data. The data of all natural sciences be- 

 come in turn subjects of a critical treatment more relnned than that which 

 the sciences themselves accord; and so it may fare in the end with our 

 passing Thought. We have ourselves seen (pp. 299-305) that the sensible 

 certainty of its existence is less strong than is usually assumed. My 

 quarrel with the transcendental Egoists is mainly about their grounds for 

 their belief. Did they consistently propose it as a substitute for the passing 

 Thought, did they consistently deny the tatter's existence, I should respect 

 their position more. But so far as I can understand them, they habitually 

 believe in the passing Thought also. They seem even to believe in the 

 Lockian stream of separate ideas, for the chief glory of the Ego in their 

 pages is always its power to 'overcome' this separateness and unite the 

 naturally disunited, '■ synthetizing' 'connecting,' or 'relating' the ideas 

 together being used as synonyms, by tran.scendentalist writers, for knowing 

 various objects at once. Not the being conscious at all, but the being con- 

 scious of many things together is, held to be the difficult thing, in our psychic 

 life, which only the wonder-working Ego can perform. But on what 

 slippery ground does one get the moment one changes the definite notion 

 of knotcing an object into the altogether vague one of uniting or synthetizing 

 the ideas of its various parts I — In the chapter on Sensation we shall come 

 upon all this again. 



