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certainty of a demonstration of Euclid, that the stream of Force 
which made us was compelled at every turning-point to go 
along that way, and could go along no other way, — we are still 
entitled to turn round to you, and say, ^ I do not care much 
where my nerves came from ; I only know that, having got 
them, they are mine. There is a something which I call Self, 
which flashes like a spirit from one end of my organism to the 
other, and claims the whole as its own ; and if you tell me 
that I am only a bundle of afPerent and efferent nerves, then, 
as a plain man, loving truth, I fling over with scorn all your 
strange phraseology, and I oppose to it the straightforward 
verdict of my simple common sense. By your own confession, 
common sense is the means by which you arrive at this won- 
derful idea that I am a mere automaton ; you admit that the 
oftener you use that common sense in reasoning the greater 
is the probability of error ; you admit that your conclusion 
is one in which that common sense has been used thousands 
of times. I prefer, then, to go to the same common sense 
only once, and to accept that dictum which she clearly 
enunciates. That ^ the whole is greater than its part ^ is at 
least as certain as that ^ circles are to one another as the 
squares of their diameters/ even if the latter be fairly demon- 
strable from the former, and that I am a personal self is at least 
as certain as that I am only a bundle of variously modified 
fibres. This last statement is contradicted by the first. I 
prefer, therefore, to take that way which lies just before my 
own door, and not go far round about only to be landed in 
a philosophical quagmire. 
Taking this as the reply of a plain common-sense man, 
I conceive it is valid, and that Mr. Spencer has no means of 
rebutting it save by denying the validity of that conscious- 
ness to which he himself appeals. If it be valid, obviously 
a complete contradiction is established between his doctrine 
on this matter of our personality, and his doctrine as to the 
absolute certainty of the statements of consciousness. 
It is, however, clear that if one part of Mr. Spencer^s philo- 
sophy contradicts another part, it cannot be a logical unity, 
and careful search can hardly fail to detect a gap in the 
reasoning. Such a gap occurs just where it might have been 
expected, when Mr. Spencer attempts to pass from the con- 
ception of a composition of solar forces to our organism as at 
present constituted. At this point, if I am able to understand his 
arguments, he does nothing but assume the very point at issue. 
His reasoning is not easy to follow, but, when he is compre- 
hended, I think it cannot be denied that his argument is alto- 
gether at fault. I would call special attention to this, for it is 
