Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/450

 436 SHADWORTH H. HODGSON : What it was, and how it gave rise to thought, was not disclosed. The dictum itself, therefore, the Coyito ergo sum, still remained a piece of common-sense experience, and the agent which it asserted, the Ego or Self, was not in reality fitted to serve as an hypothesis accounting for the experi- ences, that is to say, for the perceptions, thoughts, and actions, of sentient beings. No doubt whatever, that I, you, he, felt, thought, and acted ; but what was the I, you, he, apart from our feelings, thoughts, and actions ? Of this, although self-conscious, we were just as ignorant as we were of the nature of the Soul or Mind, now supplanted by this, newer hypothesis. Thus breaking down as a psychological hypothesis, it was a fortiori unable to form the basis of any tenable account of the nature of the Universe. It was a conception without any content of its own, empty of all content save that which it was required to explain. It was a mere tautology. In vain was Fichte's attempt to raise the Ego to transcendental rank, as an Absolute Ego. In vain J. F. Ferrier of St. Andrews, in his Institutes of Metaphysic brought it down again to earth, and endeavoured to deduce, in Euclidean fashion, a whole system of philosophy from his First Proposition, which runs thus : " Along with whatever any intelligence knows, it must, as the ground or condition of its knowledge, have some cognisance of itself". What is an intelligence? What knowledge has it of itself? The old question still recurred, and still remained unanswered. Meantime the ground won by the Cartesian cogito, the advance towards subjectivity in philosophy, had not been lost. The content of feelings, thoughts, and actions, was still there as of old ; and though it was evident that the Ego was no unit with a positive content in that character, it was equally evident that there was unity in feelings, thoughts and actions, in the form of an ever-present combination of them, as parts of the history of individual persons, or so- called self-conscious living beings. The question now was, in what did this unity consist, and in what part of the self-conscious personality did it originate and reside? 3. The way was thus laid open to theories of the third class mentioned above, the Mental Function theories, as I have called them. Conspicuous among these is the Hegelian theory, which singled out the function of Thought or Thinking, so far as it was pure consciousness, as that which evolved and explained the rest, and all that they contained. In order to place it in this commanding position two assumptions were necessary, (1) that it possessed energy or activity in its own right, acting under a logical law of its.