Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/505

 492 H. MAUDSLEY I mental being predominantly : the reflection, in fact, may be ever so partial and incomplete, it may be fairly full and complete. Meanwhile, the unconscious / has not undergone any change, or at any rate anything like a corresponding change ; it lies deep, basic, silent for the most part beneath all conscious manifestations ; they are like multitudinous waves on its surface, some of which reach deeper down than others, but none of which reach its lowest depths. Inevit- ably then does the axiom of Descartes assume the funda- mental fact of unconscious beneath conscious being the / who am as the basis of the / who think ; and necessarily must those who would know and explain mental being pursue their inquiries in regions of which self-consciousness gives no information. 1 Whatever its value in its own pro- vince, the method of introspection is manifestly inadequate to sound the depths of mental function ; it is struck with fatal barrenness at the root. The / who think never being the whole / who am, the so-called unity and continuity of consciousness are not the certainties which they are commonly proclaimed to be ; at the best they are derivative, not fundamental. Is there, in truth, a real unity of consciousness at all ? Is not the real unity the unity of the individual organism, which is funda- mental and the basis of such unity as appears in conscious- ness? Consciousness is actually a multiplicity, a series of immeasurably rapid discontinuities, rather than a continuity and unity ; there is no conscious thread of unity between its multitudinous rapid successions. The conscious Ego of to-day is as different as possible from the conscious Ego of twenty years since, and could not, as a matter of pure introspective or intuitive self-consciousness, know itself to be the same. There is no sufficing direct intuition of identity, that is to say ; the knowledge thereof is indirect, discursive, through memory of scenes and events, retrospective, a historical con- tinuity. It is because I remember the scenes and events, and how the individual who is now I acted in them, that I know that I was that individual ; not because I have im- mediate consciousness of the sameness of self. I am so much changed since then that, except for my historical con- sciousness, I could not know myself to be the same, could 1 There is a certain instinct or feeling or quasi-consciousness of the body, arising from the unity of working of its organs and declaring itself in the brain, which lies deeper than, and goes before, the conscious * I think, therefore I am 3. Messages are sent continually to the nervous centres from every part of the complex network of nerves distributed to its different parts ; and it is in these impressions that the basis of the Ego lies.