Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/296

280 the ordinary man would call the "real person" — is this strictly individual? In the waste and restoration of the bodily tissues there is a constant transition between the organism and the environment : and the same holds with respect to the mind or spirit. So much is inherited; i.e. represents a mere part of a continuous stream; so much is constantly being acquired from the physical and social environment. Self-identity is not an immediate datum of consciousness: it is a matter of inference. I think of myself as the permanent substance of which particular actions, feelings, etc., are predicable. But the real self is not a bare unity: the real human individual is his ancestry and his age epitomized. What we call "originality" is a new combination of elements already there. If there is any difference between a person and a thing in respect of individuality, it is a difference in degree only and not in kind. Spiritual substance, like material substance, is either simply a meeting point of universal qualities or a metaphysical phantom — like the geometrical abstraction of a point treated as if it were a real thing. But it will be said "there is the difference of consciousness." Well, if by reality he meant consciousness, an idealist is not likely to quarrel with the statement. But then, I suspect, the realist means by consciousness simply an attribute of a substance: he has got his Vorstellung of spiritual substance in the background.

(5) If, however, the self be taken to mean, not an object existing among other objects, but the subject logically implied in all knowledge, the "Transcendental Ego" which we never can know as an object, and which therefore we never can "get behind," that may be allowed to be the ultimate reality. But that is individual only in the sense in which the unity of the cosmos is individual: and that, I fancy, is hardly what the realist means to mean. "Nothing in the world is single" — except the whole world itself: and that is not "in" the world.

We often hear it argued "thought implies a thinker." True, but a thinker is not necessarily a thinking substance: a thinker is a thinking subject. All that is immediately given