Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/56

40 But the problem of self-consciousness is not one of "blank unmediated correspondences" between certain series of particular thoughts and other series of particular known brain-processes. It is the far graver and profounder problem of trying to tell how there comes to be an actual distinction made between thoughts and thinker; and how some thoughts are irresistibly referred by the thinker to the thinker as, not himself, but his thoughts; while other thoughts are referred by the same thinker to things as knowledge which the same thinker has of what is not his thoughts. Just here Professor James leaves us, totally without any explanation even of his own inadequate statement of the content of this problem. We have no explanation even of this aforesaid "obscurer feeling of something more," which may not be a feeling of "fainter physiological processes," but may be of just "nothing objective at all"?

The scientific description and explanation of the problem of self-consciousness includes that unity which is the very core of the problem itself. The insignificance which Professor James attributes to this problem he justifies by an appeal to Lotze, who is represented as maintaining that, "so long as our self, on the whole, makes itself good and practically maintains itself as a closed individual," this is enough. The appeal to Lotze is here most unfortunate. For above all philosophers of the century he has maintained that to be "substantially" and to be self-conscious is one and the same thing; and that the unity of self-consciousness is an irresistible demonstration of the real being of the soul.

The " associationist theory" of the pure self is then held to be — as no doubt it is — quite unworkable without secretly summoning to its help some unifying principle, some psychic synthesis, or postulated "deeper-lying entity." While "transcendentalism is only substantialism grown shame-faced, and its Ego only a 'cheap and nasty' edition of the soul" (p. 365). The conclusion of the whole matter is, then; scientific psychology, abjuring metaphysics, must hold that "thought is itself the thinker, and psychology need not look beyond" (p. 401).

But we are inclined to insist yet again: The very problem to