Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/176

162 for all psychical development. Unless we can compare the experience of yesterday with the experience of to-day, any advance of ourselves from the brute condition is impossible. Now, such comparison demands that the first experience should have been known as mine. From this demand there is no escape. Complying with it, something, some form of being called personality, must lie at the bottom of the inner side of our nature. Lotze has pertinently said: "We have this unity of consciousness not because we appear to ourselves to have it; we have it because we appear to ourselves to have it."

In each sensation there is consciousness of self in a particular state. Our sensations are varied and successive. We hear the sound of a bell, then of a railway-train, then of the wind; we see cloud, moon, and mountain-top. Here we have the sensation, the succession of sensations, the discrimination of sensations, and discrimination of things by the sensations. Devolve this whole business upon nerve-matter in the cerebral hemispheres. Is such ascription of functions rational? Is it in keeping with our knowledge of brain-structure? If we surmount the difficulty of transformation of motions into non-motions (that is, consciousness), what provision do we anywhere find in the hemispheres for the unification of such sensations as above described, their unification in self?

A further question at once arises. Physiology has arranged for diversity of result. What has it done toward comparing these differences? By comparison, and by that alone, each sensation is known as distinct from every other. All that physiology offers or can offer is the integrity of each nerve-fiber. As has been justly said, this fiber is like every other in construction and action. What provision have we, apart from personality, for detecting difference in sensations?

Personality is the place at which both parties should expend their strength. Mr. Mill and Mr. Bain, understanding this, have sought to obliterate the distinction between feeling and self-consciousness. They have maintained the priority of an impersonal feeling. Here is the starting-point, not in personality, but in feeling. Personality is a development from impersonality by what Mr. Mill calls a "process of reference." This is one of those magical terms, like the newer word "functionate," which serve to obscure the failure of an undertaking. Mr. Bain also starts with a nervous system and feeling, and gives what may be taken as the latest expression of the movement toward unification of soul and body. He says: "The arguments for the two substances—mind and matter—have, we believe, entirely lost their validity; they are no longer compatible with ascertained science and clear thinking. One substance with two sets of attributes, two sides (a physical and a mental), a double-faced unity, would appear to comply with all the exigencies of the case." This assertion of a double-faced unity not only fails to bridge the chasm that is rationally impassable, not only increases the confusion by uniting contradictory