Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/177

Rh attributes in too small a compass, but it is a pure metaphysical or ontological predication, from which reason defend us! As to the existence of any Spinozistic substance holding in itself the irreconcilables thought and extension, how can it any longer be worth while to express an opinion? Perhaps matter is double-faced. This is a speculation which, as it transcends, contradicts experience.

If I mistake not, Mr. Mill and Mr. Bain have themselves refuted their position with regard to the development of personality from impersonal feeling. Mr. Mill ("Examination of Hamilton," page 242) says: "If, therefore, we speak of the mind as a series of feelings, we are obliged to complete the statement by calling it a series which is aware of itself as past and present; and we are reduced to the alternative of believing that the mind or ego is something different from any series of feelings or possibilities of them, or of accepting the paradox that something which, by hypothesis, is but a series of feelings, can be aware of itself as a series." In his edition of "The Analysis of the Human Mind" (i, 230) he further says, "There is no meaning in the word ego, or I, unless the I of to-day is also the I of yesterday." This mast be taken as an admission that personality is an essential for personal identity.

Mr. Bain says: "We may be in a state of pleasure with little or nothing of thought" (personal consciousness) "accompanying. We are still properly said to be conscious or under consciousness. It is thus correct to draw a line between feeling and knowing that we feel, although there is great delicacy in the operation. [Italics are the writer's.] It may be said in one sense that we can not feel without knowing that we feel; but the assertion is verging on error, for a feeling may be accompanied with a minimum of cognitive energy or, as good as, none at all." I am unable to appreciate this passage as other than an abandonment of the development theory applied to personality. The language of Professor Calderwood seems just when he writes, "If in every sensation, every feeling, there is a particle of cognitive energy" (if the sensation be known as mine in any sense) "the development theory as an account of personality fails."

Under the influence of the a priori procedure, both metaphysical and theological, most of us flee with raised hands of horror at sound of the word will. Recollections of "you shall and you shan't, you can and you can't, you will and you won't," crowd round in ever-thickening confusion. Still, it must be said that, apart from all talk about freedom and bondage, volition is a decidedly large fact in human experience. Though Goethe is right in saying, "Ein kleiner Ring begränzt unser Leben," a ring of circumstance, of inheritance, yet within the circle of that ring a measure of action prevails which no word describes save the word willed. The action is determined by personality. It is impossible to find provision for this in the nervous system. Inhibitory nerves there may be, but the experience of