Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/246

226 226 PSYCHOLOGY. but each belongs with certain others and with none beside. My thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your thought with your other thoughts. Whether anywhere in the room there be a mere thought, which is nobody's thought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we have no experience of its like. The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal con- sciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I's and you's. Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering between them. No thought even comes into direct sight of a thought in another per- sonal consciousness than its own. Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the ele- mentary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned. Neither contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this barrier of belonging to differ- ent personal minds. The breaches between such thoughts are the most absolute breaches in nature. Everyone will recognize this to be true, so long as the existence of some- thing corresponding to the term ' personal mind ' is all that is insisted on, without any particular view of its nature being implied. On these terms the personal self rather than the thought might be treated as the immediate datum in psychology. The universal conscious fact is not 'feel- ings and thoughts exist,' but 'I think' and 'I feel.'* No psychology, at any rate, can question the existence of per- sonal selves. The worst a psychology can do is so to interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of their worth. A French writer, speaking of our ideas, says some- where in a fit of anti-spiritualistic excitement that, misled by certain peculiaritities which they display, we ' end by personifying' the procession which they make, — such per- sonification being regarded by him as a great philosophic blunder on our part. It could only be a blunder if the notion of personality meant something essentially different
 * B. P. Bowne : Metaphysics, p. 362.