Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/209

172

“The most characteristic feature of our consciousness,” he may say, “in so far as our consciousness is rational, appears in our tendency to refer again and again, in our various successive thoughts, to what we call the ‘’ object. To-day I see a house. I leave it, and to-morrow I return to the ‘same’ house. My friend whom I meet to-day is the ‘same’ man whom I met yesterday. I myself am the ‘same’ person at various times. These are ordinary assumptions of common-sense. Nor is it possible to deal at all with our experience without making such assumptions. One may be a sceptic, and may assert that possibly what I call the ‘same’ house or the ‘same’ man, on various occasions, is only in seeming the same. Notoriously more difficult it is to suppose, even in a sceptical mood, that I myself am not the same self as I was. But scepticism often can and does extend to at least a formal doubt or denial of some aspect of the ‘unity of apperception’ in various successive thoughts. Yet even such scepticism must come to a limit somewhere. When I say ‘A given proposition is now true,’ even if it be only the proposition that ‘I feel warm,’ or that ‘rain falls,’ I am able to assert that this proposition will always be true of that moment in which its truth was experienced. And this implies at least the possibility that, whether or no memory ever afterwards accurately serves me, an assertion should later be made which shall have this moment for its object; so that many assertions are thenceforth possible which shall refer to this same moment, although the assertions themselves may be made at very various times. Now,”