At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most progressive intellectuals still held that humans had been made in the image of God. By the end of the century—due primarily to the influence of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx—most held that humans had been made in the image of biology and society. Even earlier in the century, naturalizing tendencies had made an appearance in the guise of physiological inquiry into the brain and psychological inquiry into the development of self concepts. It would take some time for these momentous changes to be fully assimilated into intellectual culture. But when they were finally assimilated, the process of naturalizing the soul, and with it humans beings, would be all but complete.
Biological Materialism and the Origins of Experimental Psychology
In the West, materialism had its origins in classical Greece. But once the church opted for Platonic dualism, it was not until the seventeenth century that a physical science emerged that could make materialism all but irresistible. That happened primarily through Isaac Newton, whose work gave great impetus not only to materialism but also to mechanism—the idea that the world of inorganic matter runs like a clock.1
Earlier, Descartes had suggested that animals are, in effect, automata, but he made an exception in the case of human animals. Hobbes had been a thoroughgoing materialist, but he did not make significant contributions to physical science. Spinoza had been the most consistent, and perhaps even the most influential materialist of the modern era, but because he was widely regarded as an atheist, Christian thinkers avoided positive discussion of his views.2
In Man the Machine (1748), Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709–1751) extended Descartes’s automata theory from nonhuman to human animals, in the process giving vivid expression to an idea, which had already been endorsed by Anthony Collins and other less-influential materialists, that the conscious and voluntary actions of humans differ from instinctual and involuntary actions not in being composed of a different sort of stuff but only in being more complex.3 In making this point, La Mettrie replaced Descartes’s rather simplistic, clocklike mechanisms with more sophisticated conceptions that better accounted for human autonomy. Among those whom he influenced was Paul-Henri d’Holbach (1723–1789), who in System of Nature (1770) defended secular materialism. In it, d’Holbach argued, at the time sensationally, that humans are a product entirely of nature, that their moral and intellectual abilities are simply machinelike operations, that the soul and free will are illusions, that religion and priestcraft are the source of most manmade evil, and that atheism promotes good morality.
In 1795, Pierre Cabanis (1757–1808) argued that the brain is the organ of consciousness in the same sense in which the stomach is the organ of digestion. Subsequently, he proposed that since consciousness and sensibility are material mechanistic processes, it must be possible to formulate a physiologically grounded, developmental account of self-consciousness.4 He concluded that the immaterial soul is superfluous. However, unequipped with d’Holbach’s mental steadfastness, he could not sustain this vision. By the end of his life, he had retreated to the view that the ego is immaterial and immortal.
Despite such backsliding, theoretical development along materialistic lines continued. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the empirical doctrine of functional localization—the notion that specific mental processes are correlated with discrete regions of the brain—had been proposed.5 The first important steps toward confirming this hypothesis were taken by Franz Josef Gall (1758–1828), whose phrenology was based on three principles: that the brain is the organ of the mind; that it is composed of parts, each of which serves a distinct, task-specific mental “faculty,” such as hope or self-esteem; and that the size of different parts of the brain is directly proportional to the strength of the faculties that they sustain. In Gall’s view, mental faculties tend to operate independently of each other; that is, the brain, rather than a single unified system, is composed of a community of systems, which ordinarily work in tandem but sometimes oppose each other.
Toward midcentury several brain physiologists advanced a more radical view: that the brain, rather than a single organ, is a pair of organs, in much the same sense that human kidneys and lungs are each pairs of organs. This view had surfaced before, in antiquity, when Hippocrates had written that “the human brain, as in the case of [the brains of] all other animals, is double.”6 In the nineteenth century, the view was championed by the English physician A. L. Wigan in The Duality of the Mind (1844). Wigan claimed that “a separate and distinct process of thinking or ratiocination may be carried on in each cerebrum simultaneously.”7
Others argued for the unity of brain activity. Of these, the French physiologist Jean-Pierre-Marie Flourens conducted experiments on animals in which he excised various portions of the brain and noted the resulting behavioral deficiencies. What he tended to find was that while particular functions were weakened, they were rarely totally lost. He took this to confirm Descartes’s view of the unity of mind.8 Much later in the century, in this same tradition, Hughlings Jackson proposed a unified functional organization of the entire nervous system, in which he tried to accommodate the duality thesis within the context of a higher-order unity of the mind. The duality view then fell into relative obscurity until it was revived in the 1970s to account for the strange consequences of split-brain operations on epileptics.9
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, many thinkers, and most of the general public, were unaware of the rather esoteric work that had been going on in brain physiology.10 All of this changed with the appearance of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), who was to the project of naturalizing human nature what in an earlier century Newton had been to the project of naturalizing physical nature. As is well known, from 1831 to 1836, Darwin traveled as an unpaid naturalist on the H.M.S. Beagle to the east and west coasts of South America and on to the Pacific islands. Upon his return, he became preoccupied with an issue he called the species problem. Solving it required finding a mechanism that could explain why the species that are present differ from place to place and from era to era. In 1838, Darwin read the British economist Thomas Malthus (1776–1834), who, in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1803), had argued that human population growth is always kept in check by a limited food supply. This led Darwin to realize that in the struggle for survival, “favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed,” resulting in “the formation of new species.”11 Among nineteenth-century thinkers, this idea was not new. But earlier theorists, such as Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829), had failed to discover a mechanism for the process. In his newfound theory of natural selection, Darwin had found a mechanism: competition over scarce resources, which only the most fit would survive.
For decades, Darwin refrained from publishing his views. Then, in 1858, he received from Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), a naturalist working in the Malay Archipelago, a paper in which Wallace had arrived at a theory like his own. Wallace too had been led to his ideas by reflecting on Malthus’s book. Darwin’s friends, Charles Lyell and Sir Joseph Hooker, then arranged for a joint paper by Darwin and Wallace to be presented on July 1, 1858, to the Linnean Society of London. Meanwhile, Darwin hurriedly finished On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859).
Ironically, among those skeptical of Darwin’s theory, so far as its application to humans is concerned, were his mentor, Lyell, and his codiscoverer of evolution by natural selection, Wallace. Both maintained that humans had a special status, different from other organisms in nature. Nevertheless, among most scientists Darwin’s views quickly prevailed. Subsequently, his principal opposition came from the clergy, who were outraged both that his views were inconsistent with a literal reading of Genesis and that they erased a metaphysical gap between “man and the brutes.”
Darwin continued to write quietly, allowing his friends to defend his theory in public, especially Thomas H. Huxley (1825–1895), who in debating with clergy and theologians promulgated what was basically a gospel of evolution. In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), Darwin elaborated on the controversial subject of human evolution, which he had only alluded to in Origin, expanding the reach of evolution to include moral and spiritual traits of humans. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin compared the connections between behavioral symptoms and their corresponding emotional states in humans and nonhuman animals, arguing that expression of emotions such as anger, despair, hatred, and love are common in nonhuman animals. In both of these latter works, Darwin’s goal was to emphasize the continuity between humans and other animals.
One important and immediate consequence of evolutionary theory for the philosophy of human nature was that it established once and for all that humans are animals. Another was that it provided a mechanism for the appearance of different species on Earth that explained how they might have evolved from lower forms of life in a wholly natural way, with no conscious prevision of the ends to be achieved. In an earlier era, most thinkers, including even progressive ones such as Boyle, looked toward the skies and compared humans with angels. By the end of the nineteenth century, virtually all progressive thinkers looked toward the earth and compared humans with apes. The person most responsible for this change was Darwin. So far as the science of human nature is concerned, he was not only the most influential thinker of the nineteenth century but arguably the most influential of all time. But great as was his contribution to the process of naturalizing human beings, the theory of evolution was not the only theoretical initiative that had this effect.
As the century progressed, physiological research not only continued unabated but, together with evolutionary theory, stimulated more global hypotheses. For instance, the English philosopher S. H. Hodgson (1832–1912), in The Theory of Practice (1870), argued for a view that he called epiphenomenalism, according to which thoughts and feelings, regardless of how intense they may be, have no causal power. He compared mental states to the colors laid on the surface of a stone mosaic and neural events to the supporting stones. Subsequently, Huxley, in his widely read “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and Its History” (1874), claimed that states of consciousness are the effect of molecular activity in the brain. It follows, he said, that animals are “conscious automata.” Like Hodgson, he claimed that states of consciousness are effects, but not causes, of brain activity.
Also in 1874, the British physician W. B. Carpenter (1813–1885), in Principles of Mental Physiology (1874), introduced the idea that the brain-mind complex is divided between conscious and unconscious states and processes, employing the notion of “unconscious cerebration” for the latter. He then strongly, but perhaps inconsistently advocated Cartesian dualistic interactionism. Unfortunately for his view, in the two and a half centuries since Descartes, little progress had been made in explaining how there could be causal influence either way. John Tyndall (1820–1893), who called dualistic interactionism “unthinkable,” said that while “a definite thought, and a definite molecular action in the brain [may] occur simultaneously, we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from the one to the other.”12
In the face of such an overwhelming difficulty, neutral monism, which in the seventeenth century had been championed by Spinoza, was reinvented in the nineteenth century by G. T. Fechner (1801–1887), who was also responsible for the formal beginnings of experimental psychology. Fechner sketched out a dual-aspect view of the relation between mind and body, according to which the two are simply different ways of conceiving of the same reality. This view was adopted by G. H. Lewes (1817–1878), whose Physiology of Common Life (1859/1860) enticed the young Pavlov to study physiology. In Optik, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) proposed a comprehensive physiological theory of color vision and an unconscious-inference theory of perception. Finally, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) argued for the need to transcend, through the use of experimental methods, the limitations of what was then the direct, introspective study of consciousness. Experimental psychology, which had been born with Fechner and nurtured by Helmholtz, was raised to maturity by Wundt, who then served as the guardian of the “new psychology.” Students from around the world, but especially from the United States, traveled to Leipzig to study experimental technique and returned home imbued with the spirit of the new approach.13
The Psychopathology of Self
In the eighteenth century, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) had demonstrated what he called animal magnetism, later to be called hypnotism. He claimed that everything in the universe, including everything within a human body, is connected by a physical, magnetic fluid, which is polarized, conductible, and capable of being discharged and accumulated. It is a disequilibrium of this fluid within the body that leads to disease. To cure this disease, a physician would redirect the fluid by serving as a conduit by which animal magnetism is channeled from the universe at large into the patient’s body by means of “magnetic passes” of the physician’s hands. Patients who received this treatment would experience a magnetic “crisis,” like an electric shock, after which they would be cured. In 1785, an official inquiry headed by Benjamin Franklin, the American ambassador to France at the time, discredited Mesmer’s views. Mesmer then left Paris and lived the rest of his life in relative obscurity. He died in 1815, but his ideas persisted.
Mesmer’s most important disciple was the Marquis de Puységur (1751–1825), who many regard as the founder of modern psychotherapy. The discoverer of what today we call hypnotic suggestion, he claimed that “magnetic effects” depend on the effect of the therapist’s personality and beliefs and on his rapport with patients. His techniques, often together with Mesmer’s explanation of why they worked, spread rapidly.14
In England, James Braid (1795–1860) published Neurypnology; or, the Rationale of Nervous Sleep, Considered in Relation with Animal Magnetism (1843), in which he claimed that the magnetic effects of Mesmer are produced not as a consequence of any agent passing from the body of the therapist to that of the patient but by “a peculiar condition of the nervous system, induced by a fixed and abstracted attention.”15 He named this state neurohypnosis, later shortened to hypnosis, and explored its use in relieving pain during surgery.16 By claiming a link between hypnotic phenomena and brain physiology and then introducing a terminology that was more palatable to the medical and scientific establishment, Braid was instrumental in preparing the way for the eventual use of hypnosis in psychotherapy.
Counterbalancing the movement toward greater respectability, between 1848 and 1875 hypnotism became increasingly tarnished by its association with mediumistic spiritualism, on the one hand, and stage demonstrations, on the other. As a consequence, before hypnotism could be accepted as a respectable research and therapeutic tool, it had to be brought back from the realm of pseudoscience to which it had been consigned. Charles Richet (1850–1935), a young French physiologist whose work revived interest in the scientific use of hypnosis, gets much of the credit for doing this. Richet’s work attracted the attention of Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), who created at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris what eventually became the most influential center for research in neurology. In charge of a ward containing women suffering from convulsions, Charcot discovered that, under hypnosis, he could replicate not only convulsions but other symptoms of hysteria as well, such as paralysis. This led him to try to distinguish symptoms that were organic in origin from others that are mental and to suggest that there are “ideas” split off from normal consciousness at the core of certain neuroses. His theories exerted a profound influence on two of his students, Pierre Janet (1859–1947) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).
Janet employed automatic writing and hypnosis to investigate the nature of a variety of automatisms, including what subsequently came to be known as multiple-personality disorder and the experience of possession. In developing an analytical framework to conceptualize these and related phenomena, he paved the way for his own and Freud’s later approaches to therapy. In 1893, Josef Breuer (1842–1925) and Freud published a paper in which they gave an account of Breuer’s initial discovery of a new therapeutic method, based on Breuer’s work with Anna O, who under hypnosis provided Breuer, in reverse chronological order, with information about the circumstances under which each of her symptoms appeared, as well as the trauma that originated them. As she did this, her symptoms went away. Her cure by what Breuer and Freud called the cathartic method is often regarded as the origin of psychoanalysis.
Theodule Ribot (1839–1916), the “father” of the French school of psychopathology, was one of the first scientific psychologists to take a brain-oriented view of the dissociation of personality. In his Diseases of Personality (1885), he claimed that “experimental psychology” cannot rest content with the traditional assumption that each human possesses an “ego” that is “absolutely one, simple, and identical,” which results only in “an illusive clearness and a semblance of a solution.” For a genuine explanation, he claimed, it will be necessary to explain how the ego “is born, and from what lower form it proceeds.”17 He added that the traditional view cannot explain the “unconscious life of the mind,” whereas the more scientific view “expresses the unconscious in physiological terms.” This is important, he said, because “nervous activity is far more extensive than psychic activity” and consciousness needs to be explained in terms of its concrete physiological conditions of appearance. He claimed that “all manifestations of psychic life, sensations, desires, feelings, volitions, memories, reasonings, inventions, etc., may be alternately conscious and unconscious.”18
Ribot went on to characterize numerous diseases of the personality, including physical abnormalities such as “double monsters” (for instance, the Hungarian twins that were parodied in Scriblerus), as well as cases of multiple-personality disorder. He claimed that “the organism and the brain, as its highest representation, constitute the real personality, containing in itself all that we have been and the possibilities of all that we shall be.” In the brain, “the whole individual character is inscribed,” together “with all its active and passive aptitudes, sympathies, and antipathies; its genius, talents, or stupidity; its virtues, vices, torpor, or activity.” “What emerges and reaches consciousness,” he said, “is little compared with what lies buried below, albeit still active. Conscious personality is never more than a feeble portion of physical personality.”19
Ribot further claimed that the unity of the ego is “the cohesion, during a given period, of states of consciousness” and unconscious physiological states. He concluded that “unity means co-ordination” and that with consciousness subordinate to the organism, “the problem of the unity of the ego is, in its ultimate form, a biological problem.” So, “to biology belongs the task of explaining, if it can, the genesis of organisms and the solidarity of their component parts.” “Psychological interpretation,” he said, “can only follow in its wake,” appealing to the theory of evolution to support his view that biology is the ultimate ground upon which psychology—even human personality—is built.20 Subsequently, psychologists began to divide up mental functions and investigate them separately. This divide-and-conquer strategy would lead in our own times to a tremendous growth of knowledge, the price of which was serious theoretical fragmentation. Whether the pieces can be put back together is an issue to which we shall return.
The Birth of Sociology
The revolution in thinking about human nature that by the mid-nineteenth century was well underway did not simply involve understanding humans as belonging with the rest of nature. Almost as fundamentally, it involved contextualizing them in their cultural and social environments. Earlier thinkers had anticipated this new approach, but it was not until the nineteenth century, in the work of Auguste Comte (1798–1857), that the new science acquired visibility. From 1830 to 1842, Comte published his great philosophical history of science, the six-volume Course of Positive Philosophy, in which he tried to synthesize what he took to be the most important intellectual developments of his time. In it, he also provided criteria for a scientific approach to the historical study of society, for which he invented the label sociology. Best known now as the father of French positivism, Comte attempted to reconcile science and religion in order to promote his view of how society ought to be organized.21
Comte’s constructive theory emanated from his historical study of the progress of the sciences, especially astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology. In his view, every science goes through three stages, each of which corresponds to a specific form of mental and material development: the theological, the metaphysical, and, finally, the positive. In the theological stage, which is further broken down into the substages of animism, polytheism, and monotheism, humans view nature as having will. In animism, objects have their own will; in polytheism, many divine wills impose themselves on objects; and in monotheism, the will of one great God imposes itself on objects. In the second, metaphysical, stage, causes and forces replace will, and Nature is viewed as one great naturalistic system, put in motion by a First Cause. Finally, in the third, positive, stage, the search for absolute knowledge is abandoned, as is the First Cause. In their place, the quest becomes that of discovering laws “of relations of succession and resemblance.” Comte believed that this developmental transformation of science is headed toward the perfection of thought and that progress through the stages and substages is both inevitable and irreversible. Each successive science is necessarily dependent on a previous one, for instance, biology on chemistry. Further, as the phenomena under consideration become more complex, so do the methods with which scientists investigate them.
In contrast to Descartes, who thought that the geometrical method was the one right method of inquiry, Comte believed that each science has its own distinctive logic, which is revealed in the historical study of that science. The final science that he claimed to have discovered, which he thought had not yet entered its most mature stage, was sociology, which would give meaning to all of the other sciences by delineating their historical development. Through this science, he claimed, humans will finally understand the true logic of mind.
Comte divided sociology itself into social statics, that is, the study of sociopolitical systems in their unique historical contexts, and social dynamics, the study of developmental progress. As Thomas Kuhn would also famously do in the 1960s in accounting for scientific development, Comte distinguished between stable periods of order and unstable ones of progress.22 He claimed that what was needed in his own time was a new synthesis of order and progress, which would lead to a new, higher form of social and intellectual stability. In this regard, he claimed that while the French Revolution had been a progressive development, in that the ancien régime had been based on obsolete theological knowledge, the revolution was negative in that it yielded no rationale for the reorganization of society. This, he said, would be provided by a new religion and a new faith, in which the Catholic clergy would be replaced by a scientific-industrial elite. For his “positivist religion,” he created a pantheon of secular saints, which included Adam Smith, Dante, and Shakespeare, and he appointed himself as high priest!
So far as the self is concerned, Comte tried to explode what he regarded as a prejudice in favor of there being a unified, indivisible I. He began by noting that metaphysicians of Descartes’s time and earlier were expected, by theologians and others, to preserve “the unity of what they called the I, that it might correspond with the unity of the soul.” But, he said, now that researchers no longer labor under that expectation, “the famous theory of the I is essentially without a scientific object, since it is destined to represent a purely fictional state.” Nevertheless, he continued, there are phenomena to which the word, I refers. Those who wish to study these phenomena will find that they consist only in “the equilibrium of various animal functions,” something that is present in all animals. It is the “harmony” among these animal functions that gives rise to the illusion of a unified I. Hence, what philosophers and psychologists have attempted in vain to make an attribute of humanity exclusively “must belong to all animals, whether they are able to discourse upon it or not.”23
Comte’s reputation was ably promoted by the unflagging efforts of his ardent disciple, Emile Littré (1801–1881), a French lexicographer and philosopher. Littré rejected Comte’s positivist religion, which he considered a product of Comte’s tired, disturbed mind. Sticking to the high ground, Littré claimed that positivism afforded the best hope for the development of society along rational lines.
Karl Marx (1818–1883), the other great social theorist of the age, was also something of a spiritual idealist. Against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution, with its attendant and unprecedented specialization of labor, he urged that people should not be restricted to one monotonous form of work, which can result only in alienation. Ideally, a person could and should do many things, say, be a philosopher in the morning, a gardener in the afternoon, and a poet in the evening. With Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), Marx published The Communist Manifesto (1848), a landmark event in the history of socialism. He also wrote Capital (1859), one of the most important economic treatises ever written. Revolutionary to the core, Marx wrote that the main point of philosophy is not to understand the world but to change it. Yet, one of the most important ways he changed it was by revolutionizing the ways in which social scientists subsequently understood it.
In his early twenties, Marx was captivated by Ludwig Feuerbach’s (1804–1872), The Essence of Christianity (1841), in which Feuerbach argued that the ways in which people conceive of God are projections of their own natures, so the worship of God is actually worship of an idealized self. Feuerbach made a similar point about the ways in which idealist philosophers, particularly Hegel, conceive of Spirit. The young Marx initially agreed but soon decided that while Feuerbach was right in his criticism, he had failed to track the problem to its roots: “Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”24 What Marx meant is that the conscious life of human beings, including not only mundane, day-to-day reflections, but law, morality, religion, and philosophy, is but a reflection of underlying social relations, which are wholly material. Soon he would progress to the idea, which would become so potent in the philosophies of the last half of the twentieth century, that not only had Feuerbach not properly identified the essence of humans but that humans have no essence.
Marx’s idea that mental production is merely a reflection of underlying social and economic realities did not explain the evolution of consciousness. So, to complete his theory, he adapted Hegel’s idea that historical processes evolve dialectically, spurred on by conflicts among their contradictory aspects. However, unlike Hegel, Marx located the sources of the conflicts in basic social and economic realities. In The German Ideology (1846), Marx and Engels reiterated these themes, adding that “in direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here it is a matter of ascending from earth to heaven.” That is, the correct approach is not to set out from what men say, imagine, and conceive “in order to arrive at men in the flesh,” but to set out from real, active men. “Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these,” they said, “no longer retain the semblance of independence.” “It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.”25
Thirteen years later, in his autobiographical preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx reflected on “the general result” at which he had arrived and that “served as a guiding thread” for his thought. He said that it “can be briefly formulated as follows”:
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
Marx then summed up this “general result” by remarking that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”26
Although Marx’s direct contributions to self- and personal-identity theory were few, his effect on the theorizing of others was enormous. He drew attention to what he took to be the sociohistorical determinants of self and personal identity. Twentieth-century Marxists and other social constructivists would try to explain the link between these determinants and individual psychology.
British Theories of the Self
As we have seen, in Britain, by the end of the eighteenth century, discussion of fission examples in connection with personal-identity theory, as well as consideration of the thesis that personal identity is not what matters primarily in survival, had been introduced into debate. And toward the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the writings of Hazlitt, the debate over personal identity was proceeding along a trajectory that may seem quite up to date to students of analytic personal-identity theory in our own times. Hazlitt had even provided a rudimentary developmental account of the acquisition of self-concepts. However, subsequently in Britain, theorists of personal identity tended to be less progressive.
Thomas Brown’s Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1820) was much more psychological than philosophical, though he believed that mental philosophy had implications for epistemology. Nevertheless, for the most part he studied phenomena of mind from a realist perspective. Among his contributions was an important critique of introspection based on what he took to be the absurdity of the idea that one indivisible mind could be both subject and object of the same observation.
When Brown dealt with the issue of personal identity, or what he preferred to call mental identity, he became preoccupied with the question of how we come to suppose that the self that remembers is the same one that is remembered. Viewing all conscious mental states as “feeling,” or experiential states of various kinds, he suggested that “the belief of our mental identity” is “founded on an essential principle of our constitution,” in consequence of which, “it is impossible for us to consider our successive feelings, without regarding them as truly our successive feelings,” that is, as “states, or affections of one thinking substance.”27 From such intuitions of the substantial identity underlying proximate experiences, one readily goes on to view more distant remembered experiences as one’s own as well, thus conceiving an identical self underlying the stream of conscious experiences.
James Mill (1773–1836) built on Brown’s observations but tried to reduce all mental phenomena to associations. When Mill considered the problem of identity, he first dealt with the notion of identity of objects, which he accounted for in terms of associated resemblances over time. In the case of people, he supposed that necessarily when one remembers having some experience, one believes that it was oneself who had it. In such cases, he maintained, “the Evidence” of one’s own existence, and “the Belief” in it “are not different things, but the same thing.”28 In the case of times that one does not remember, but when one nevertheless believes one existed, one relies on verbal evidence from others, which is itself based on observations that others have made of one’s bodily and psychological continuity and resemblances among person stages. He, thus, focused less on mental identity than on a body-based personal identity.29
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), although an enthusiastic follower of Comte, criticized his negative attitude toward psychology, primarily on the grounds that he “rejects totally, as an invalid process, psychological observation properly so called, or in other words, internal consciousness, at least as regards our intellectual operations.” In Comte’s scheme, Mill continued, there is “no place” for “the science of Psychology,” which he always speaks of “with contempt.” In its place, “the study of mental phenomena, or as he [Comte] expresses it, of moral and intellectual functions,” comes “under the head of Biology, but only as a branch of physiology. Our knowledge of the human mind must, he thinks, be acquired by observing other people.”30
Mill’s self-avowed “psychology” was primarily epistemology. By 1865, when he wrote his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, it had been thirty-five years since his father’s book was first published, and much had changed in the relations between philosophy and psychology. Kantian philosophy had come to Britain, which Hamilton had tried unsuccessfully to integrate with the Scottish commonsense approach. In 1856, James Ferrier, who opposed Hamilton as much as Mill later would, published Institutes of Metaphysic, in which he made a disciplinary distinction between metaphysics and psychology, declaring that metaphysics, which belongs to philosophy, has to be purified of all naturalistic reasoning. An apostate of the Scottish school, Ferrier asserted that metaphysics is composed of “Epistemology” and “Ontology,” thus introducing the term “epistemology” into the English language. He viciously attacked Reid, declaring him philosophically incompetent, while rejecting as failed epistemology the naturalistic and psychological approach to the mind that Reid had tried so hard to promote.
Mill, who followed a similar line in criticizing Reid’s intuitionism, thought that his own phenomenalist project, which he called the psychological theory, was a kind of foundational psychology. But, rather than an anticipation of what was to come, it was psychology in the sense in which Hume’s main focus in book 1of the Treatise was psychology. In Mill’s view, material objects are “permanent possibilities of sensation,” and other minds are inferred to exist based on an analogy with one’s own case, which Mill presumed one knows directly. Like objects in the external world, Mill supposed that minds too are just actual and possible sensations. Since the ego or self is not given in experience, accounting for self-knowledge was a problem for his theory. He responded that self-knowledge must be based on an intuitive belief in our own continued existence that comes with our ability to remember past states of mind as our own. Self and memory, he said, are “merely two sides of the same fact, or two different modes of viewing the same fact.”31
Mill explained that when a person—I—remembers something, “in addition” to the belief that I have “that the idea I now have was derived from a previous sensation,” there is “the further conviction that this sensation” was “my own; that it happened to my self.” “In other words,” Mill continued, “I am aware of a long and uninterrupted succession of past feelings, going back as far as memory reaches, and terminating with the sensations I have at the present moment, all of which are connected by an inexplicable tie, that distinguishes them not only from any succession or combination in mere thought, but also from the parallel succession of feelings” that are had by others. “This succession of feelings, which I call my memory of the past, is that by which I distinguish my Self. Myself is the person who had that series of feelings, and I know nothing of myself, by direct knowledge, except that I had them. But there is a bond of some sort among all the parts of the series, which makes me say that they were feelings of a person who was the same person throughout and a different person from those who had any of the parallel successions of feelings; and this bond, to me, constitutes my Ego.”32
William James later criticized Mill for having fallen back “upon something perilously near to the Soul,” quoting as evidence Mill’s remark that it is “indubitable” that “that there is something real” in the tie which is revealed in memory when one recognizes a sensation’s having been felt before, and thereby “connects the present consciousness with the past one of which it reminds me.” This tie, Mill said, “is the Ego, or Self.” Hence, “I ascribe a reality to the Ego—to my own mind—different from that real existence as a Permanent Possibility, which is the only reality I acknowledge in Matter.” This ego, he concluded, “is a permanent element.” James remarked that “this ‘something in common’ by which they [remembered feelings] are linked and which is not the passing feelings themselves, but something ‘permanent,’ of which we can ‘affirm nothing’ save its attributes and its permanence, what is it but metaphysical Substance come again to life?”33 James concluded that Mill here makes “the same blunder” that Hume had earlier made: “the sensations per se, he thinks, have no ‘tie.’ The tie of resemblance and continuity which the remembering Thought finds among them is not a ‘real tie’ but ‘a mere product of the laws of thought;’ and the fact that the present Thought ‘appropriates’ them is also no real tie.” But, James continued, whereas Hume was content “to say that there might after all be no ‘real tie,’ Mill, unwilling to admit this possibility, is driven, like any scholastic, to place it in a non-phenomenal world.” James concluded that “Mill’s concessions may be regarded as the definitive bankruptcy of the associationist description of the consciousness of self.”34
James’s alternative is basically to stay with the phenomena of consciousness but to concede that
the knowledge the present feeling has of the past ones is a real tie between them, so is their resemblance; so is their continuity; so is the one’s ‘appropriation’ of the other: all are real ties, realized in the judging Thought of every moment, the only place where disconnections could be realized, did they exist. Hume and Mill both imply that a disconnection can be realized there, whilst a tie cannot. But the ties and the disconnections are exactly on a par, in this matter of self-consciousness.
In anticipation of what in the late twentieth century would come to be known as the closest continuer view, James continued:
The way in which the present Thought appropriates the past is a real way, so long as no other owner appropriates it in a more real way, and so long as the Thought has no grounds for repudiating it stronger than those which lead to its appropriation. But no other owner ever does in point of fact present himself for my past; and the grounds which I perceive for appropriating it—viz., continuity and resemblance with the present—outweigh those I perceive for disowning it—viz., distance in time.
James concluded that “my present Thought stands thus in the plenitude of ownership of the train of my past selves, is owner not only de facto, but de jure, the most real owner there can be, and all without the supposition of any ‘inexplicable tie’—in a perfectly verifiable and phenomenal way.”35
It was not just J. S. Mill for whom the idea of the immaterial soul exerted a lingering attraction. In a passage reminiscent of Hazlitt and one that may in our own times have influenced Derek Parfit, Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) mused, “It must surely be admissible to ask the Egoist, ‘Why should I sacrifice a present pleasure for a greater one in the future? Why should I concern myself about my own future feelings any more than about the feelings of other persons?’” He persisted: “Grant that the Ego is merely a system of coherent phenomena, that the permanent identical ‘I’ is not a fact but a fiction, as Hume and his followers maintain; why, then, should one part of the series of feelings into which the Ego is resolved be concerned with another part of the same series, any more than with any other series?”36 Sidgwick’s question is one that Priestley, Cooper, and Hazlitt had previously raised and answered in somewhat different ways. However, Sidgwick, without the prod of fission examples and with substance accounts of identity still a respectable option, managed to set the question aside.
In 1805, when Hazlitt published his Essay, what at the time was called mental philosophy was well on its way to spawning psychology, an empirical science that would, by the end of the century, emerge as a discipline separate from philosophy. However, the emergence of the two as distinct disciplines would take most of the century to achieve. The same mixing of metaphysical and empirical issues that was so prevalent in the eighteenth century would continue to infect the thinking of major nineteenth-century British theorists, such as Thomas Brown, James Mill, and J. S. Mill. And, while religious dogma would no longer dominate discussions of the mind, the presuppositions of an indivisible soul continued to work in the background of many discussions of the ego, even among progressive thinkers.
In a more scientific vein, in The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and The Emotions and the Will (1859), the Scottish psychologist Alexander Bain (1818–1903) worked out a sensory-motor associationism that became a turning point in the evolution of associationist psychology. Before Bain, associationists, like Hume and Mill, were committed to experience as the primary source of knowledge and so neglected the possibility that movement and social interaction were sources of self-attributions. Bain, in a more realist mode, accepted movement and social interaction as primary and then drew upon them to explain higher mental functions. He claimed, for instance, that when attention is turned inward upon oneself as a personality “we are putting forth towards ourselves the kind of exercise that properly accompanies our contemplation of other persons”:
We are accustomed to scrutinize the actions and conduct of those about us, to set a higher value upon one man than upon another, by comparing the two; to pity one in distress; to feel complacency towards a particular individual; to congratulate a man on some good fortune that it pleases us to see him gain; to admire greatness or excellence as displayed by any of our fellows. All these exercises are intrinsically social, like Love and Resentment; an isolated individual could never attain to them, nor exercise them. By what means, then, through what fiction can we turn round and play them off upon self? Or how comes it that we obtain any satisfaction by putting self in the place of the other party? Perhaps the simplest form of the reflected act is that expressed by Self-worth and Self-estimation, based and begun upon observation of the ways and conduct of our fellow-beings. We soon make comparisons among the individuals about us.
For instance, we see that some do more work than others and so receive more pay, that some are kinder than others and so receive more love, that some surpass others in “astonishing feats” and so attract “the gaze and admiration of a crowd.”
Having thus once learned to look at other persons as performing labors, greater or less, and as realizing fruits to accord; being, moreover, in all respects like our fellows;—we find it an exercise neither difficult nor unmeaning to contemplate self as doing work and receiving the reward…. As we decide between one man and another,—which is worthier, … so we decide between self and all other men; being, however, in this decision under the bias of our own desires.37
When compared with the tactics of someone like Mill, Bain’s approach is distinctive, first, for its realism, in that he begins by assuming the existence of the physical world, including as items in it other people and himself; second, by the primacy he gives to social observation, in that we first make judgments about others and only later think of ourselves as one “other” among many; and, third, by his suggestion that this progression from others to self not only explains the origin of the notion of self but also our ability to feel toward the self emotions that originally we felt toward others.
In 1855, the same year in which Bain published The Senses and the Intellect, Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) published The Principles of Psychology, which grounded psychology in evolutionary biology. William James would later build on both of these contributions to psychology.
Developmental Psychology
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, most British theorists were still torturing themselves trying to find epistemological grounds for personal identity. With the exception of Hazlitt, it was not until Bain, late in the century, that they considered either how self-concepts are actually acquired or the impact of social context on their acquisition. On developmental issues, German and French theorists did better. However, serious interest in the impact of social context on development would await the midcentury appearance of the views of Hegel and Marx.
Early in the century, Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), who had studied at Jena under Fichte and was the successor at Königsberg to Kant, wrote several works that were primarily psychological, including his Textbook of Psychology (1813) and Psychology as a Science (1824–25). Independently of Hazlitt, Herbart advocated that one acquires the concept of self in developmental stages, advancing this hypothesis against the backdrop of his view that psychology could be both empirical (but without experiments) and mathematical. He claimed that initially the idea of self comes from humans’ experience of their bodily activities, which provides them with information about themselves as well as objects in the world with which they interact. Subsequently, as they more thoughtfully relate past to present thoughts, they come to identify more with their ideas than with their bodies. Thereby, they develop a notion of an ego or subject of their thoughts, which they then generalize as an abstract ego, or identical subject of experience, that persists throughout their lives.
In France, Maine de Biran (1766–1824), who is sometimes regarded as the father of French existentialism, described the human self as developing through a purely sensitive, animal phase, to a phase of will and freedom that finally culminates in spiritual experiences that transcend humanity. As a developmental psychologist, he was concerned especially with the active or voluntary self, which infants first notice in experiencing the resistance of the world to their desires. He claimed that the continuity of voluntary agency provides children with a basis for their concept of themselves as extended over time.
In America, the genetic psychology of James Mark Baldwin (1861–1934) had an enormous influence on subsequent developmentalists, particularly on Piaget. Baldwin, a psychologist, and his friend, Josiah Royce, a philosopher, theorized about the social origins of the self at about the same time, publishing their ideas, in the mid-1890s, in different works. The fundamental principle of Baldwin’s theory was that imitation or mimicry was the foundation of social life and the origin of the infant’s understanding of the category person. This principle had been suggested, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, in theories about the role of mimicry in sympathetic imagination. Adam Smith, in particular, likened imagination to mimicry and connected both to social phenomena through the medium of sympathy. Later, Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), who replaced Smith at Edinburgh, recognized what he called sympathetic imitation as an important social phenomenon. He even postulated that such mimicry was especially powerful in childhood and, as such, at the very foundations of social life. However, with the possible exceptions of Coleridge and Hazlitt, no one in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century seemed to recognize how these phenomena were connected to the development of infants’ acquired knowledge of themselves and others as people with minds. Thinkers tended to presuppose an individualistic perspective. Understanding one’s own mind was acquired prior to acquiring knowledge of the minds of others.
By the end of the century, James Baldwin and Josiah Royce were able to go beyond this. Baldwin, in particular, had an especially clear grip on the concept of psychological development. In contrasting the old-fashioned soul view (“a fixed substance, with fixed attributes”), he said that it was as if “knowledge of the soul was immediate in consciousness, and adequate.” “The mind was best understood where best or most fully manifested; its higher ‘faculties’ even when not in operation, were still there, but asleep.” It was, he said, as if soul theorists assumed that “the man is father of the child,” that is, that “if the adult consciousness shows the presence of principles not observable in the child consciousness, we must suppose, nevertheless, that they are really present in the child consciousness beyond the reach of our observation.” The proper procedure (“the genetic idea”), Baldwin claimed, is precisely the opposite of this.
Are there principles in the adult consciousness which do not appear in the child consciousness, then the adult consciousness must, if possible, be interpreted by principles present in the child consciousness; and when this is not possible, the conditions under which later principles take their rise and get their development must still be adequately explored.38
No one in the eighteenth century had such a clear grasp of the notion of mental development.
In Baldwin’s theory of the origins of self-consciousness, rather than first becoming aware of themselves as persons, children first become aware of others. Later, by becoming aware of their effort to imitate others, they become aware of their own “subjective” activity. Next, they come to understand what others feel by “ejecting” their own inner states onto others: “The subjective becomes ejective; that is, other people’s bodies, says the child to himself, have experiences in them such as mine has. They also have me’s.” In this last phase, Baldwin concludes, “the social self is born.”
In History of Psychology (1913), Baldwin summarized a mature version of his theory:
In the personal self, the social is individualized…. A constant give-and-take process—a “social dialectic”—is found between the individual and his social fellows. By this process the materials of self-hood are absorbed and assimilated. The “self” is a gradually forming nucleus in the mind; a mass of feeling, effort, and knowledge. It grows in feeling by contagion, in knowledge by imitation, in will by opposition and obedience. The outline of the individual gradually appears, and every stage it shows the pattern of the social situation in which it becomes constantly a more and more adequate and competent unit.
He continued:
The consciousness of the self, thus developed, carries with it that of the “alter”-selves, the other “socii,” who are also determinations of the same social matter. The bond, therefore, that binds the members of the group together is reflected in the self- consciousness of each member…. When the self has become a conscious and active person, we may say that the mental individual as such is born. But the individual remains part of the whole out of which he has arisen, a whole that is collective in character and of which he is a specification.39
In the twentieth century, this collectivist vision of the origins of self consciousness, which was beyond the scope of early thinkers, came to dominate the psychology of the self. Yet even as psychologists increasingly have found the origins and identity of the individual self within, and only within, a shared social reality, twentieth century analytic philosophers, in accounting for personal identity, have maintained an individualistic focus.
The Last Philosopher-Psychologist
Nineteenth-century philosophy of self and personal identity was dominated in the first half of the century by Kant and in the second half by Hegel. Concurrent with philosophical developments, there was a growing spirit of naturalized science, typified by Darwin and independently including inquiry into the development of self-concepts and the physiology of the brain. The American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910) integrated this naturalizing impulse with a scientific philosophy of the self. James, no friend of either Kant or Hegel, remarked, “With Kant, complication both of thought and statement was an inborn infirmity, enhanced by the musty academicism of his Königsberg existence. With Hegel it was a raging fever.”40 James’s more straightforward alternative was the philosophical movement known as pragmatism, which was based on the principle that the criterion of an idea’s merit is its usefulness.
For present purposes, the part of James’s work that matters most is not his pragmatism per se, but two chapters from his Principles of Psychology. In the first of these—“On the Stream of Consciousness”—he began his “study of the mind from within.”41 In his view, beginning in this way meant that one does not begin, as Hume did, with “sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it.” Rather, consciousness presents itself as a much more complex phenomenon: “what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree.” When psychologists begin, as they should, with “the fact of thinking itself” and then analyze this fact, they discover, he claimed, that thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness. In other words, they discover that thoughts, as they actually occur, are not separate but belong with certain other thoughts, depending on whose thoughts they are: “My thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your thought with your other thoughts.”42
James conceded the theoretical possibility that there may be a mere thought that is not anyone’s thought, but he said that if there were any such thing, we could not know it: “The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I’s and you’s,” each of which “keeps its own thoughts to itself.” Thoughts are not traded, and each person has direct access only to his or her own thoughts. “Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law.” No thought of which we have knowledge is “this thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned.” This ownership provides a natural barrier between thoughts, preventing one of “the most absolute breaches in nature.” As a consequence, James claimed, the “personal self” should be “the immediate datum in psychology.” “The universal conscious fact is not ‘feelings and thoughts exist,’ but ‘I think’ and ‘I feel.’” It follows, he thought, that no psychology that hopes to stand “can question the existence of personal selves.” On the contrary, “it is, and must remain, true that the thoughts which psychology studies do continually tend to appear as parts of personal selves.”43
A problem arises, though, from the fact that dissociative phenomena, such as automatic writing, reveal that there are “buried feelings and thoughts” that are themselves part of “secondary personal selves.” These secondary selves “are for the most part very stupid and contracted, and are cut off at ordinary times from communication with the regular and normal self of the individual.” Even so, “they still form conscious unities, have continuous memories, speak, write, invent distinct names for themselves, or adopt names that are suggested and, in short, are entirely worthy of that title of secondary personalities which is now commonly given them.” As Pierre Janet showed, James wrote, these secondary personalities often “result from the splitting of what ought to be a single complete self into two parts, of which one lurks in the background whilst the other appears on the surface as the only self the man or woman has.”44
In the second of James’s two most relevant chapters—“On the Consciousness of Self”—he began by considering the widest and most empirical issues, then proceeded to the narrower and less empirical, ending with “the pure, Ego.” He said that “the Empirical Self” that each of us has is what each of us is most tempted to call me. But, he warned, “the line between me and mine is difficult to draw.”
We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked. And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours, or are they us?
In James’s view, there are no definite answers to such questions. “In its widest possible sense, a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children,” and so on. “All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down,—not necessarily in the same degree for each thing, but in much the same way for all.”45 James concluded that “the Self” may be divided into the empirical self, on the one hand, which includes the material, social, and spiritual selves, and the pure Ego, on the other.
Our material selves include our bodies, possessions, and families. For instance, if a family member dies, “a part of our very selves is gone. If they do anything wrong, it is our shame. If they are insulted, our anger flashes forth as readily as if we stood in their place.” But each of these to different degrees. For instance, some possessions, say our homes, may be more a part of us than others.
Our social selves consist of social recognition: “a man has as many social selves” as there are individuals and groups “who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind. To wound any one of these his images is to wound him.”
The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with. The good or bad fortunes of this self cause the most intense elation and dejection—unreasonable enough as measured by every other standard than that of the organic feeling of the individual.46
A person’s fame, and his honor, also are among his social selves.
James said that by the spiritual self, that is, the empirical spiritual self, he means one’s “inner or subjective being.” This inner being is a set of “psychic dispositions” that “are the most enduring and intimate part of the self,” including one’s ability “to argue and discriminate,” one’s “moral sensibility and conscience,” and one’s “indomitable will.” It is “only when these are altered,” James said, that a person is said to have been alienated from him or herself. But, of course, not every alteration results in alienation.
This spiritual self may be considered either abstractly—say, by dividing consciousness into faculties—or concretely. Considered concretely, it may be considered either as “the entire stream of our personal consciousness” or the “present ‘segment’ or ‘section’ of that stream.” Either way, James wrote, “our considering the spiritual self at all is a reflective process,” the “result of our abandoning the outward-looking point of view” in order to “think ourselves as thinkers.” James concluded, “This attention to thought as such, and the identification of ourselves with it rather than with any of the objects which it reveals, is a momentous and in some respects a rather mysterious operation, of which we need here only say that as a matter of fact it exists; and that in everyone, at an early age, the distinction between thought as such, and what it is ‘of’ or ‘about,’ has become familiar to the mind.”47
Considering the spiritual self abstractly, “the stream as a whole is identified with the Self far more than any outward thing” But:
a certain portion of the stream abstracted from the rest is so identified in an altogether peculiar degree, and is felt by all men as a sort of innermost centre within the circle, of sanctuary within the citadel, constituted by the subjective life as a whole. Compared with this element of the stream, the other parts, even of the subjective life, seem transient external possessions, of which each in turn can be disowned, whilst that which disowns them remains.
But, what is “this self of all the other selves”? James answered that most would say that it is “the active element in all consciousness.”
It is what welcomes or rejects. It presides over the perception of sensations, and by giving or withholding its assent it influences the movements they tend to arouse. It is the home of interest,—not the pleasant or the painful, not even pleasure or pain, as such, but that within us to which pleasure and pain, the pleasant and the painful, speak. It is the source of effort and attention, and the place from which appear to emanate the fiats of the will.
A physiologist, James said, would associate the self with “the process by which ideas or incoming sensations are ‘reflected’ or pass over into outward acts.” For it is “a sort of junction at which sensory ideas terminate and from which motor ideas proceed, and forming a kind of link between the two.” Moreover, it is “more incessantly there than any other single element of the mental life, the other elements end by seeming to accrete round it and to belong to it. It becomes opposed to them as the permanent is opposed to the changing and inconstant.”48
So much, James thought, would be a matter of common agreement. But as soon as one tried to go farther, opinions would diverge, some calling this “self of selves” a simple active substance or soul and others a fiction. Yet this self of selves is not merely a object of thought but is also felt: “Just as the body is felt, the feeling of which is also an abstraction, because never is the body felt all alone, but always together with other things.”
In what, then, does “the feeling of this central active self” consist? Not, James answers, in the apprehension of a “purely spiritual element.” Rather, “whenever my introspective glance succeeds in turning round quickly enough to catch one of these manifestations of spontaneity in the act, all it can ever feel distinctly is some bodily process, for the most part taking place within the head,” or “between the head and throat.” James conceded that there may be more to the apprehension of this “spiritual self” but insisted that “these cephalic motions are the portions of my innermost activity of which I am most distinctly aware.” If the rest, “which I cannot yet define should prove to be like unto these distinct portions in me, and I like other men, it would follow that our entire feeling of spiritual activity, or what commonly passes by that name, is really a feeling of bodily activities whose exact nature is by most men overlooked.”49
Were this hypothesis true, one consequence, James claimed, is that in order to have “a self that I can care for, nature must first present me with some object interesting enough to make me instinctively wish to appropriate it for its own sake,” which I would then use as the basis to create a material, social, and spiritual self. The origin of the entire array of self-expressions and behaviors is that “certain things appeal to primitive and instinctive impulses of our nature, and that we follow their destinies with an excitement that owes nothing to a reflective source.” These are “the primordial constituents” of our mes. Whatever else is subsequently “followed with the same sort of interest, form our remoter and more secondary self.” Hence, James claimed, the words me and self, “so far as they arouse feeling and connote emotional worth,” mean everything which has “the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain peculiar sort.”50
James said that a human’s “most palpable selfishness” is “bodily selfishness,” and his “most palpable self,” his body. But a human does not love his body because he identifies himself with it; rather, he identifies himself with it because he loves it.51 This self-love is part of a more general phenomenon. Every creature instinctively “has a certain selective interest in certain portions of the world,” where “interest in things means the attention and emotion which the thought of them will excite, and the actions which their presence will evoke.” Thus, animals in every species are particularly interested in their own prey or food, enemies, sexual mates, and progeny. These things are intrinsically interesting and “are cared for for their own sakes.”
In James’s view, individual thoughts are, in effect, agents. Thoughts distinguish on the basis of how they themselves feel those other thoughts which belong to the self from those which are merely conceived: “The former have a warmth and intimacy about them of which the latter are completely devoid.” James said that the main question of interest is “what the consciousness may mean when it calls the present self the same with one of the past selves which it has in mind.”52 The key to his answer is “warmth and intimacy,” which “in the present self, reduces itself to either of two things—something in the feeling which we have of the thought itself, as thinking, or else the feeling of the body’s actual existence at the moment,” or both. “We cannot realize our present self without simultaneously feeling one or other of these two things.” And “which distant selves do fulfil the condition, when represented? Obviously those, and only those, which fulfilled it when they were alive.”
Continuity and similarity importantly affect one’s sense of self: “the distant selves appear to our thought as having for hours of time been continuous with each other, and the most recent ones of them continuous with the Self of the present moment, melting into it by slow degrees; and we get a still stronger bond of union”:
Continuity makes us unite what dissimilarity might otherwise separate; similarity makes us unite what discontinuity might hold apart. The sense of our own personal identity, then, is exactly like any one of our other perceptions of sameness among phenomena. And it must not be taken to mean more…. The past and present selves compared are the same just so far as they are the same, and no farther. A uniform feeling of ‘warmth,’ of bodily existence (or an equally uniform feeling of pure psychic energy?) pervades them all; and this is what gives them a generic unity, and makes them the same in kind. But this generic unity coexists with generic differences just as real as the unity. And if from the one point of view they are one self, from others they are as truly not one but many.53
James suggested that we think of the self and its unity like we might think of a herd of cattle: The owner gathers the cattle together into one herd because he finds on each of them his brand: “The ‘owner’ symbolized here that ‘section’ of consciousness, or pulse of thought, which we have all along represented as the vehicle of the judgment of identity; and the ‘brand’ symbolizes the characters of warmth and continuity, by reason of which the judgment is made.” The brand marks the cattle as belonging together. But “no beast would be so branded unless he belonged to the owner of the herd. They are not his because they are branded; they are branded because they are his.”
This account, James said, knocks “the bottom out of” common sense: “For common-sense insists that the unity of all the selves is not a mere appearance of similarity or continuity, ascertained after the fact,” but “involves a real belonging to a real Owner, to a pure spiritual entity of some kind.” It is thought that it is the relation of the various constituents to this entity that makes them “stick together.” But in reality, the unity “is only potential, its centre ideal, like the ‘centre of gravity’ in physics, until the constituents are collected together.” According to commonsense, “there must be a real proprietor in the case of the selves, or else their actual accretion into a ‘personal consciousness’ would never have taken place.” But what actually does the uniting is “the real, present onlooking, remembering, ‘judging thought’ or identifying ‘section’ of the stream.” This is what “owns” some of what it “surveys, and disowns the rest,” thus making “a unity that is actualized and anchored and does not merely float in the blue air of possibility.”54
Thus, in James’s view, unity is not present until the unifying thought creates it: “It is as if wild cattle were lassoed by a newly-created settler and then owned for the first time. But the essence of the matter to common-sense is that the past thoughts never were wild cattle, they were always owned. The Thought does not capture them, but as soon as it comes into existence it finds them already its own.” Thus, James said, common sense would have us acknowledge an “Arch-Ego, dominating the entire stream of thought and all the selves that may be represented in it, as the ever self-same and changeless principle implied in their union.” The “soul” of traditional metaphysics, as well as “the ‘Transcendental Ego’ of the Kantian Philosophy,” are but misguided “attempts to satisfy this urgent demand of common-sense.”55
James said that just as “we can imagine a long succession of herdsmen coming rapidly into possession of the same cattle by transmission of an original title by bequest,” it is “a patent fact of consciousness” that “the ‘title’ of a collective self” is passed from one Thought to another in an analogous way:
Each pulse of cognitive consciousness, each Thought, dies away and is replaced by another. The other, among the things it knows, knows its own predecessor, and finding it ‘warm,’ in the way we have described, greets it, saying: “Thou art mine, and part of the same self with me.” Each later Thought, knowing and including thus the Thoughts which went before, is the final receptacle—and appropriating them is the final owner—of all that they contain and own. Each Thought is thus born an owner, and dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor…. Such standing-as-representative, and such adopting, are perfectly clear phenomenal relations. The Thought which, whilst it knows another Thought and the Object of that Other, appropriates the Other and the Object which the Other appropriated, is still a perfectly distinct phenomenon from that Other; it may hardly resemble it; it may be far removed from it in space and time.56
James conceded that his account leaves a crucial element unclear: “the act of appropriation itself.”
The word, appropriate, James said, is “meaningless” unless what is appropriated are “objects in the hands of something else”:
A thing cannot appropriate itself; it is itself; and still less can it disown itself. There must be an agent of the appropriating and disowning; but that agent we have already named. It is the Thought to whom the various ‘constituents’ are known. That Thought is a vehicle of choice as well as of cognition; and among the choices it makes are these appropriations, or repudiations, of its ‘own.’ But the Thought never is an object in its own hands, it never appropriates or disowns itself. It appropriates to itself, it is the actual focus of accretion, the hook from which the chain of past selves dangles, planted firmly in the Present, which alone passes for real, and thus keeping the chain from being a purely ideal thing. Anon the hook itself will drop into the past with all it carries, and then be treated as an object and appropriated by a new Thought in the new present which will serve as living hook in turn.
Thus, James claimed, the present moment of consciousness is “the darkest in the whole series.” While “it may feel its own immediate existence,” nothing can be known about it until it recedes into the past.
Its appropriations are therefore less to itself than to the most intimately felt part of its present Object, the body, and the central adjustments, which accompany the act of thinking, in the head. These are the real nucleus of our personal identity, and it is their actual existence, realized as a solid present fact, which makes us say ‘as sure as I exist, those past facts were part of myself.’ They are the kernel to which the represented parts of the Self are assimilated, accreted, and knit on; and even were Thought entirely unconscious of itself in the act of thinking, these ‘warm’ parts of its present object would be a firm basis on which the consciousness of personal identity would rest.57
Such consciousness, James said, “can be fully described without supposing any other agent than a succession of perishing thoughts, endowed with the functions of appropriation and rejection, and of which some can know and appropriate or reject objects already known, appropriated, or rejected by the rest.”
Thus, in James’s view, the subjective phenomena of consciousness do not need any reference to “any more simple or substantial agent than the present Thought or ‘section’ of the stream.” The immaterial soul, he said, “explains nothing.” But were one to go this route, James added, rather than individual souls, “I find the notion of some sort of an anima mundi thinking in all of us to be a more promising hypothesis.”58
According to James, the core of personhood is “the incessant presence of two elements, an objective person, known by a passing subjective Thought and recognized as continuing in time.”59 James resolved to use the word me for “the empirical person” and I for “the judging Thought.” Since the “me” is constantly changing: “the identity found by the I in its me is only a loosely construed thing, an identity ‘on the whole,’ just like that which any outside observer might find in the same assemblage of facts.”60 The I of any given moment is a temporal slice of “a stream of thought,” each part of which, as “I,” can “remember those which went before, and know the things they knew” and “emphasize and care paramountly for certain ones among them as ‘me,’ and appropriate to these the rest.” The core of what is thought to be the “me” “is always the bodily existence felt to be present at the time.”61
Remembered past feelings that “resemble this present feeling are deemed to belong to the same me with it.” And “whatever other things are perceived to be associated with this feeling are deemed to form part of that me’s experience; and of them certain ones (which fluctuate more or less) are reckoned to be themselves constituents of the me in a larger sense,” such as one’s clothes, material possessions, friends, honors, and so on. But while the “me” is “an empirical aggregate of things objectively known,” the “I” that “knows them cannot itself be an aggregate.” Rather, “it is a Thought, at each moment different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together with all that the latter called its own.”62 In other words, what one calls “the I” is constantly changing. The I as a persisting thing is a fiction.