nor any ideal construction. Each is merged in a higher and all-containing Reality (Chapter xxiv.).
2. We have seen, so far, that our phenomenal view of the soul does not degrade it to an adjective depending on the body. Can we reply to objections based on other grounds? The psychical series, we may be told, demands as its condition a something transcendent, a soul or Ego which stands above, and gives unity to, the series. But such a soul, I reply, merely adds further difficulties to those we had before. No doubt the series, being phenomenal, is the appearance of Reality, but it hardly follows from this that its reality is an Ego or soul. We have seen (Chapter x.) that such a being, because finite, is infected with its own relations to other finites. And it is so far from giving unity to the series of events, that their plurality refuses to come together with its singleness. Hence the oneness remains standing outside the many, as a further finite unit. You cannot show how the series becomes a system in the soul; and, if you could, you cannot free that soul from its perplexed position as one finite related to other finites. In short, metaphysically your soul or Ego is a mass of confusion, and we have now long ago disposed of it. And if it is offered us merely as a working conception, which does not claim truth, then this conception, as we have seen, will not work in metaphysics. Its alleged function must be confined to psychology, an empirical science, and the further consideration of it here would be, therefore, irrelevant.[1]
3. But our account of the soul, as a series of
- ↑ In another place I should be ready to enter on this question. It would, I think, not be difficult to show in psychology that the idea of a soul, or an Ego, or a Will, or an activity beyond events explains nothing at all. It serves only to produce false appearances of explanation, and to throw a mist over what is really left quite unexplained.
