But I must hasten to add that this view remains gravely imperfect. It is in the end impossible to maintain that anything is because it has been. And with regard to the soul, such an objection can be pressed from two sides. Suppose, in the first place, that another body like my own were manufactured, can I deny that with this body would go everything that I call my self? So long as the soul is not placed in the position of an idle appendage, I have already, in principle, accepted this result. I think that in such a case there would be the same associations and of course the same memory. But we could no longer repeat here that the soul is, because it has been. We should be compelled rather to assert that (in a sense) the soul has been, because it now is. This imaginary case has led us back, in fact, to that problem of “dispositions,” which we found before was insoluble. Its solution (so far as we could perceive) would dissolve each of the constructions called body and soul.
And, in the second place, regarded from the inside, the psychological view of identity is no less a compromise. We may perhaps apprehend this by considering the double aspect of Memory. We remember, on the one hand, because of prior events in our existence. But, on the other hand, memory is most obviously a construction from the present, and it depends absolutely upon that which at the moment we are. And this latter movement, when developed, carries us wholly outside the psychological view, and altogether beyond memory. For the main object of thought may be called the attempt to get rid of mere conjunctions in the soul. A true connection, in the end, we see cannot be true because once upon a time its elements happened together. Mere associations, themselves always universal from the first,[1] are hence by thought deliberately purified.
- ↑ I have endeavoured to prove this point in Principles of Logic, pp. 36 and foll.; 284 and foll.; cp. 460-1. I venture to think that psychology is suffering seriously from want of clearness on this head.
