Page:B20442294.djvu/182

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154
SEX AND CHARACTER

the grammarian. In this Hume had anticipated him, inasmuch as he also had declared, at the end of his analysis, all disputes as to the identity of the person to be merely a battle of words.

E. Mach has recently represented the universe as a coherent mass, and the egos as points in which the coherent mass has greater consistency. The only realities are the perceptions, which are connected in one individual strongly, but which are weaker in another individual who is thus differentiated from the first.

The contents of the perceptions are the realities, and they persist externally to the worthless personal recollections. The ego is not a real but only a practical entity and cannot be isolated, and, therefore, the idea of individual immortality must be rejected. None the less the idea of an ego is not wholly to be rejected; here and there, as, for instance, in Darwin's struggle for existence, it appears to have some validity.

It is extraordinary how an investigator who has accomplished so much, not only as a historian of his special branch and as a critic of ideas, but who is also fully equipped with knowledge of biology, should have paid no heed to the fact that every organic being is indivisible from the first, and is not composed of anything like atoms, monads, &c. The first distinctive mark of the living as opposed to inorganic matter is that the former is always differentiated into dissimilar, mutually dependent parts, and is not homogeneous like a crystal. And so it should have been borne in mind that it was at least possible that individuation, the fact that organic beings are not united, like Siamese twins, would prove to have importance in psychical matters, and the ego, therefore, was more than Mach's idea of it as a mere waiting-hall of perceptions.

It may be that there exists a psychical correlation even amongst animals. Everything that an animal feels and perceives has a different "note" or "colour" in every individual. This individual quality is not only characteristic of the class, genus, species, race, and family, but also is