Chapter  8[1]

 

THE SELF

            James's promethean pragmatist, being a restless, indefatigable desire-satisfaction maximizer, was seen in Part I to be always on the make in his quest to have it all. Toward this end he had to adopt an externalized stance toward worldly objects, since his concern was with successfully manipulating them for his own purposes. His pragmatic theory of meaning and truth supplied him with recipes for successfully riding herd on them. In addition they served as a univocal methodological reconciler or mediator between the projects and interests of his many different selves, but only a partial reconciler since conflicts still remained between the perspectives of these selves, especially those of the moral agent and scientist with regard to the issue of determinism and free will, as well as bifurcationism. The stronger medicine of a Poo-bahistic ontological relativism was needed,  requiring him never to go anywhere or do anything without being armed with a "qua"-clause. Even the doctrine of Pure Experience, which turned out to be a failed though noble experiment, had a reconciling intent. Poo-bahism, however, will be seen in Chapter 10, to be in conflict with the mystical self's absolutistic outlook, creating the deepest unresolved aporia in James's philosophy, and it will be the task of Chapter 11 to explore ways of resolving it within a broadly Jamesian approach. All of these pragmatic theses about meaning, truth, freedom, and reality were suitable options for the will to believe, which is James's ultimate promethean doctrine since it licenses us to believe in matters metaphysical (and thereby epistemically undecidable) in a manner that will best enable us to have it all.      

            But the stance of the externalized promethean pragmatist toward worldly objects, including other persons, did not satisfy James's deep mystical longings for a more intimate and personal relation to them, a relation so intimate that it would ultimately involve a union with them, but one that stopped short of the numerical identity of monistic mysticism. To experience such union it was necessary to overcome his active promethean self and learn to become passive so that he could penetrate to their inner consciousness through acts of conceptless sympathetic intuition. The promethean quest to have it all has given way to the mystical quest to spiritually penetrate all.

            This mystical quest for intimacy and union was both deeply rooted in William James, the man, and endemic to his era, which felt threatened by the seemingly meaningless, impersonal world that had become the professed official view of science since the rise of the "new physics" in the 17th Century. It seems as if everyone in New England in the second half of the 19th Century had been inoculated by the Concord bacilli of mystical transcendentalism as an immunization against this threat. Along with Peirce and Dewey, James made the overcoming of this pernicious bifurcation between man and nature the chief goal of their philosophies.

            James accepts without question the bifurcationist upshot of science. "The essence of things for science is not to be what they seem, but to be atoms and molecules moving to and from each other according to strange laws." (PP 1230) What James means by this cryptic remark is that "Sensible phenomena are pure delusions for the mechanical philosophy" based on modern science. (PP 1258) "Even today, secondary qualities themselves--heat, sound, light--have but a vague place in the scheme of understanding. In the common-sense meaning and for practical purposes, they are absolutely objective, absolutely physical. For the physicist, they are subjective. For him, only form, mass, and movement have an outer reality." (ERE 266)

            This scientific image of the world challenges our deepest humanistic longings and aspirations. Some of the most eloquent and poignant passages in James attest to the sense of alienation and forlornness wrought by this bifurcation. Science holds that "all the things and qualities men love, dulcissima mundi nomina, are but illusions of our fancy attached to accidental clouds of dust which will be dissipated by the eternal cosmic weather as carelessly as they were formed." (1260) "The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of 'nothing but--nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort." (P 15) Our "personal" and "romantic" view of life is incompatible with the mechanistic and materialistic world view of science.

Science has come to be identified with a certain fixed general belief, the belief that the deeper order of Nature is mechanical exclusively, and that non-mechanical categories are irrational ways of conceiving and explaining even such a thing as human life. Now this mechanical rationalism, as one may call it, makes, if it becomes one's only way of thinking, a violent breach with the ways of thinking that have until our own time played the greatest part in human history. Religious thinking, ethical thinking, poetical thinking, teleological, emotional, sentimental thinking, what one might call the personal view of life to distinguish it from the impersonal and mechanical, and the romantic view of life to distinguish it from the rationalistic view, have been and even still are, outside of well-drilled scientific circles, the dominant forms of thought. But for mechanical rationalism, personality is an insubstantial illusion; the chronic belief of mankind that events may happen for the sake of their personal significance is an abomination; and the notions of our grandfathers about oracles and omens, divinations and apparitions, miraculous changes of heart and wonders worked by inspired persons, answers to prayer and providential leadings, are a fabric absolutely baseless, a mass of sheer untruth. (EPR 134-5. see also PU 16)

            Not only does the mechanistic and materialistic world view of science undermine our personal and romantic ways of thinking, it renders the world an unfit habit for a moral agent, since it gives him no reason for wanting to take life seriously, and this is the worst defect in a philosophy since it does not give our active propensities any

object whatever to press against. A philosophy whose principle is so incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all relevancy in universal affairs, as to annihilate their motives at one blow, will be even more unpopular than pessimism....This is why materialism will always fail of universal adoption...For materialism denies reality to the objects of almost all the impulses which we most cherish....We demand in it [the universe] a character for which our emotions and active propensities shall be a match. (940-1)

Any philosophy that presents a view of the world that is devoid of human significance is unacceptable. "Nothing could be more absurd than to hope for the definitive triumph of any philosophy which should refuse to legitimate and to legitimate in an emphatic manner, the more powerful of our emotional and practical tendencies." (PP 943) "It surely is a merit in a philosophy to make the very life we lead seem real and earnest."[2] (PU 28) Herein James is speaking both as a man and as a sociologist of philosophy.

            James’s panacea for the evils of scientifically-based bifurcationism is to follow the way of inwardness, something that was to be later advocated by the existentialists and contemporary continental philosophers. 

The only form of thing that we directly encounter...is our own personal life. The only complete category of our thinking...is the category of personality, every other category being one of the abstract elements of that. And this systematic denial on Science's part of personality as a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may...be the very defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own boasted Science. (EPR 136-6)     

This passage reveals the most fundamental assumption of James's philosophy -- that the true nature of reality is to be ascertained not through the employment of symbols or concepts but rather through personal experience. "So long as we deal with the cosmic and the general [as does Science], we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term." (VRE 393) "Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done." (VRE 395) 

            James's advocation of the inner approach to understanding reality develops an important theme in Emerson, who wrote in his Diary for 1833: "There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. Instead of studying things without, the principles of them all may be penetrated into within him...The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint man with himself...The highest revelation is that God is in every man." Through looking into our own souls, that is, introspecting our own minds, we discover the way things really are, and, not surprisingly, they will turn out to be of a like kind to ourselves. Thus, by giving pride of place to introspection, James assures that our view of the universe will be a personal, romantic one. Gerald Myers showed great insight when he wrote that "in intent, technique, and effect [introspection] is preeminently personal." (In R. Putnam RAP 20) As will be seen in the next chapter, it will enable each of us to address our universe as a "Thou."

            In recommending that we follow the way of inwardness or subjectivism, James, in effect, is giving pride of place to introspection over the way of objective analysis in terms of cause and effect. In The Principles of Psychology James held these approaches in a precarious dynamic equilibrium, ultimately siding with the introspective approach. Not only did he say that "Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always," but let it have the final say when he dealt with humanistically valuable concepts, such as the self and its free will.

            The story to be told in Part II of this book is how James ultimately relied on the inner approach of introspection to ascertain the nature of reality, projecting onto reality at large what he discovered from introspecting his own consciousness, and, not surprisingly, wound up espousing consciousness to be the stuff of everything, with the subject of experience partially merging with what he experiences in the way in which different phases of a conscious process melt into each other. The story will begin in this chapter with an account of James's theory of the self and how he relied solely on the revelations of introspection to reveal its nature.

            James's analysis is guided by the underlying leitmotiv of his whole pragmatic philosophy -- that the essence of consciousness is to be selectively attentive on the basis of what is interesting or important. This issues in the distinctively promethean theme that we create a world out of the big blooming, buzzing confusion of the perceptually given by selectively attending to those perceptions that are of interest to us and, moreover, within them, selecting which ones are to be constitutive of the essence of the objects perceived. The famous Chapter on "The Stream of Thought" in The Principles of Psychology immediately precedes that on "The Consciousness of the Self" and beautifully segues into it. Just after arguing that consciousness is interested in some parts of the given "to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects--chooses from among them, in a word--all the while," it concludes with the observation that for each person there is an ultimate, across-the-board selective partitioning of the world into that which he takes to be "mine" and all the rest. (220)

One great splitting of the whole universe into two halves is made by each of us; and for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves; but we all draw the line of division between them in a different place....The altogether unique kind of interest which each human mind feels in those parts of creation which it can call me or mine may be a moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychological fact. (278)

            This  theme is immediately taken up at the beginning of "The Consciousness of the Self," where it is advanced as the basis of his account of the Empirical Self, which comprises the Material Self (one's body and possessions), Social Self (how one is recognized by others), and Spiritual Self (one's mental dispositions and stream of consciousness).[3]

The Empirical Self of each of us is all that he is tempted to call by the name of me. But it is clear that between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves. (279)

James contends that the common sense distinction between me and mine is without grounds, one of his famous differences that make no difference, since a person directs the same attitudes, feelings, and actions to what he calls mine as he does to what he calls me.

In its widest possible sense, however, 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, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and work, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. (279)[4]

            It would not be wildly anachronistic to see this attempt to analyze Self identity in terms of distinctive sort of emotions, attitudes, and actions that give importance to Self identity as a forerunner of Derek Parfit's account. Both men attempt to pare off from the bare numerical identity of common sense those importance-bestowing features that are its almost invariable but contingent accompaniments and replace the former by the latter, thereby bringing about a number of departures from common sense.  For example, being identical with, pace common sense, now will admit of degrees because being important does. Another revisionary consequence is to assimilate numerical to qualitative identity. When a person, upon undergoing a psychological upheaval that results in a radical difference in the way in which he remembers and evaluates the importance of things, says "I am no longer the same person," it is not to be parsed in its ordinary manner of "I am numerically one and the same person throughout but have just changed in my psychological traits." Rather, that person bears little if any numerical identity to the past person. James says in regard to our Material Self that when we lose a loved one "a part of our very selves is gone," (280) and, in regard to the person who has suffered a radical disrupture in psychological continuity that he rightfully "disowns his former me, gives himself a new name, identifies his present life with nothing from out of the older time." (319. see also 351, especially his endorsement of the quotation in its footnote 40.)

            The most startling departure from common sense is the jettisoning of its transitivity requirement. While James's analysis of the identity of the Spiritual Self, as will be seen, implausibly attempts to retain transitivity, plainly his analysis of the Material Self does not. For example, if you and I co-own a desk beloved by both of us, it turns out, if transitivity is retained, that I am identical with you in virtue of each of us being able to call the desk  "mine" and therefore, on this revisionary analysis, "me." Since not even James would accept something as outre this, he must give up the transitivity requirement. All three of these revisions, by the way, are to be found in the Parfit analysis. While James had a wholesome respect for common sense, he avoided making it an Idol of the Tribe, and, as was seen in Part I, made radical departures from it in his analyses of matter, mind, and truth. As he made clear in his Chapter on "Pragmatism and Common Sense" in his Pragmatism, its tenets and categories are subject to revision and often are repositories for past metaphysical theories. 

            The crucial challenge to any revisionary analysis is to justify its departure from common sense. Parfit's is that by accepting his revisionary analysis and thereby potentially having a larger Self than is ordinarily allowed we will be more altruistic and less subject to harmful regrets and fears about the gnawing tooth of time, but it is left obscure why this so. James's justification, on the other hand, is based in part on his pragmatic theory of meaning requiring that every difference make some practical difference in terms of what experiences we are to expect or how we should act. Since there is no experiential or behavioral difference between the case of bare numerical identity and one in which the importance-bestowing relations obtain, there is no difference. Common-sense mistakenly takes there to be a difference because of its acceptance of the pragmatically vacuous Cartesian soul substance theory, a good example of common sense being metaphysically biased in the way just alluded to by James. (15) Another justificatory reason for preferring an importance-based analysis is that it supports his humanistic promethean thesis of man as creator: we make things what they are by taking them in a way that is based on our feelings of what is important or interesting. James saw such a humanism as having morally desirable consequences by encouraging us to live the morally strenuous life of creators of value and meaning.

            With these preliminary issues about orientation and motivation out of the way, we can now zero in on James's analysis of the Spiritual Self. In accordance with a time honored philosophical slogan that there is no entity without identity, he attempts to uncover its nature through an analysis of its identity conditions, especially its  identity over time. It is a difficult task for an expositor to say just what James's analysis is an analysis of, for running throughout much of The Principles of Psychology is a distinction between two radically different ways in which a psychologist can investigate a psychic state.

There are, as we know, two ways of studying every psychic state. First, the way of analysis: What does it consist in? What is its inner nature? Of what sort of mind-stuff is it composed? Second, the way of history: What are its conditions of production, and its connection with other facts? (913)

            The "analysis" is a phenomenological one based on introspection of an "inner" psychic state of consciousness, while the "historical" way is in terms of those publicly observable events that cause the psychic state. Given these dichotomous approaches, the particular psychic state of "consciousness of personal sameness" can be treated

as a subjective phenomenon or as an objective deliverance, as a feeling, or as a truth. We may explain how one bit of thought can come to judge other bits to belong to the same Ego with itself; or we may criticise its judgment and decide how far it may tally with the nature of things. (314)

The analysis of self identity as a "subjective phenomenon" is exclusively in terms of what I will call "first person criteria," these being states of consciousness that are introspectively available to the subject and reportable by propositions of the form "I am now conscious in such-and-such a way."

            James makes several cryptic allusions to "third person criteria" (in my terminology) based on publicly observable events for self identity as an "objective deliverance."

The psychologist, looking on and playing the critic, might prove the thought [of self identity] wrong, and show there was no real identity,-there might have been no yesterday, or, at any rate, no self of yesterday; or, if there were, the sameness predicated might not obtain, or might be predicated on insufficient grounds. In either case, the personal identity would not exist as a fact; but it would exist as a feeling all the same; the consciousness of it by the thought would be there, and the psychologist would still have to analyze that, and show where its illusoriness lay. (315-6)

At another place James seems to anticipate the controversial contemporary "best candidate" or "only candidate" requirement for self identity over time. "The way in which the present Thought [one's momentary total state of consciousness] 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." (341) James gives an early indication of what these objective defeaters or overriders could be when he says that "The experiences of the body are thus one of the conditions of the faculty of memory being what it is." (17) This seems to imply that neurophysiological facts about brain processes and states could defeat a personal identity claim based on apparent memory by showing that the right sort of causal process was not in operation within the body. The later Chapter on "Memory" in The Principles of Psychology will be seen to give some support to this interpretation.

            James says nothing more about the nature of these third person defeaters and their relation to first person criteria. In a later section of this chapter an attempt will be made to follow through on his behalf, but this will have to wait the unearthing and attempted resolutions of various aporias concerning first versus third person criteria . Until this is done it will remain uncertain whether James's analysis is of personal identity over time as such or only the introspective experiences that lead us to reidentify our selves. For the time being, we will assume the simple, but, it will turn out, simple minded, view that it is concerned only with the latter, that is, with a phenomenological analysis of first person criteria, thereby leaving the issue completely open as to connection between first and third person criteria.

            James's analysis is an amalgam of the bundle analyses of Locke and Hume according to which the enduring self (or, in Hume's case, what we ordinarily but mistakenly call such) is reduced to a succession of conscious stages. A strong verificationist sentiment, which requires eschewing any non-empirical entity, such as a Cartesian soul substance or Kantian transcendental ego of apperception, recommends this analysis to James. He praises his Associationist predecessors by saying that they "have taken so much of the meaning of personal identity out of the clouds and made of the Self an empirical and verifiable thing," and claims that his own analysis in terms of "resemblance among the parts of a continuum of feelings... constitutes the real and verifiable 'personal identity' which we feel."[5] (319. See also 328 and 341.) The aim of James's reductive analysis, accordingly, is to eliminate all references to or quantification over the Self in favor of references to conscious stages and descriptions of their interconnections. 

            A bundle theory of the Self must answer two questions. Exactly what are the elements or relata in the bundle? And, what is the relation(s) between them that renders them parts of the history of a single Self? James's answer to the first question shows a departure from the psychological atomism of Locke and Hume. Whereas they took a stage or state of consciousness to be compounded out of phenomenologically discriminated atomic components, James argued that it is a phenomenologically "indecomposable unity" that constitutes the total way in which a person is conscious at a given time. (350)  The taste of lemonade is not decomposable into separate sensations of tartness and sweetness, although its external cause is decomposable. It would be an instance of James's "Psychological Fallacy" to read back into the experiencing of the lemonade's taste features of the cause of this experience. This difference with his predecessors is not very important because James was able, five years after the publication of The Principles of Psychology, in "The Knowing of Things Together," to change his view about this without having to change any other feature of his analysis. He called such a momentary total state of consciousness a "Thought" and attempted to reduce the endurance of the Self to a succession of momentary pulses of such Thoughts. There is a lingering atomism, however, in James's employment of a succession of numerically distinct momentary pulses of Thought. The "specious present" of The Principles of Psychology,  as will be seen in Chapter 10, failed to avoid such atomism, for not only is there a succession of discrete specious presents but within each there is a discrimination between successive contents that differ in their degree of liveliness. It remained for him to offer a more radical Bergsonian solution in his A Pluralistic Universe and Some Problems of Philosophy according to which the law of non-contradiction does not apply to our experience of change--a solution that did not thrill everybody.

            All of the psychological states, processes, and dispositions that were formerly predicable of the person or Self now are to be predicated of a momentary Thought. Thus, it is a present Thought that knows, remembers, believes, wills, and the like. Herein is yet another respect in which James's analysis, like any bundle analysis, departs from common sense or ordinary usage, but this, as already seen, would not crush James. There is, however, the lingering suspicion that the Jamesian Thought, in virtue of being the common bearer and therefore unifier of all these psychological attributes, is a traditional substance of the sort he hoped to exorcise. Since they perform similar functions, they are the same on the basis of his principle that a difference that makes no difference is no difference. James's response could be that there is some difference, though not as great as he had believed, namely that his Thought, unlike a traditional soul substance, does not ground the identity of the Self over time. But this does not allay the suspicion that James is sleeping with the enemy by countenancing something non-empirical, even if only a momentary non-empirical something. 

            James's answer to the second question, concerning the bundling relation, resembles the accounts of Locke and Hume, but with two important exceptions: he holds it to exist in de rerum natura, thereby rendering the bundle a real unity and, furthermore, sees it as man-made, in accordance with his promethean humanism.[6] To discover the relation James follows Locke's strategy of basing it on the relation that obtains between a Self and its present Thought (or idea for Locke).[7] The reasons a Self (really a Thought) has for self-ascribing a present Thought will be the same as it has for self-ascribing a past Thought. The issue, then, gets down to the phenomenal grounds on which a Self self-ascribes a present Thought.

            It is important to bear in mind that for James it is not a conceptual truth that every Thought is had by one and only one Self, something which was seen in the discussion of Pure Experience in the last chapter. When he said, in listing the five characters in thought, "Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness," he meant the "tends" qualification seriously. He argued that the then current work on multiple personality in abnormal psychology and on mediumship and automatic writing in paranormal psychology  provided counter-examples to this. In fact, he even claimed to have had an experience in 1906 of a dream that seemed to him to be someone else's. (EP 163-4) This caused great dread, since he feared that he was disintegrating into one of Janet's split personalities. Thus, it is a real problem for James how a Self identifies some Thought as its own, since it could have access to the Thoughts of others, or even Thoughts that were no one's--free-floating bits of consciousness in Fechner's surrounding mother-sea of consciousness.

            James's answer is that it does so on the basis of the warmth and intimacy of the apprehended Thought. (314 and 316) Since what has warmth and intimacy is what is of interest, this is to say that a Thought is self-ascribed on the basis of interest, which fits the underlying leitmotiv of his analysis based on the interest-based selectivity of consciousness. A past Thought is self-ascribed by a present one -- taken to be copersonal with it -- when it is recaptured in memory with the same warmth and intimacy it had when present, thereby agreeing with Locke that the grounds for self-ascribing a present Thought are the same as for self-ascribing a past one.

            There are several ways in which James describes this recapturing of the original warmth and intimacy of a past Thought by a present one. Most often, it is said that the latter "appropriates" or "adopts" the former. The present Thought is said also to "own" the past one. Each Thought, other than the first or last in a personal history, is "born an owner, and dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor." (322) At another place he uses the simile of the passing on of "the 'title' of a collective self" from one Thought to another. (322) You might say that every Thought goes from Champ to Chump in a brief moment, rather than in the fifteen minutes envisioned by Andy Warhol. This comparison with the successive holders of a title misfires, since they are not co-personal whereas the successive appropriators are.

            The attentive reader will have noticed a seeming inconsistency in James's account of the conditions for a present Thought to be copersonal with a past one. It appears as if James says both that it is made and discovered, which presents the second major aporia for later discussion. The appropriating and adopting accounts of it speak to its being made, since these are intentional acts that the present Thought performs at will, on purpose, etc.. But the warmth and intimacy account speaks to it being discovered, since we cannot, be it for conceptual or causal reasons (I am not sure which), take something at will or voluntarily to have these qualities or be interesting, any more than we can love at will.

            But before we wrestle with this aporia more must be said about James's bundling relation, in particular whether it is transitive, that is, if Thought T1 appropriates T2, and T2 appropriates T3, does T1 appropriate T3, and, the nature of its phenomenal qualities of warmth and intimacy. For the time being, we will avoid the problem posed by the possibility of a split in psychological continuity, such as might occur through a brain bisection followed by a successful implanting of each hemisphere in a different body, or simply through two contemporaneous Thoughts appropriating the same past Thought, which must qualify as a distinct possibilities for James, one which he made use of in his doctrine of Pure Experience.

            In answer to the first question, a distinction must be drawn between "propositional-memory"--remembering that p, in which p is some proposition--and "image-memory"--representation of a former experience of one's own through an affective or phenomenal reenactment of it. Whatever might be the case regarding the transitivity of propositional-memory (If I remember that I remembered that I went to the circus, do I remember that I went to the circus?), it is dubious that image-memory is; and from what James says in support of the transitivity of appropriation, it is clear that he is concerned exclusively with image-memory. Initially he supports its transitivity by claiming that "Who owns the last self owns the self before the last, for what possesses the possessor possesses the possessed." (322) But this reliance on the metaphor of ownership is not sufficiently probative; for, even if there were a positive legal code according to which a slave owner owns everything that his slave owns, it would have no relevance to James co-personality sense of ownership. More to the point is his diagram (324) to illustrate the manner in which a Thought appropriates every thought appropriated by any Thought it appropriates. It consists in a series of Chinese boxes with their bottom halves cut away. Each box represents a single Thought, with its phenomenal content included within the box. The initial (present) Thought-box in the series includes within itself, its phenomenal content, the phenomenal content included within each Thought-box included within it. As a consequence, the visual image content of a Thought contains the visual image content of any Thought it appropriates, just as a painting of a scene including a painting contains the represented painting in miniature.

            The worry is that there is a finite bound to the number of possible successive appropriators and thus a rupture in transitivity, due to a limiting threshold on the smallness of the images we can be conscious of, just as there is a limiting threshold on how many contained paintings there can be in a painting that contains a miniature version of itself, in this case due to limitations imposed by materials and skills, as well as on our power of making visual discriminations. Furthermore, usually when I affectively recapture a past Thought through image-memory I do not have an image of every one of its phenomenal contents. I affectively recall my agonizing over this chapter yesterday evening, but I do not have a phenomenal awareness of every content of my total state of consciousness at that time, such as my itching from a mosquito bite. This, incidentally, should make us suspicious of James's claim that a total state of consciousness is not phenomenally decomposable, for how could I have an image-memory of a proper phenomenal part of such a state unless it contained as proper parts distinct phenomenal contents.

            Given the function that James assigns to his bundling relation, there is no need for him to fight in the last ditch for its having an image-memory based transitivity. This function is to secure sufficient qualitative similarity between successive phases of the stream of thought so that they can qualify as copersonal. His image memory is only a device, as it was for Hume, for securing the kind of qualitative continuity that is necessary for the identity over time of any enduring individual or continuant.

The sense of our own personal identity, then, is exactly like any one of our other perceptions of sameness among phenomena. It is a conclusion grounded either on the resemblance in a fundamental respect, or on the continuity before the mind, of the phenomena compared. (318)

James follows Locke in holding the temporal phases of a continuing individual can vary qualitatively, provided that they do so in a gradual and continuous manner.

            If James grants, as he should, that image-memory, for the reasons just given, is not transitive, he will have to complicate his account so as to handle cases in which transitivity fails to hold. He could avail himself of the grandfather relation to image-memory and say that successive Thoughts are copersonal just in case either one of them has an image-memory of the other or they are connected by an unbroken succession of image-memories. This, of course, will not meet the problem posed by the logical possibility of the same Thought being image-remembered by different simultaneous Thoughts. James would not worry about such mere logical possibilities, since his analysis had the modest aim of describing how things actually are. In general, as has been pointed out in the discussion of truth in Chapter 5, James never claimed that his analyses or accounts gave logically or conceptually sufficient and necessary conditions.

            Another aspect of the appropriation relation requiring further consideration is the role played by the qualities of warmth and intimacy upon which it is based. The charming example by which James attempts to illustrate this is fraught with difficulties:  "...Peter, awakening in the same bed with Paul, and recalling what both had in mind before they went to sleep, reidentifies and appropriates the 'warm' ideas as his, and is never tempted to confuse them with those cold and pale-appearing ones which he ascribes to Paul." (317) This fails as a phenomenological analysis of the grounds on which a person self-ascribes an idea. Imagine that Peter's own ideas prior to falling asleep were quite "cold and pale-appearing" compared with the ideas of Paul that were then related to him. Peter was thinking about a boring departmental meeting he had just attended in which five hours were given over to discussing whether a graduate student representative should be allowed to vote on junior faculty appointments at the very time Paul was relating to him the exciting details of his evening with some lady. Peter is not under any temptation, either at that time or when he reconsiders these ideas upon waking, to take Paul's ideas as his own, in spite of their greater warmth and interest.

            A similar objection applies to James's phenomenological account of how we identify our own body. Our bodies "too are percepts in our objective field--they are simply the most interesting percepts there." (304) The Hunchback of Notre Dame, no doubt, finds the body of his beloved far more interesting than his own without thereby taking it to be his. James also errs in making "liveliness, or sensible pungency" (928) one of the important phenomenological characteristics on the basis of which we take a sensation's object to be real. "Whilst absorbed in the novel, we turn our backs on all other worlds, and, for the time, the Ivanhoe-world remains our absolute reality." (922) Again, this is belied by the phenomenological facts, for, not only are our dreams usually more lively and vivid than our run of the mill waking sense experiences without thereby being taken to be of a reality that supplants or stands alongside of the ordinary sensible world, one fails to read a novel as a novel if the actions it depicts are taken to be real-life.

            What response might be available to James to these objections to his basing of copersonality on warmth and intimacy? These objections employed a generic version of these qualities. But such qualities cannot be individuative for persons, for every Thought, except possibly for a free-floating one in the mother-sea, has warmth and intimacy for someone. Thus, a Thought's being warm and intimate does not discriminate among selves. My Thoughts, for example, do not just have warmth and intimacy, for that would not discriminate them from other people's Thoughts. Rather they have warmth and intimacy for me. What are needed are more esoteric, personally individuating versions of these qualities, such that each person experiences one and only one of them.

            James's simile of the herd owner who collects together his cattle on the basis of their unique brand mark suggests that he might have intended this esoteric, "existential" sort of warmth and intimacy.

The 'owner' symbolizes 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. There is found a self brand, just as there is found a herd-brand. Each brand, so far, is the mark, or cause of our knowing, that certain things belong together. (319-20)

            It would be fully in the spirit of James's philosophy of language in A Pluralistic Universe and especially Some Problems of Philosophy (with which PP 40 is in complete agreement), which insists on the privacy of meanings and the impossibility of fully communicating them in language, as well as the strong existential emphasis of many of the essays in The Will to Believe, to understand this "self brand" type of warmth and intimacy in terms of personal indexical senses of restricted accessibility. The basic idea is that a different Fregean sense or property will be expressed by each person's use of "my warmth and intimacy," which can be grasped only by that person, just as successive utterances of "now" express different senses that are accessible only to persons existing at the time of utterance. To put it simply, only you know what it is like to be you. As a consequence, the tokening of "the Thought of the department meeting has my warmth and intimacy about it" by different persons will express different Fregean de dicto propositions, just as successive tokenings of "It is now raining" do.[8] These personal indexical senses or properties of warmth and intimacy do not perfectly fit the simile, for whereas a unique self brand is experientially accessible to people other than the owner of the herd, the sense or property which each person expresses by using "my feeling of warmth and intimacy" is entertainable only by the user.

            These de dicto indexical senses or propositions are not everyone's cup of tea, as indicated by the legion of contemporary philosophers of language who have attempted to deny their reality and replace them with de re indexical propositions, but plainly James would have looked with favor upon them, given his penchant for wallowing in the subjective and ineffable. One minor change, however, will have to be made in The Principles of Psychology if James is to be able consistently to accept them. James claimed that a Thought cannot refer to or appropriate itself--"the Thought never is an object in its own hand." (323) The use of the indexical phrase "my feeling of warmth and intimacy," however, refers to the person (momentary Thought for James) who uses it. By jettisoning this claim we not only save James from commitment to a patently false doctrine but also eliminate an inconsistency in his text, for some of the things he says elsewhere imply its falsity.  For example, he says that "we shall assimilate them [Thoughts] to each other and to the warm and intimate self we now feel within us as we think," but it is hard to see how this could be done if we cannot refer to our present Self or Thought.  (317) He imagines a "subtle reader" objecting to his denial of the possibility of reflexive self reference by saying that "the Thought cannot call any part of its Object 'I' and knit other parts on to it, without first knitting that part on to Itself; and that it cannot knit it on to Itself without knowing itself." (323) James's answer, that "The words I and me signify nothing mysterious and unexampled--they are at bottom only names of emphasis," is really a non-answer that gives in to the objection. (324) For in calling them "names" he grants that they refer, his only point being the anti-Cartesian one that they refer to an object with good empirical credentials--the present Thought.

            This completes our overview of James's phenomenological analysis of the identity of the Self over time, and a more in depth probe is now required if we are to resolve its making versus discovering and first versus third person criteria aporias.  

The Making Versus Discovering Aporia

            A good way to broach this aporia is through the herd simile. James initially says that "There is found a self brand, just as there is found a herd brand," which, by its use of "found," plainly supports the discovering thesis. If the making theorist should object that the herdsman had to initially brand  loose, unowned cattle, James's imagines the response that "They are not his because they are branded; they are branded because they are his." (320) (The respondent must have never heard of cattle thieves, or even settlers.) He mounts an objection to his dispensing with an enduring soul based on the analogous fact that The Thought does not capture or appropriate its own Thoughts, "but as soon as it comes into existence it finds them already its own," to which his response again is the anti-Cartesian one that the present Thought can perform all the functions that a soul substance does. (321) What he fails to realize is that this fact counts against his claim that the present Thought makes the unity by its appropriative act. It renders this act otiose by requiring it to unify that which already is unified, thereby resulting in the contradiction that the unity of the Self over time is both made and discovered.

            It was pointed out in Chapter 7 that the same aporia infects James's account of existence or reality. According to his phenomenological analysis, we take as real "whatever things we select and emphasize and turn to WITH A WILL....The world of living realities as contrasted with unrealities is thus anchored in the Ego, considered as an active and emotional term." (926) But these claims in favor of the making thesis of reality were seen to clash with his claims that we take a sensation's object to be real primarily when it has "Coerciveness over attention, or the power to possess consciousness," and, secondly, on the basis of "Liveliness, or sensible pungency, especially in the way of exciting pleasure or pain." (928) These two sets of claims clash, because we do not make something lively or interesting, no less coercive by an act of will. The order of explanation goes from something's being interesting to its being attended to rather than vice-versa. A similar aporia also runs throughout his general account of belief. On the one hand, his sentiment of rationality doctrine stresses that our beliefs are determined by our emotions and passions, which renders them non-intentional. On the other hand, his promethean will to believe doctrine requires that we be able to choose our beliefs at will, something which we accomplish by making the intentional effort to concentrate our attention in a certain way, as was shown in Chapter 2. James would like to believe that each of us is a causa sui, totally responsible for everything we are and do, but he is too good a psychologist to go down the line with this promethean doctrine, with the result that an aporia appears.        

            But the herd simile can also be put to use in service of the making thesis. James now imagines that "wild cattle were lassoed by a newly-created settler and then owned for the first time." (321) We can further imagine that upon lassoing them, the herder imprints his unique self brand on them, thereby making them his, this being analogous to the present Thought appropriating a Thought, be it present or past, as its own. The herd simile, since it permits both the discovering and making interpretation, limps on all four hoofs and should be permanently retired to Gabby Hayes's Wild West Museum in Canton, Ohio. A new start is needed.         

            James's account of the self-ascription of a Thought, be it present or past, begins with the phenomenal fact that some Thought is given to a present Thought with the qualities of warmth and intimacy of a special sort. "Our own past states of mind...appear to us endowed with a sort of warmth and intimacy that makes the perception of them seem more like a process of sensation than like a thought." (218) So far there is no intentional act, only passiveness, since one cannot choose to make something warm or interesting.  The Thought simply discovers via passive sensation its copersonality with other Thoughts, which fits squarely with his passionate insistence that "The knowledge the present feeling has of the past ones is a real tie between them. " (340) The relation of copersonality, like all relations, pace Hume and Mill, are experientially given and inhere in the real world.

            The problem is what work is left over for the intentional act of appropriation or adoption to do. James says that when Peter awakens from sleep he "reidentifies and appropriates the 'warm' ideas as his." (317) and that this act "collects...some of the past facts which it surveys, and disowns the rest...and so makes a unity that is actualized and anchored and does not merely float in the blue air of possibility." (321) Although James repeatedly uses "appropriates," at one place even within what look like scare-quotation marks (326), he never says just what it involves and candidly admits at the end of his account that "The only point that is obscure is the act of appropriation itself." (323) I will consider three different ways of filling out what it is.

            On the basis of what James says, an appropriative act, whatever else it might be, is an act of self-ascription that involves selective emphasis. Such a self-ascription, necessarily, requires that the present Self or Thought refer to itself by the use of a first person indexical expression, such as "I" or "me. But they, along with every other indexical expression according to James, "are at bottom only names of emphasis." (324) Herein we find the sought for intentional act of selective attention, since "the distinction between I and you, like that between this and that, here and there, now and then...is the result of our laying the same selective emphasis on parts of place and time." (273) Furthermore, we can think of the appropriative act as influenced, but not determined, by what appears warm and intimate, thereby finding some role for these feelings to do in the account of copersonality.

            Unfortunately, this way of finding something for the appropriative act to do in determining copersonality between Thoughts rests on a radically mistaken view of how first person indexical words work, wrongly assimilating them to selective indexical terms such as "this."[9] A use of "this" is indeed selective among objects, since if the user had chosen on that very occasion  of use to point in a different direction than he had in fact pointed, he would have pointed to a different object than he in fact did. Since a use of "I" cannot refer to anyone other than the user, it is not selective in this counter-factual manner. Similarly, a use of "now," pace James and Russell, does not select or choose some time from out of a group of other times that could have been denoted instead on that very occasion.

            A second, and more promising, way of finding useful employment for the appropriative act is supplied by Gerald E. Myers. Myers rightly sees James as holding that "the present self or act of thinking both finds and fashions the unity that causes us to think that we are the same person throughout successive experiences", and attempts a resolution of this seeming contradiction. (WJ 349. my italics) It should be obvious that any resolution must equivocate on "unity." Myers does not disappoint us.

James used appropriation as the name for the act by which the present self recognizes its continuity with its former selves, and what he said about appropriation seems both to find and to fashion unity. The present self appropriates what it literally finds as warm and belonging to itself, yet since it has the unifying feature of any act of thought (collecting various items into a single act of attention or consciousness), it actively contributes to the judgment in terms of which the recognition of the continuity between past and present self is expressed. (WJ 349)

            Myers's solution to the aporia involves a distinction between two types of "unity"--the copersonality unity of successive Thoughts that are connected by the relation of being warm and intimate to (or its grandfather relation) and the unity of the judgment formed by the present Thought that there is the former type of unity. The appropriative act creates the unity of the judgment but only discovers the warmth and intimacy based unity of successive Thoughts upon which the judgment is based. Furthermore, given James's lifelong rejection of abstract propositions, it could be added onto Myers's account that the appropriative act also creates, in addition to the judging, the proposition judged.

            While Myers's resolution of the aporia has some textual support, it trivializes the making role of the appropriative act. There is a third way of interpreting this act that accords well with James's making thesis in other areas of his philosophy and assigns it the far more exciting task of creating the copersonality unity itself, and not just the unity of the judgment or proposition judged. Taking seriously the oft-made remark that "It was all there, at least in germ, in The Principles of Psychology," an attempt will be made to understand the cryptic claim that the Thought "makes a unity that is actualized and anchored and does not merely float in the blue air of possibility" (321. My italics) by relating it to this attempt to resolve a making-discovering aporia nineteen years later in The Meaning of Truth:

A fact [of there being seven stars in the great dipper constellation] virtually pre-exists when every condition of its realization save one is already there. In this case the condition lacking is the act of the counting and comparing mind. But the stars (once the mind considers them) themselves dictate the result....We have here a quasi-paradox. Undeniably something comes by the counting that was not there before. And yet that something was always true. In one sense you create it, and in another sense you find it. You have to treat your count as being true beforehand, the moment you come to treat the matter at all. (MT 56)

            James's account bears a startling resemblance to Aristotle's claim in his Physics (Book IV, Chapter 10) that the act of measuring the duration of a succession of events makes time actual. Just as a succession of events is only potentially time and becomes so in actuality only when a mind counts or measures their duration, it is just potentially a fact or true that the great dipper constellation contains seven stars and becomes so in actuality only when a mind counts them. It can similarly be said, given James's claim in the quotation from The Principles of Psychology, that the copersonal unity is "actualized," ceasing to be a mere "possibility," only upon the making of the judgment by the present Thought, that a succession of Thoughts connected by the being warm and intimate to relation is only potentially a copersonal unity of successive Thoughts and becomes so in actuality only when a present Thought judges that they are a copersonal unity.

            Aristotle's account misfires because there could not be a succession of events (what he calls "the Before and After") unless there actually were time, and the worry is that James's parallel account of the making actual of a copersonal unity by the appropriative act of judgment fails for a similar reason. James, however, says some things in passing that could be marshaled to show that it at least is not a complete non-starter.

            These remarks concern the forensic aspect of Self identity over time, an aspect which James for the most part rightfully neglects, given that his analysis is a phenomenological one. He agrees with what he takes to be the dictates of the law and "common-sense" ( Locke!) that a man should not be punished for what he no longer remembers, because "he is not the same person forensically now which he was then." (352) It would be very much in the spirit of this (benighted) sentiment to hold that image-memory alone is not sufficient for forensic responsibility, the reason being that a person could have an image-memory of the Thought that accompanied his past transgression but not know, because he fails to judge or believe, that he is copersonal with the person who had that Thought. It is not enough that the present Self be potentially copersonal with the wrong-doing past Self, which is all that image-memory can achieve, it must actually be, and this requires it to judge or believe that it is. But this propositional-memory is nothing but James's appropriative act.

            It could be objected that even if propositional-memory is required for actual copersonality, it does not require that the propositional judgment or belief of copersonality be an appropriative act, meaning something done intentionally or at will. This raises the basic problem with the will-to-believe doctrine's assumption that we can voluntarily control our beliefs. At the end of the Chapter on "The Perception of Reality" James admits that we cannot voluntarily choose to have certain beliefs and gives a causal recipe for indirectly inducing them based on acting as if you believe them. What he does not realize is that it is only in rare cases that one can believe something at will. As a consequence of the rarity of appropriative acts, there rarely are, for James, cases of Self identity over time, certainly a reductio ad absurdum of his analysis. 

The First Versus Third Person Criteria Aporia           

            The problem, it will be recalled, was whether James's avowedly phenomenological analysis based solely on first person criteria is intended as an analysis of what Self identity over time really is, and, if it is, how third person criteria are relevant. The simplest answer is that he did not intend his analysis to be revelatory of what such identity is, since he was quite explicit that it was an exclusively introspective analysis that excluded third person criteria and gave the title of "The Sense of Personal Identity" to the section in which he developed it, thereby indicating that he had no concern with how third person criteria were relevant.[10] (314) The truth of the matter, however, is not this simple, since there are several good reasons to think that James took his analysis to be of Self identity over time as such and simply failed to follow through and come to grips with the way in which third person criteria are relevant.         

            The "inner" approach to understanding the nature of persons contrasts with the "outer" or objective approach that treats persons as what I will call, in a somewhat extended sense of the term, a "natural kind," meaning a type of object whose nature is to be determined through natural science. These contrasting approaches are at the foundation of the split in 20th Century philosophy between so-called Continental and analytical approaches. They also form the real basis of James's contrast between the tough- and tender-minded given in Pragmatism, in spite of their not appearing explicitly in his account. The traits listed under "The Tender-Minded," for the most part, are those that assure an unbifurcated world and are vouchsafed through the inner approach, as contrasted with those listed under "The Tough-Minded," which represent the natural scientist's temper of mind, with its natural kinds approach to understanding persons and their world.

            In the first place, there are several cases in which James took an introspective analysis of a given concept to be an analysis of the concept as such. In these cases he makes an inference from what we experience X to be--the experiential reason for calling something "X"--to both what we mean by "X" and what X really is. Five prominent examples of this derivation of semantic and metaphysical conclusions from an introspective analysis are his analyses of good, truth, matter, negation, and reality. In Chapter 1 James's attempt to define good in terms of the experiential conditions under which we take something to be good, namely when it satisfies a desire or demand, was expounded. James's claims in Pragmatism that "The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true" (37) and in The Meaning of Truth that truth is "what truth [is] known-as" (48) give further evidence of his proclivity to determine the nature of something on the basis of how we experience it, as does his oft-repeated endorsement of Berkeley's reductive analysis of material objects in terms of our experiential grounds for believing that they exist.

            These four cases, however, are not sufficiently probative in showing that James thought Self identity over time could be analyzed in terms of first person criteria alone, since third person criteria, having to do with things like the endurance of a body, also are experientially accessible, though not in as direct and immediate way as are our own conscious states. Even so, these experiences of bodies would not be the whole nor even a significant part of what we experience our own personal identity as and thereby our reasons for taking ourselves to endure over time.

            Of more moment are his analyses of negation and reality. From the analysis of the psychological grounds for a negative belief--"we never disbelieve something except for the reason that we believe something else which contradicts the first thing"--he draws a conclusion concerning the nature of the logical concept of negation--"Compare this [just mentioned] psychological fact with the corresponding logical truth that all negation rests on covert assertion of something else than the thing denied." (914) The most telling example is that of reality. He begins with the psychological question, "Under what circumstances do we think things real,? (917) to which his answer is that we do so when they “appear both interesting and important." (924) But from this psychological analysis he draws the semantic conclusion that "reality means simply relation to our emotional and active life" and that "this is only sense which the word ever has in the mouths of practical men." (924) For further details the reader is referred back to Section II of Chapter 7. 

            James's account of Self identity over time shows a similar inference of semantic and metaphysical conclusions from a psychological or introspective analysis. To start with, he asks "what the consciousness may mean when it calls the present self the same with one of the past selves which it has in mind." (316) He boasts that the introspective analyses given by himself and his Associationist predecessors, "have taken so much of the meaning of personal identity out of the clouds and made of the Self an empirical and verifiable thing." (319. My italics.) And a few pages later he makes the strong statement that "It is impossible to discover any verifiable features in personal identity which this sketch does not contain," which seems to render third person criteria otiose, given that his "sketch" is exclusively in terms of first person criteria. (322) These quotations still are not decisive, since it could be argued that his use of "mean" is short for "psychologically means," since it occurs within the scope of the sectional title, "The Sense of Personal Identity."

            What really nails down my case are the unrestricted endorsements of an exclusively introspective analysis given in publications subsequent to The Principles of Psychology, thereby escaping this scope problem. In the 1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience he praises Locke for analyzing "personal identity" in terms of "its cash-value," meaning what  it is "known as." (VRE 350) In his series of articles on Pure Experience published during 1904-5 he argued that no experiential datum is conscious or physical simpliciter but only in a relational manner. Placed in one kind of network of relationships to other experiential data it qualifies as physical but in a different kind of network as conscious. The latter kind of network is said to be that of the history of a single Self over time, which he explained as follows:

In the chapter on 'The Self,' in my Principles of Psychology, I explained the continuous identity of each personal consciousness as a name for the practical fact that new experiences come which look back on the old ones, find them 'warm,' and greet and appropriate them as 'mine.' (ERE 64. See also 39 and 270)

Herein he is asserting without qualification or restriction what constitutes the identity of the Self over time.

             I take it that some good reasons have just been advanced for taking James's analyses based exclusively on first person criteria as an analysis of Self identity over time as such. But, it will be objected, this cannot be the whole story. To be sure, James's introspective approach to understanding Self identity supports his anti-bifurcationism, since it gives an account of the Self in terms of what has importance for our emotions and active propensities, which, it will be recalled, formed the underlying leitmotiv of his analysis. The dramatic portrayal of personal endurance that it gives secures a central place for our values and aspirations, thus helping to prevent our world from becoming a bifurcated one devoid of human meaning. James, however, is not exclusively an "inside man," for he wrote The Principles of Psychology primarily for the purpose of establishing psychology as a natural science, and, toward that end, gave prominence to the "outside" based work (actually it was done indoors in a laboratory) of his German friends and colleagues, about whose exact scientific method he said that "it could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored." (192) There is a tension that runs throughout the book  between the outer and inner methodological approaches, or between his functional psychology and phenomenological psychology.[11] But, as has been already shown, there unquestionably are places in The Principles of Psychology where one of the approaches becomes dominant and is appealed to as being revelatory of the true nature of the phenomenon under investigation, and some good reasons have been advanced to show that he gave priority to the inner approach for revealing the true nature of personal identity.          

            A more serious objection is that there are strong materialistic undercurrents in The Principles of Psychology, in particular his reductive phenomenological analysis of our prized active inner Self, that Self of all the other Selves, which is the source of will and effort, to a collection of bodily sensations, primarily movements in the head. (287-8) Herein James seems to come close to Dewey's natural kinds view of a person, which speaks against his having exclusively first person criteria for Self identity over time. But surface appearances deceive here. First, James's reductive analysis is explicitly restricted Poo-bah style to phenomenal appearances, and, when he waxes metaphysical and moral in the Chapters on "Attention" and "Will," this active Self turns into something non-material that defies description and explanation by natural science, as was shown in Chapter 3. (424 and 1179-1182) It must be remembered that James is an arch relativist who always speaks qua some human perspective or interest. The apparent contradiction between his claim in The Principles of Psychology that "there is no neurosis without psychosis" (133. See also 18) and his account of the independence of consciousness from matter (his filtration theory of the brain) in his later writings, especially the lecture on Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections, The Varieties of Religious Experience and A Pluralistic Universe, vanishes once it is realized that the former claim is restricted to our perspective as natural scientists. Similar considerations hold for his comments about determinism. Qua scientist, we assume determinism, but, qua moral beings, we must reject it. This is in accord with his Poo-bahism, as seen in the previous chapter.

            What has been primarily overlooked by those, like Dewey, who have attributed a naturalistic or materialistic view of persons to James on the basis of his phenomenological reduction of the inner Self to a collection of bodily movements is that James nowhere bases Self identity over time on that of the body or even some core part thereof, such as the brain, that is causally responsible according to science for what is most important and distinctive about persons. He does not hold it to be even a necessary condition for such identity, as is attested to by his claim that "The same brain may subserve many conscious selves, either alternate or coexisting...." (379) If a person were identical with a living human body or brain, then they should have the same criteria of identity, but plainly they do not for James, otherwise he would have said so somewhere.

            But, it could still be objected, we must take seriously the quotations earlier in this chapter in which James alluded to the possibility of defeating an introspectively based claim of Self identity over time by appeal to third person criteria. He does not explicitly tell us what they are, but if we dig deeply enough we might find them, and they might very well involve a requirement of some sort of spatio-temporal continuity of a body, thereby showing that his phenomenological analysis is not the whole story about personal identity over time.

             The most likely place to look for these defeaters is in the "Memory" Chapter, the reason being that his introspective analysis based on the state of seeming to remember, i.e. judging a past Thought which appears warm and intimate to be yours, inevitably leads to the question of when such an apparent memory is veridical, and thus the apparent identity a real one. The hope is that we shall find in this Chapter some causal requirement for an apparent memory to be veridical that could serve as the sought for third person criteria by which a claim of personal endurance based on apparent memory could be challenged or defeated. That this Chapter is placed six chapters after that on "The Consciousness of Self" does not preclude it containing these defeaters, since James had some reason for placing it where he did in The Principles of Psychology, namely he might have wanted to contrast the account of immediate memory given in the chapter that immediately precedes it on "The Perception of Time" with its account of secondary memory of what has lapsed from consciousness. Nevertheless, that there is such a wide separation between the chapters should give us some pause.

            The plot of the "Memory" Chapter is the familiar one, in which an introspective analysis is given initially and then followed by an historical or causal one. The phenomenological analysis merely repeats the one given in the "The Consciousness of Self." For me to remember a past event I must have "directly experienced its occurrence. It must have that 'warmth and intimacy' which were so often spoken of in the chapter on the Self, as characterizing all experiences 'appropriated' by the thinker as his own." (612) The historical analysis of the causes of memory, in contrast, is a straightforward neurophysiological one.

Whatever accidental cue may turn this tendency [to recall] into an actuality, the permanent ground of the tendency itself lies in the organized neural paths by which the cue calls up the experience...the condition which makes it possible at all...is...the brain-paths which associate the experience with the occasion and cue of recall." (616)

Retention "is no mysterious storing up of an 'idea' in an unconscious state." It is "a morphological feature, the presence of these 'paths'...in the finest recesses of the brain's tissue." (617)

                The big question, which James makes no attempt to answer, is how the phenomenological and causal accounts of memory are connected, this being just a special instance of his general failure to connect together the "inner" and "outer" approaches of The Principles of Psychology, which is one of the big unresolved aporias in his philosophy. James now has before him everything that is needed for placing a causal requirement on memory. BUT HE DOESN'T. Were he to opt for making the neurophysiological causes of memory necessary for memory, his memory theory of personal endurance would in effect be treating persons as natural kinds in the manner of contemporary memory theorists, such as Shoemaker and Perry, the reason being that he would be giving natural science the prerogative of determining the identity conditions and thereby the nature of persons. BUT HE DOESN'T!

                Based on what James both says and fails to say when the opportunity presents itself, his criteria for memory are, as they are for Locke and Quinton, of a coherentist sort, subject to the lone defeater requiring that there be no other equally good or better claimant under these coherentist criteria, which is my construal of his remark that The present Thought veridically appropriates a past one "so long as no other owner appropriates it in a more real way." (341) The role of this defeater is to save the transitivity of identity in the case in which coexistent persons are equally good claimants under these criteria for having memories of the same past Thought. The Mayor of Queensbury's apparent memories of the Thoughts of Socrates are veridical, and thereby he is identical with Socrates, just in case his apparent memory corresponds with the past and properly coheres with a sufficiently rich set of other historically accurate apparent memories he has of Socrates’ past, and there does not exist at that time anyone who qualifies at least as well under this memory-coherence account to have memories of Socrates.[12] James, with his life-long passion to investigate paranormal phenomena, is the last person to balk at the possibility of such a case of reincarnation.

                It might be asked whether James can find some role, however diminished, for a defeater based on the causal requirement supplied by the neurophysiological analysis of memory. Hopefully, it has been made clear why James could not accept this caused-in-the-right-way criterion as either sufficient or necessary for personal endurance, and thus for the veridicality of the sort of phenomenal or apparent memories that he takes to be both sufficient and necessary for such endurance. What he could say is that it is a very weak defeater in that an apparent memory's failure to satisfy it merely lessens the probability that it is veridical, though not necessarily so that it is less than one-half. James never told us what he believed in this matter, and, given that he is dead, if we are to find out, we'll have to do so by coming upon him or one of his free floating "Thoughts" in the mother-sea of consciousness which envelopes our ordinary finite minds. This is my way of saying that we'll never find out.