orstellung_) of the ego, therefore, can never be
actually brought to completion. (The assumption of the freedom of the will
leads to an analogous _regressus in infinitum_, in which the question,
"Willst thou thy volition?" "Willst thou the willing of this volition"? is
repeated to infinity.) The only escape from this tissue of absurdities
is to think the ego otherwise than is done by popular consciousness. The
knowing and the known ego are by no means the same, but the observing
subject in self-consciousness is one group of representations, the observed
subject another. Thus, for example, newly formed representations are
apperceived by the existing older ones, but the highest apperceiver is not,
in turn, itself apperceived. The ego is not a unit being, which represents
itself in the literal meaning of the phrase, but that which is represented
is a plurality. The ego is the junction of numberless series of
representations, and is constantly changing its place; it dwells now in
this representation, now in that. But as we distinguish the point of
meeting from the series which meet there, and imagine that it is possible
simultaneously to abstract from all the represented series (whereas in fact
we can only abstract from each one separately), there arises the appearance
of a permanent ego as the unit subject of all our representations. In
reality the ego is not the source of our representations, but the final
result of their combination. The representation, not the ego, is the
fundamental concept of psychology, the ego constituting rather its most
difficult problem.[1] It is a "result of other representations, which,
however, in order to yield this result, must be together in a single
substance, and must interpenetrate one another" (_Text-book of
Introduction_, p. 243). In this way Herbart defends the substantiality
of the soul against Kant and Fries. The soul's immortality (as also its
pre-existence) goes without saying, because of the non-temporal character
of the real.

[Footnote 1: On the Herbartian psychology, cf. Ribot, _German Psychology of
To-day_, English Translation by Baldwin, 1886, pp. 24-67; and G.F. Stout,
_Mind_, vols. xiii.-xiv.--TR.]

The soul is one of these reals which, unchangeable in themselves, enter
into various relations with others, and conserve themselves against the
latter. In its simple _what_ as unknowable as the rest, it is yet familiar
to us in its self-conservations. In the absence of a more f