nted, if it possess the gift of speech, in
declaring, in words even more emphatic than those of Descartes, 'I
_myself_ am'? And how, if these questions do not admit of reply, can
Professor Huxley be warranted in declaring self and non-self to be mere
'hypotheses by which we account for the facts of consciousness,' and
adding that of their existence we 'neither have, nor by any possibility
can have' the same 'unquestionable and immediate certainty as we have of
the states of consciousness which we consider to be their effects'?
Surely the existence of self is one of the most direct and immediate
subjects of consciousness; yet it does not depend for evidence on
consciousness alone, but is as unanswerably demonstrable as that two
straight lines cannot enclose space or that parallel lines cannot meet,
or as any other mathematical negation. No ratiocinative deduction can be
more incontestable than that, since _I_ have thoughts, there must be an
_I_ to have them.

Whoever thus assures himself of the existence of self obtains
simultaneously equal assurance of the existence of non-self; for feeling
that his conscious self is not boundless, but is confined within limits,
he cannot doubt that beyond those limits there must be space, and,
receiving continual sensations from without, he perceives that there
are, in external space, potentialities of imparting sensations. Thus, I
repeat, Descartes in laying down the first principles of his philosophy
created an intellectual basis for the external universe. Unfortunately,
however, instead of proceeding to place its proper superstructure on the
foundation thus laid, he wilfully stepped aside from what he had just
pronounced the only firm ground in existence, and undertook to raise a
rival edifice on part of the formless void beyond. Deeply struck by the
grand discoveries of his illustrious contemporaries, Galileo and Harvey,
and thence discovering for himself that the phenomena of remotest worlds
and also the involuntary phenomena of our own bodily frames take place
in accordance with forces of uniform operation, he leaped suddenly to
the conclusion that those forces are purely mechanical. The circulation
of the blood, he says, 'is as much the necessary result of the structure
of the parts one can see in the heart, and of the heat which one may
feel there, and of the nature of the blood which may be experimentally
ascertained, as is the motion of a clock the result of the force,
situat