nally to the following astonishing result. Sensations are divided
into two classes; each has seven main characteristics which distinguish
it from the other. One of these classes make up the subject, that which
I mean when I use the words I myself; the other the object or that
which is not I. But there is absolutely nothing to determine which is
which, which class is the subject and which is the object, which is I
myself, and which is not I myself. Vividness and faintness plainly have
nothing in them by which we can assign the one to that which is I, the
other to that which is not I. If we were to conjecture, we should be
disposed to say that surely the most vivid sensations must be the
nearest and therefore must be part of that which is I; but we find it is
quite the other way. The faint sensations are characteristic of that
which is I, and the vivid of that which is not I. And the same remark
applies to each pair of characteristics in succession. The fact is that
Mr. Spencer has omitted what is essential to complete his argument; he
has not shown, nor endeavoured to show, nor even thought of showing, how
out of his seven characteristics of the subject the conception of a
subject has grown. It is quite plain that he not only makes his classes
first and finds his characteristics afterwards, which we may admit to
have been inevitable; but he fails altogether to show how that by which
we know the classes apart has grown out of the characteristics that he
has given us. The characteristics which he assigns to that which is I,
all added together, do not in the slightest degree account for that
sense of permanent existence in spite of changes which lies at the root
of my distinction of myself from other things. The very word same, in
the sense in which I use it when speaking of myself, cannot be defined
except by reference to my own sameness with myself. It is a simple idea
incapable of analysis, and is indeed, as was pointed out in my last
Lecture, the root of the character of permanence which we assign to
things external. To say that this conception has been evolved from the
characteristics that Mr. Spencer has enumerated is like saying that a
cat has been evolved without any intermediate stages from a fish, or a
smell from a colour.

But, if we now go a step further, and ask in what form this personal
identity presents itself in the world of phenomena, the answer is clear:
our personality while bound up with all our other fa