ore remains when we
abstract from all other objective judgments. It is an assertion involved
in the very process by which we dismiss all other assertions. Have we
not then a right to regard it as a primitive unity of thought and being,
in which is contained, or out of which may be developed, the very
definition of truth?

Difficulties of the "cogito, ergo sum."

The sense in which Descartes understood his first principle becomes
clearer when we look at his answers to the objections made against it.
On the one hand it was challenged by those who asked, like Gassendi,
why the argument should be based especially on thought, and why we
might not say with as good a right, _ambulo, ergo sum_: "I walk,
therefore I am." Descartes explains that it is only as referred to
consciousness that walking is an evidence of my existence; but if I
say, "I am conscious of walking, therefore I exist," this is
equivalent to saying, "I think in one particular way, therefore I
exist." But it is not thinking in a particular way, but thinking in
general that is coextensive with my existence. I am not always
conscious of walking or of any other special state or object, but I am
always conscious, for except in consciousness there is no ego or self,
and where there is consciousness there is always an ego. "Do I then
always think, even in sleep?" asks the objector; and Descartes exposes
himself to the criticisms of Locke, by maintaining that it is
impossible that there should ever be an interval in the activity of
consciousness, and by insisting that as man is essentially a thinking
substance, the child thinks, or is self-conscious, even in its
mother's womb. The difficulty disappears when we observe that the
question as to the conditions under which self-consciousness is
developed in the individual human subject does not affect the nature
of self-consciousness in itself or in its relation to knowledge. The
force of Descartes's argument really lies in this, that the world as
an intelligible world exists only for a conscious self, and that
therefore the unity of thought and being in self-consciousness is
presupposed in all knowledge. Of this self it is true to say that it
exists only as it thinks, and that it thinks always. _Cogito, ergo
sum_ is, as Descartes points out, not a syllogism, but the expression
of an identity which is discerned by the simple intuition of the
mind.[2] If