DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

504:1 Though not inclined toward the vitalistic view of human evolution, M. Th. Ribot very closely approaches the Celtic view of the Ego (or p. 505 individuality) as being the principle which gives unity to different personalities, but he does not have in mind personalities in the sense implied by the Celtic Esoteric Doctrine of Re-birth : — ‘The Ego subjectively considered consists of a sum of conscious states’ (comparable to personalities).

‘In brief, the Ego may be considered in two ways: either in its actual form, and then it is the sum of existing conscious states; or, in its continuity with the past, and then it is formed by the memory according to the process outlined above. It would seem, according to this view, that the identity of the Ego depended entirely upon the memory. But such a conception is only partial. Beneath the unstable compound phenomenon in all its protean phases of growth, degeneration, and reproduction, there is a something that remains: and this something is the undefined consciousness, the product of all the vital processes, constituting bodily perception and what is expressed in one word — the cÅ“næthesis.’ (The Diseases of Memory, pp. 107-8).

William James, the greatest psychologist of our epoch, after a long and faithful life consecrated to the search after a true understanding of human consciousness, finally arrived at substantially the same conviction as Fechner did, that there is no personal immortality, but that the personality is but a temporary and partial separation and circumscription of a part of a larger whole, into which it is reabsorbed at death’ (W. McDougall, In Memory of William James, in Proc. S. P. R., Part LXII, vol. xxv, p. 28). He thus virtually accepted the mystic’s view that the personality after the death of the body is absorbed into a higher power, which, to our mind, is comparable with the Ego conceived as the unifying principle behind personalities. In one of his last writings, James explained his belief in such a manner as to make it coincide at certain points with the view held by modern Celtic mystics which has been presented above; the difference being that, unlike these mystics, James was not prepared to say (though he raised the question) whether or not behind the ‘mother-sea’ of consciousness there is, as Fechner believed, a hierarchy of consciousnesses (themselves subordinate to still higher consciousnesses, and comparable with so many Egos or Individualities) which send out emanations as temporary human personalities. The organic psychical forms (if we may use such an expression) of such temporary human personalities would have to be regarded from James’s point of view as being built up out of the psychical elements constituting the ‘mother-sea’ of consciousness, just as the human body is built up out of the physical elements in the realm of matter : —

‘Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves, and Conanicut and Newport hear each other’s foghorns. But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality’ (used as synonymous with personality and not in our distinct sense) ‘builds but accidental fences, and into which p. 506 our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir. Our “normal” consciousness’ (the personality as we distinguish it from the Ego or individuality) ‘is circumscribed for adaptation to our external earthly environment, but the fence is weak in spots, and fitful influences from beyond break in, showing the otherwise unverifiable common connexion. Not only psychic research, but metaphysical philosophy and speculative biology are led in their own ways to look with favour on some such “pan-psychic” view of the universe as this.’ (W. James, The Confidences of a Psychical Researcher, in The American Magazine, October 1909). Again, James wrote : — ‘The drift of all the evidence we have seems to me to sweep us very strongly towards the belief in some form of superhuman life with which we may, unknown to ourselves, be co-conscious.’ (A Pluralistic Universe, New York, 1909, p. 309.)

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