and found not a shred of evidence for its existence. He affirmed
that whenever he looked into his mind he came across a sensation,
an image or a feeling, but not the self to which they are supposed to
belong. The mind, according to him, is merely a succession of ideas
which are related to each other externally by virtue of existing in the
same or successive states of consciousness. Being a thoroughgoing
empiricist, he could not accept an idea which did not correspond to
an actual fact of consciousness. He believed that orderliness and
coherence in the contents of the mind could be fully explained in
terms of the principles of association. Thereafter, the English
empirical thinkers dispensed with the concept of self altogether.
Kant agreed that the self or ego was not a fact of experience.
Nevertheless, he believed in a transcendental ego which was the
ground of experience. The idealistic philosophers, therefore,
continued to speculate about the transcendental self and its relation
to experience.
The psychologists, with their naturalistic outlook, found the
concept of a transcendental self as of no use to them. They
confined themselves to the study of the facts of experience.
However, as they found that the contents of the mind were not
disconnected but centred round an āIā or ego, they developed the
concept of the empirical self. They set themselves to solve the
problems of the emergence of the empirical self and the changes it
undergoes in the course of mental development. However, as
psychology attained the status of a full-fledged science, even the
concept of an empirical self was discarded as being associated with
ideas of permanence and stability.
In modern psychology the concept of personality has
supplanted the older concept of self. The psychologist now studies
the origin of personality and the process of its development as well
as the process of its disintegration in abnormal cases. Personality is
conceived not as an entity but as the form or pattern which the raw
material of the mind assumes when it is organised. The organisation
of the instinctive urges, tendencies and capacities which constitute
the biological equipment of the individual proceeds apace during
the formative years of life. According to the view which is most
widely held, the ground plan of personality is laid during the first
five years of life. Two factors, the physiological and the social,
Islam: A Challenge to Religion 52