Have you heard the old joke about oxford University? An
American visitor asks a student to show him the famous
and ancient University of oxford. the student takes him to
the Bodleian Library and the sheldonian theatre, to Brase-
nose College, Christ Church, and Lady margaret Hall, to the
Department of experimental Psychology and the grand
examination schools; he shows him magdalen Bridge and
students punting on the Cherwell. At the end of his exten-
sive tour, the visitor says, ‘But where is the university?’
(Ryle, 1949, p. 16).
Do clubs exist? of course. Do collegiate universities exist?
of course. But neither is something more than, or addi-
tional to, the events, people, actions, buildings, or objects
that make it up. neither is an entity that can be found.
According to bundle theory, the self is like this.rest, an ‘active element’ that receives the sensations
and perceptions of the stream of consciousness, and
is the source of effort, will, and attention (Chapter 7).
It is something like a junction at which sensory ideas
terminate and from which motor ideas proceed. He
could hardly have described the audience in the Car-
tesian Theatre better.
But strangely enough, for James this audience is
still only part of the ‘me’, not the ‘I’. The ‘I’ lies beyond
all this: it is the subjective knowing thought, or
pure ego, the self that I care about, the felt nucleus
of my experience. This is ‘the most puzzling puzzle
with which psychology has to deal’ (1890, i, p. 330).
He describes the two main ways of dealing with
it in a way that should by now seem thoroughly
familiar to us:
Some would say that it is a simple active
substance, the soul, of which they are thus
conscious; others, that it is nothing but a fiction,
the imaginary being denoted by the pronoun I;
and between these extremes of opinion all sorts of intermediaries would
be found.
(p. 298)James criticises both. The ‘soul theory’, he says, explains nothing, guarantees
nothing, and lacks any positive account of what the soul may be. He rejects Plato
and Aristotle’s substantialist views, Descartes’s dualism, and Locke’s association-
ist theory. As for Kant’s theory, the transcendental ego is just a ‘cheap and nasty’
edition of the soul, he says, and inventing an ego does not explain the feeling of
the unity of consciousness: ‘the Egoists themselves, let them say what they will,
believe in the bundle, and in their own system merely tie it up, with their special
transcendental string, invented for that use alone’ (p. 370). Perhaps he means that
believing wholeheartedly in bundles is so frightening that the ego string gets
invented to conceal them.
At the other extreme, says James, those who side with the Humeans, claiming
that the stream of thought is all there is, run against the entire common sense of
mankind which insists on a real ‘owner’, a spiritual entity of some kind, or a real
proprietor to hold the selves together. This ‘holding together’, concludes James, is
what needs explaining.
How does James escape from inventing a real proprietor or a special string of his
own? His well-known adage is that ‘thought is itself the thinker, and psychology
need not look beyond’ (1890, i, p. 401). ‘The phenomena are enough, the passing
Thought itself is the only verifiable thinker, and its empirical connection with the
brain-process is the ultimate known law’ (p. 346). What he means is this. At any
moment, there is a passing thought (he calls this special thought the Thought)
that incessantly remembers previous thoughts and appropriates some of them
to itself. In this way, what holds the thoughts together is not a separate spirit
‘thought is itself the
thinker’(James, 1890, i, p. 401)