Note (return) — Chapter VI

Still less does the phrase "a permanent possibility of feelings" exhaust all our conception of a personal self. Recurring to the experiences of yesterday, I remember the feelings I experienced on beholding the sun, and also on pressing against the closed door, and I confidently expect the recurrence, under the same circumstances, of the same feelings. Does the belief in "a permanent possibility of feelings" explain the act of memory by which I recall the past event, and the act of prevision by which I anticipate the recurrence of the like experience in the future? Who or what is the "I" that remembers and the "I" that anticipates? The "ego," the personal mind, is, according to Mill, a mere "series of feelings," or, more correctly, a flash of "present feelings" on "a background of possibilities of present feelings." 240 If, then, there be no permanent substance or reality which is the subject of the present feeling, which receives and retains the impress of the past feeling, and which anticipates the recurrence of like feelings in the future, how can the past be recalled, how distinguished from the present? and how, without a knowledge of the past as distinguished from the present, can the future be forecast? Mr. Mill feels the pressure of this difficulty, and frankly acknowledges it. He admits that, on the hypothesis that mind is simply "a series of feelings," the phenomena of memory and expectation are "inexplicable" and "incomprehensible." 241 He is, therefore, under the necessity of completing his definition of mind by adding that it is a series of feelings which "is aware of itself as a series;" and, still further, of supplementing this definition by the conjecture that "something which has ceased to exist, or is not yet in existence, can still, in a manner, be present." 242 Now he who can understand how a series of feelings can flow on in time, and from moment to moment drop out of the present into non-existence, and yet be present and conscious of itself as a series, may be accorded the honor of understanding Mr. Mill's definition of mind or self, and may be permitted to rank himself as a distinguished disciple of the Idealist school; for ourselves, we acknowledge we are destitute of the capacity to do the one, and of all ambition to be the other. And he who can conceive how the past feeling of yesterday and the possible feeling of to-morrow can be in any manner present to-day; or, in other words, how any thing which has ceased to exist, or which never had an existence, can now exist, may be permitted to believe that a thing can be and not be at the same moment, that a part is greater than the whole, and that two and two make five; but we are not ashamed to confess our inability to believe a contradiction. To our understanding, "possibilities of feeling" are not actualities. They may or may not be realized, and until realized in consciousness, they have no real being. If there be no other background of mental phenomena save mere "possibilities of feeling," then present feelings are the only existences, the only reality, and a loss of immediate consciousness, as in narcosis and coma, is the loss of all personality, all self-hood, and of all real being.