and from the ground of an admitted plurality of souls.
If then, beginning from within, I take my whole given experience at any one moment, and if I regard a single “this-now,” as it comes in feeling and is “mine,”—may I suppose that in this I have found my true soul? Clearly not so, for (to go no farther) such existence is too fleeting. My soul (I should reply) is not merely the something of one moment, but it must endure for a time and must preserve its self-sameness. I do not mean that it must itself be self-conscious of identity, for that assertion would carry us too far on the other side. And as to the amount of continuity and of self-same character which is wanted, I am saying nothing here. I shall touch later on both these questions, so far as is necessary, and for the present will confine myself to the general result. The existence of a soul must endure through more than one presentation; and hence experience, if immediate and given and not transcending the moment, is less than my soul.
But if, still keeping to “experience,” we take it in another sense, we none the less are thwarted. For experience now is as much too wide as before it was too narrow. The whole contents of my experience—it makes no difference here whether I myself or another person considers them—cannot possibly be my soul, unless my soul is to be as large as the total Universe. For other bodies and souls, and God himself, are (so far as I know them) all states of my mind, and in this sense make part of my particular being. And we are led at once to the distinction, which we noticed before (Chapter xxi.), between the diverse aspects of content and of psychical existence. Our experience in short is, essentially and very largely, ideal. It shows an ideal process which, beginning from the unity of feeling, produces the differences of self and not-self, and separates the divisions of the world from themselves
