sensorial a representation of consciousness is very unfaithful; for our biography does not represent what we have called acts of consciousness, but a large slice of our past experience—that is to say, a synthesis of bygone sensations and images, a synthesis of objects of consciousness; therefore a complete confusion between the acts of consciousness and their objects. The formation of the personality seems to me to have, above all, a legal and social importance.[1] It is a peculiar grouping of states of consciousness imposed by our relations with other individuals. But, metaphysically, the subject thus understood is not distinguished from the object, and there is nothing to add to our distinction between the object and the act of consciousness.
Those who defend the existence of the subject point out that this subject properly constitutes the Ego, and that the distinction of the subject and the object corresponds to the distinction of the Ego and non-Ego, and furnishes the separa-
- ↑ The preceding ten lines in the text I wrote after reading a recent article of William James, who wishes to show that the consciousness does not exist, but results simply from the relation or the opposition raised between one part of our experience (the actual experience, for instance, in the example of the perception of an object) and another part, the remembrance of our person. But the argument of James goes too far; he is right in contesting the relation subject-object, but not in contesting the existence of the consciousness (William James: “Does consciousness exist?” in J. of Philosophy, &c., Sept. 1904).
