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Laing. That though Smith may mistake every one of these, yet the term "I" necessarily and invariably means the same for him, the one central, constant unity to which every non-ego is opposed. And this from a man who elsewhere claims an easy familiarity with Kant. "Again what can be said of love and hate if under given circumstances they can be transformed into one another by a magnet?"
The original synthesis, moreover, prescribes a division of the inquiry into two parts, one theoretical and the other practical. For it contains the following principles: The ego posits itself as limited by the non-ego it functions cognitively; and: The ego posits itself as determining the non-ego it functions volitionally and actively.
Or you may have it that everything is itself in respect of the pleasure or pain it is feeling, but not itself in respect of the using of itself by itself as a tool with which to work its will. Or perhaps we should say that the ego remains always ego in part; it does not become all non-ego at one and the same time.
When it is said, in the jargon of the modern German philosophy, that "the Ego has no immediate consciousness of the Non-Ego as existing, but that the Non-Ego is only represented to us in a modification of the self-conscious Ego, and is, in fact, only a phenomenon of the Ego," a plain, practical Englishman, little tolerant of these subtle distinctions, might be ready, if not deterred by the mere sound of the words, to test them by a particular example.
Hence it would appear that the conception of the difference between the Ego and the non-Ego could not be attained by a man thus situated. His feelings would be his universe, and his tactile sensations his "moenia mundi." Time would exist for him as for us, but space would have only two dimensions.
He now admitted what, if he had not denied, he had overlooked before, an essential reality as the substratum both of the Ego and Non-ego; a reality of which all things, whether within or without, are only so many "modes" or manifestations. And it is at this point that his subjective Idealism passes into Pantheism, and that we mark the close affinity between his speculations and those of Spinoza.
The all-powerfulness of the surroundings is declared by them to be as completely an illusion, if examined closely, as the power of the individual was declared to be by their opponents, inasmuch as the antecedents of the non-ego, when examined by them, prove to be not less due to the personal individual element everywhere recognisable, than the ego, when examined by their opponents, proved to be mergeable in the universal.
Indeed, a metaphysical fowl, brooding over the mental operations of his fully-fledged consciousness, might appeal to the fact as proof that, in the very first action of his life, he assumed the existence of the Ego and the non-Ego, and of a relation between the two.
The Non-Ego lies on the other side of a yawning chasm, if, indeed, there is anything on the other side, which is doubtful. The Ego becomes the centre of the Universe, and God, who comes under the Non-Ego, lies somewhere on the circumference, and is only yielded to us as the product of our moral instinct.
Augustine to the twelfth century, and as little conclusive as any other assumption of the Ego or the Non-Ego. The schools argued, according to their tastes, from unity to multiplicity, or from multiplicity to unity; but what they wanted was to connect the two. They tried realism and found that it led to pantheism. They tried nominalism and found that it ended in materialism.
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