The other--or logical Ego--the mere identity of subject and object,--when taken in its utter abstractness and simplicity, shrivels up to something very small indeed--to a something which is little better than nothing. The mere _I_ which is not contra-distinguished by a _Thou_ and a _He_--which is without all definiteness of predication (the I=I of Fichte and Schelling)--is only as it were a point of being cut off from all its connexions in reality, and treated as if it were or could be entirely independent. It is an identity in which subject and object have not yet appeared: it is not a real I, though we may still retain the name. It is--as Hegel's _Logic_ will tell us--exactly definable as Being, which is as yet Nothing: the impossible edge of abstraction on which we try--and in vain--to steady ourselves at the initial point of thought. And to reach or stand at that intangible, ungraspable point, which slips away as we approach, and transmutes itself as we hold it, is not the natural beginning, but the result of introspection and reflection on the concrete self. But with this aspect of the question we are not now concerned.
That the unity of the Self as an intelligent and moral being, that the Ego of self-consciousness was an ideal and a product of development, was what Herbart soon became convinced of. The unity of Self is even as given in mature experience an imperfect fact. It is a fact, that is, which does not come up to what it promised, and which requires to be supplemented, or philosophically justified. Here and everywhere the custom of life carries us over gaps which yawn deep to the eye of philosophic reflection: even though accident and illness force them not unfrequently even upon the blindest. To trace the process of unification towards this unity--to trace, if you like, even the formation of the concept of such unity, as a governing and guiding principle in life and conduct, comes to be the problem of the psychologist, in the largest sense of that problem. From Soul (_Seele_) to Mind or Spirit (_Geist_) is for Herbart, as for Hegel, the course of psychology(27). The growth and development of mind, the formation of a self, the realisation of a personality, is for both the theme which psychology has to expound. And Herbart, not less than Hegel, had to bear the censure that such a conception of mental reality as a growth would destroy personality(28).