What is this “centre of apperception” that is superior to time and change?
It can be nothing less than what raises man above himself (as a part of the world of sense) which joins him to an order of things that only the reason can grasp, and that puts the whole world of sense at his feet. It is nothing else than personality.
The most sublime book in the world, the “Criticism of Practical Reason,” has referred morality to an intelligent ego, distinct from all empirical consciousness. I must now turn to that side of my subject.
David Hume is well known to have abolished the conception of the ego by seeing in it only a bundle of different perceptions in continual ebb and flow. However completely Hume thought himself to have compromised the ego, at least he explained his view relatively moderately. He proposed to say nothing about a few metaphysicians who appeared to rejoice in another kind of ego; for himself he was quite certain that he had none, and he dared to suppose that the majority of mankind, leaving the few peculiar metaphysicians out of the question, were, like himself, mere bundles. So the polite man expressed himself. In the next chapter I shall show how his irony recoils on himself. That his view became so famous depends partly on the over-estimation in which Hume is held and which is largely due to Kant. Hume was a most distinguished empirical psychologist, but he cannot be regarded as a genius, the popular view notwithstanding. It is not very much to be the first of English philosophers, but Hume has not even a claim to that position. I do not think that Kant would have given so much praise to Hume if he had been fully acquainted with all Hume’s work and not merely with the “Enquiry,” as he certainly rejected the position of Spinoza, according to which men were not “substances,” but merely accidents.
Lichtenberg, who took the field against the ego later than Hume, was still bolder. He is the philosopher of impersonality, and calmly corrects the conversational “I think” into an actual “it thinks”; he regards the ego as a creation of the grammarian. In this Hume had anticipated him, inasmuch as he also had declared, at the end of his analysis, all disputes as to the identity of the person to be merely a battle of words.