the question, “Willst thou thy volition?” “Willst thou the willing of this volition”? is repeated to infinity.) The only escape from this tissue of absurdities is to think the ego otherwise than is done by popular consciousness.  The knowing and the known ego are by no means the same, but the observing subject in self-consciousness is one group of representations, the observed subject another.  Thus, for example, newly formed representations are apperceived by the existing older ones, but the highest apperceiver is not, in turn, itself apperceived.  The ego is not a unit being, which represents itself in the literal meaning of the phrase, but that which is represented is a plurality.  The ego is the junction of numberless series of representations, and is constantly changing its place; it dwells now in this representation, now in that.  But as we distinguish the point of meeting from the series which meet there, and imagine that it is possible simultaneously to abstract from all the represented series (whereas in fact we can only abstract from each one separately), there arises the appearance of a permanent ego as the unit subject of all our representations.  In reality the ego is not the source of our representations, but the final result of their combination.  The representation, not the ego, is the fundamental concept of psychology, the ego constituting rather its most difficult problem.[1] It is a “result of other representations, which, however, in order to yield this result, must be together in a single substance, and must interpenetrate one another” (Text-book of Introduction, p. 243).  In this way Herbart defends the substantiality of the soul against Kant and Fries.  The soul’s immortality (as also its pre-existence) goes without saying, because of the non-temporal character of the real.

[Footnote 1:  On the Herbartian psychology, cf.  Ribot, German Psychology of To-day, English Translation by Baldwin, 1886, pp. 24-67; and G.F.  Stout, Mind, vols. xiii.-xiv.—­TR.]

The soul is one of these reals which, unchangeable in themselves, enter into various relations with others, and conserve themselves against the latter.  In its simple what as unknowable as the rest, it is yet familiar to us in its self-conservations.  In the absence of a more fitting expression for the totality of psychical phenomena we call these representations, the phenomenal manifoldness of which is due to the variety of the disturbances and exists for the observer alone.  In itself, without a plurality of dispositions and impulses, the soul is originally not a representative force, but first becomes such under certain circumstances, viz., when it is stimulated to self-conservation by other beings.  The sum of the reals which stand in immediate relation to the soul is called its body; this, an aggregate of simple beings, furnishes the intermediate link of causal relation between the soul and the external world.  The soul has its (movable) seat in the brain.  In opposition to the physiological treatment of psychology, Herbart remarks that psychology throws much more light on physiology than she can ever receive from it.