ABSTRACT
But we are tempted to overlook the relevance of such criteria by the fact that we do not actually have to employ them when we use the word "I" in ascribing current or remembered experiences to ourselves. (When I am in pain, for example, I do not have to look and see that it is I who am in pain.) Thus we are tempted to think that we have knowledge of a continuing, identical subject, as such, knowledge which is independent of any empirical criteria of identity. We try, as it were, to abstract the force of "I" from the background of empirical criteria which give it its power of referring to a continuing subject and yet still view it as possessing that power. But if we do perform this abstraction, there is nothing for the word to express except consciousness in general, or the general conditions of the possibility of experience. Thus we confound the unity of experience with the experience of unity; and thus there arises the illusion of knowledge of the soul as a persisting immaterial thing. But it is only an illusion; and if we succumb to it, we are powerless to defend such a view of the soul against rival and less flattering theories, since no empirical means of decision between them is available. Kant adds that it is essential to his own critical philosophy to demonstrate the emptiness of any such claim to knowledge; for if it were allowable, then our knowledge must have transcended the realm of experience and entered that of things as they are in themselves.
