ABSTRACT

David Hume presents two versions of his arguments against the existence, within experience, of anything that is a “self” or personal identity. Philosophers of various stripes were telling that the identity of the mind resolves the plurality of different perceptions into a unity. The psychic forces of the higher activities, of which the self is formed, are often invisible as such, but they are certainly operative everywhere. The refusal of unnoticed sensations and of unconscious judgments, which was a logical consequence of the acceptance of falsificationism, eliminated this realm of “subjective” but unobservable operations. In their place had to go observable factors with potentially observable consequences, actual features of experience that have effects on other actual features of experience. The existence of objects phenomenally independent of the act of observation is thus no stranger than the existence of undeformed objects behind a veil of water in movement.