article shows how persistently his mind must have dwelt upon the problems connected with the notion of the self as a synthetic activity in experience.

The immediate occasion for the article on the Self was the appearance of Professor Andrew Seth's work, Hegelianism and Personality (1889). Dewey appears to have been influenced by Seth at an even earlier period,[39] and he now found the lectures on Hegel stimulating in connection with his own problems about thought and reality.

It will not be necessary to go into the details of Dewey's criticism of the three ideas of the self presented by Seth. Since it is Dewey's own position that is in question, it is better to begin with his account of the historical origin of these definitions, "chiefly as found in Kant, incidentally in Hegel as related to Kant."[40] Dewey turns to the 'Transcendental Deduction,' and follows Kant's description of the synthetic unity of apperception. "Its gist," he says, "in the second edition of the K.d.r.V., is the proof that the identity of self-consciousness involves the synthesis of the manifold of feelings through rules or principles which render this manifold objective, and that, therefore, the analytic identity of self-consciousness involves an objective synthetic unity of consciousness."[41] To say that self-consciousness is identical is a merely analytical proposition, and, as it stands, unfruitful. "But if we ask how we know this sameness or identity of consciousness, the barren principle becomes wonderfully fruitful."[42] In order to know reality as mine, not only must the consciousness that it is mine accompany each particular impression, but each must be known as an element in one consciousness. "The sole way of accounting for this analytic identity of consciousness is through the activity of consciousness in connecting or 'putting together' the manifold of sense."[43]

In the 'Deduction' of the first Critique, Dewey continues, Kant begins with the consciousness of objects, rather than with the identity of self-consciousness. Here also consciousness implies a unity, which is not merely formal, but one which actually connects the manifold of sense by an act. "Whether, then, we inquire what is involved in mere sameness of consciousness, or what is involved in an objective world, we get the same answer: a consciousness which is not formal or analytic, but which is synthetic of sense, and which acts universally (according to principles) in this synthesis."[44]

The term 'Self,' as thus employed by Kant, Dewey says, is the correlative of the intelligible world. "It is the transcendental self looked at as 'there,' as a product, instead of as an activity or process."[45] This, however, by no means exhausts what Kant means by the self, for while he proceeds in the 'Deduction' as if the manifold of sense and the synthetic unity of the self were strictly correlative, he assumes a different attitude elsewhere. The manifold of sense is something in relation to the thing-in-itself, and the forms of thought have a reference beyond their mere application to the manifold. In the other connections the self appears as something purely formal; something apart from its manifestation in experience. In view of the wider meaning of the self, Dewey asks, "Can the result of the transcendental deduction stand without further interpretation?" It would appear that the content of the self is not the same as the content of the known world. The self is too great to exhaust itself in relation to sensation. "Sense is, as it were, inadequate to the relations which constitute self-consciousness, and thus there must also remain a surplusage in the self, not entering into the make-up of the known world."[46] This follows from the fact that, while the self is unconditioned, the manifold of sensation is conditioned, as given, by the forms of space and time. "Experience can never be complete enough to have a content equal to that of self-consciousness, for experience can never escape its limitation through space and time. Self-consciousness is real, and not merely logical; it is the ground of the reality of experience; it is wider than experience, and yet is unknown except so far as it is reflected through its own determinations in experience,—this is the result of our analysis of Kant, the Ding-an-Sich being eliminated but the Kantian method and all presuppositions not involved in the notion of the Ding-an-Sich being retained."[47]

Dewey's interpretation of Kant's doctrine as presented in the 'Deductions' is no doubt essentially correct. But granting that Kant found it necessary to introduce a synthesis in imagination to account for the unity of experience and justify our knowledge of its relations, it must not be forgotten that this necessity followed from the nature of his presuppositions. If the primal reality is a 'manifold of sensations,' proceeding from a noumenal source, and lacking meaning and relations, it follows that the manifold must be gathered up into a unity before the experience which we actually apprehend can be accounted for. But if reality is experience, possessing order and coherence in its own nature, the productive imagination is rendered superfluous. Dewey, however, clings to the notion that thought is a "synthetic activity" which makes experience, and draws support from Kant for his doctrine.

Dewey now inquires what relation this revised Kantian conception of the self bears to the view advanced by Seth, viz., that the idea of self-consciousness is the highest category of thought and explanation. Kant had tried to discover the different forms of synthesis, by a method somewhat artificial to be sure, and had found twelve of them. While Hegel's independent derivation and independent placing of the categories must be accepted, it does not follow that the idea of self-consciousness can be included in the list, even if it be considered the highest category. "For it is impossible as long as we retain Kant's fundamental presupposition—the idea of the partial determination of sensation by relation to perception, apart from its relation to conception—to employ self-consciousness as a principle of explaining any fact of experience."