MIND AND SOUL When Hegel speaks of the world-spirit his references to it are not mere metaphors for the operation of impersonal historical forces Hegel’s spirit resembles Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception in being the subject of all experience, which cannot itself be an object of experience Kant was content to assume that there will be a separate such focus in the life of each individual mind But what ground, Hegel might ask, is there for such an assumption? Behind Kant’s transcendental self stands the Cartesian ego; and one of the Wrst critics of Descartes’ cogito put the pertinent question: how you know that it is you who are thinking, and not the world-soul that thinks in you? Hegel’s spirit is meant to be a centre of consciousness prior to any individual consciousness One spirit thinks severally in the thoughts of Descartes and in the thoughts of Kant, perhaps rather as I, as a single person, can simultaneously feel toothache and gout in diVerent parts of myself But it is diYcult to accommodate within either empirical or analytic psychology a spirit whose behavioural expression is the entire universe Rather than a philosophy of mind, Hegel oVers us a Philosophy of Mind In respect of the philosophy of the human mind, the thinker who made the most signiWcant contribution in our period was undoubtedly Kant Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophy of mind was made subordinate to epistemology, in consequence of the Cartesian pursuit of certainty In the course of this pursuit, Descartes and the rationalists undervalued the role of the senses, and the British empiricists eliminated the role of the intellect It took the overarching genius of Kant to put together again what the partisan energies of his predecessors had shattered, and to give an account of the human mind that did justice to its various faculties In his work epistemology and philosophical psychology once again meet together, as they had done in the best work of the Middle Ages 245