Against atomistic psychology: is the self a unitary whole, not a bundle of mental elements?

Mary Whiton Calkins, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The self is not a heap of ideas nor a bundle of perceptions succeeding one another; it is a unitary, persistent whole that relates itself to its objects and knows itself as one through all its changing contents.1 Hume's bundle mistakes the contents for the container. The unity and persistence of the self are not built up from the elements — they are presupposed by there being any experience of elements at all.2345

Sources

  1. He has made this mistake because (3) he wrongly regards the necessary judgments about space, time, and the categories as synthetic, that is, as involving a neces sity other than the logical impossibility of self-contradiction. B. KANT'S DOCTRINE OF THE SELF, AND OF THE OBJECT AS RELATED TO THE SELF (iN OPPOSITION TO HUME) I.
    The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, pp. 226–227
  2. III. HUME'S DOCTRINE OF SELF Hume's metaphysical doctrine is, up to this point, a mere reassertion of Berkeley's immaterialism, an idealistic concep tion of the universe. To Leibniz and to Berkeley, and in deed to all idealists before Hume, this means simply that the universe is a society of interrelated spirits, or persons.
    The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, p. 179
  3. In other words, it is certainly true that a self without perceptions is never experienced, but it does not follow that there is no self; on the other hand, it well may be that the perceptions are those of a self. b.
    The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, pp. 186–187
  4. And were all my perceptions remov'd by death, and cou'd I neither. think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated.... If any one, upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him.... We are essentially different in this particular.
    The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, pp. 183–184
  5. These implications, it must be observed, of the existence of minds or selves, underlying the succession of ideas, are not mere unessential lapses from Hume's central teaching. On the contrary, this conception of a self is fundamental to no fewer than four of Hume's explicit doctrines or arguments.
    The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, pp. 187–188

Where the argument is made

  • The rejection of "idea-psychology" — the analysis of mind into independent mental elements — in favour of the self as a related whole

How the argument was received

That the self is a related whole and not a bundle I hold as the core of the doctrine; how its unity is to be finally understood — as given, as a form of relating, as the condition of experience — is the philosophical labour I carried from psychology into metaphysics and did not claim to have closed.