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Does Consciousness Exist? By
William James I My thesis is that if we start
with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the
world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff
'pure experience,' the knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort
of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may
enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one if its 'terms'
becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower,[2] the other becomes the object known.
This will need much explanation before it can be understood. The best way to
get it understood is to contrast it with the alternative view; and for that we
may take the recentest alternative, that in which the evaporation of the
definite soul-substance has proceeded as far as it can go without being yet
complete. If neo-Kantism has expelled earlier forms of dualism, we shall have
expelled all forms if we are able to expel neo-Kantism in its turn. For the thinkers I call
neo-Kantian, the word consciousness to-day does no more than signalize the
fact that experience is indefeasibly dualistic in structure. It means that
not subject, not object, but object-plus-subject is the minimum that can
actually be. The subject-object distinction meanwhile is entirely different
from that between mind and matter, from that between body and soul. Souls
were detachable, had separate destinies; things could happen to them. To
consciousness as such nothing can happen, for, timeless itself, it is only a
witness of happenings in time, in which it plays no part. It is, in a word,
but the logical correlative of 'content' in an Experience of which the
peculiarity is that fact comes to light in it, that awareness of
content takes place. Consciousness as such is entirely impersonal --
'self' and its activities belong to the content. To say that I am
self-conscious, or conscious of putting forth volition, means only that
certain contents, for which 'self' and 'effort of will' are the names, are
not without witness as they occur. Thus, for these belated
drinkers at the Kantian spring, we should have to admit consciousness as an
'epistemological' necessity, even if we had no direct evidence of its being
there. But in addition to this,
we are supposed by almost every one to have an immediate consciousness of
consciousness itself. When the world of outer fact ceases to be materially
present, and we merely recall it in memory, or fancy it, the consciousness is
believed to stand out and to be felt as a kind of impalpable inner flowing,
which, once known in this sort of experience, may equally be detected in
presentations of the outer world. "The moment we try to fix out
attention upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is," says a
recent writer, "it seems to vanish. It seems as if we had before us a
mere emptiness. When we try to introspect the
sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue; the other element is as if it
were diaphanous. Yet it can be distinguished, if we look attentively enough,
and know that there is something to look for."[3] "Consciousness"
(Bewusstheit), says another philosopher, "is inexplicable and hardly
describable, yet all conscious experiences have this in common that what we
call their content has a peculiar reference to a centre for which 'self' is
the name, in virtue of which reference alone the content is subjectively
given, or appears.... While in this way consciousness, or reference to a
self, is the only thing which distinguishes a conscious content from any sort
of being that might be there with no one conscious of it, yet this only
ground of the distinction defies all closer explanations. The existence of
consciousness, although it is the fundamental fact of psychology, can indeed
be laid down as certain, can be brought out by analysis, but can neither be
defined nor deduced from anything but itself."[4] 'Can be brought out by
analysis,' this author says. This supposes that the consciousness is one
element, moment, factor -- call it what you like --
of an experience of essentially dualistic inner constitution, from which, if
you abstract the content, the consciousness will remain revealed to its own
eye. Experience, at this rate, would be much like a paint of which the world
pictures were made. Paint has a dual constitution, involving, as it does, a menstruum[5] (oil, size or what not) and a mass of
content in the form of pigment suspended therein. We can get the pure
menstruum by letting the pigment settle, and the pure pigment by pouring off
the size or oil. We operate here by physical subtraction; and the usual view
is, that by mental subtraction we can separate the two factors of experience
in an analogous way -- not isolating them entirely, but distinguishing them
enough to know that they are two. II Now my contention is
exactly the reverse of this. Experience, I believe, has no such inner
duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not
by way of subtraction, but by way of addition -- the addition, to a given
concrete piece of it, other sets of experiences, in connection with which
severally its use or function may be of two different kinds. The paint will
also serve here as an illustration. In a pot in a paint-shop, along with
other paints, it serves in its entirety as so much saleable matter. Spread on
a canvas, with other paints around it, it represents, on the contrary, a
feature in a picture and performs a spiritual function. Just so, I maintain,
does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of
associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of
'consciousness'; while in a different context the same undivided bit of
experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective 'content.' In a
word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing. And,
since it can figure in both groups simultaneously we have every right to
speak of it as subjective and objective, both at once. The dualism connoted
by such double-barreled terms as 'experience,' 'phenomenon,' 'datum,' 'Vorfindung'
-- terms which, in philosophy at any rate, tend more and more to replace the
single-barreled terms of 'thought' and 'thing' -- that dualism, I say, is
still preserved in this account, but reinterpreted, so that, instead of being
mysterious and elusive, it becomes verifiable and concrete. It is an affair
of relations, it falls outside, not inside, the single experience considered,
and can always be particularized and defined. The entering wedge for
this more concrete way of understanding the dualism was fashioned by Locke
when he made the word 'idea' stand indifferently for thing and thought, and by If the reader will take
his own experiences, he will see what I mean. Let him begin with a perceptual
experience, the 'presentation,' so called, of a physical object, his actual
field of vision, the room he sits in, with the book he is reading as its
centre; and let him for the present treat this complex object in the
commonsense way as being 'really' what it seems to be, namely, a collection
of physical things cut out from an environing world of other physical things
with which these physical things have actual or potential relations. Now at the
same time it is just those self-same things which his mind, as we say,
perceives; and the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus’ time
downwards has just been one long wrangle over the paradox that what is
evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space
and in a person's mind. 'Representative' theories of perception avoid the
logical paradox, but on the other hand they violate the reader's sense of
life, which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and
the book immediately just as they physically exist. The puzzle of how the one
identical room can be in two places is at bottom just the puzzle of how one
identical point can be on two lines. It can, if it be situated at their
intersection; and similarly, if the 'pure experience' of the room were a
place of intersection of two processes, which connected it with different
groups of associates respectively, it could be counted twice over, as
belonging to either group, and spoken of loosely as existing in two places,
although it would remain all the time a numerically single thing. Well, the experience is a
member of diverse processes that can be followed away from it along entirely
different lines. The one self-identical thing has so many relations to the rest
of experience that you can take it in disparate systems of association, and
treat it as belonging with opposite contexts. In one of these contexts it is
your 'field of consciousness'; in another it is 'the room in which you sit,'
and it enters both contexts in its wholeness, giving no pretext for being
said to attach itself to consciousness by one of its parts or aspects, and to
out reality by another. What are the two processes, now, into which the
room-experience simultaneously enters in this way? One of them is the
reader's personal biography, the other is the
history of the house of which the room is part. The presentation, the
experience, the that in short (for until we have decided what
it is it must be a mere that) is the last term in a train of
sensations, emotions, decisions, movements, classifications, expectations,
etc., ending in the present, and the first term in a series of 'inner'
operations extending into the future, on the reader's part. On the other
hand, the very same that is the terminus ad quem of a lot of
previous physical operations, carpentering, papering, furnishing, warming,
etc., and the terminus a quo of a lot of future ones, in which it will
be concerned when undergoing the destiny of a physical room. The physical and
the mental operations form curiously incompatible groups. As a room, the
experience has occupied that spot and had that environment for thirty years.
As your field of consciousness it may never have existed until now. As a
room, attention will go on to discover endless new details in it. As your
mental state merely, few new ones will emerge under attention's eye. As a
room, it will take an earthquake, or a gang of men, and in any case a certain
amount of time, to destroy it. As your subjective state, the closing of your
eyes, or any instantaneous play of your fancy will suffice. In the real
world, fire will consume it. In your mind, you can let fire play over it
without effect. As an outer object, you must pay so much a month to inhabit
it. As an inner content, you may occupy it for any length of time rent-free.
If, in short, you follow it in the mental direction, taking it along with
events of personal biography solely, all sorts of things are true of it which
are false, and false of it which are true if you treat it as a real thing
experienced, follow it in the physical direction, and relate it to associates
in the outer world. III So far, all seems plain
sailing, but my thesis will probably grow less plausible to the reader when I
pass from percepts to concepts, or from the case of things presented to that
of things remote. I believe, nevertheless, that here also the same law holds good. If we take conceptual manifolds, or memories, or
fancies, they also are in their first intention mere bits of pure experience,
and, as such, are single thats which act in one context as objects,
and in another context figure as mental states. By taking them in their first
intention, I mean ignoring their relation to possible perceptual experiences
with which they may be connected, which they may lead to and terminate in,
and which then they may be supposed to 'represent.' Taking them in this way
first, we confine the problem to a world merely 'thought of' and not directly
felt or seen. This world, just like the world of percepts, comes to us at
first as a chaos of experiences, but lines of order soon get traced. We find
that any bit of it which we may cut out as an example is connected with
distinct groups of associates, just as our perceptual experiences are, that
these associates link themselves with it by different relations,[6] and that one forms the inner history
of a person, while the other acts as an impersonal 'objective' world, either
spatial and temporal, or else merely logical or mathematical, or otherwise
'ideal.' The first obstacle on the
part of the reader to seeing that these non-perceptual experiences have
objectivity as well as subjectivity will probably be due to the intrusion into
his mind of percepts, that third group of associates with which the
non-perceptual experiences have relations, and which, as a whole, they
'represent,' standing to them as thoughts to things. This important function
of non-perceptual experiences complicates the question and confuses it; for,
so used are we to treat percepts as the sole genuine realities that, unless
we keep them out of the discussion, we tend altogether to overlook the
objectivity that lies in non-perceptual experiences by themselves. We treat
them, 'knowing' percepts as they do, as through and through subjective, and
say that they are wholly constituted of the stuff called consciousness, using
this term now for a kind of entity, after the fashion which I am seeking to
refute.[7] Abstracting, then, from
percepts altogether, what I maintain is, that any single non-perceptual
experience tends to get counted twice over, just as a perceptual experience
does, figuring in one context as an object or field of objects, in another as
a state of mind: and all this without the least internal self-diremption on
its own part into consciousness and content. It is all consciousness in one
taking; and, in the other, all content. I find this objectivity
of non-perceptual experiences, this complete parallelism in point of reality
between the presently felt and the remotely thought, so well set forth in a
page of Münsterberg's Grundzuge, that I will quote it as it stands. "I may only think of
my objects," says Professor Munsterberg; "yet, in my living thought
they stand before me exactly as perceived objects would do, no matter how
different the two ways of apprehending them may be in their genesis. The book
here lying on the table before me, and the book in the next room of which I
think and which I mean to get, are both in the same sense given realities for
me, realities which I acknowledge and of which I take account. If you agree
that the perceptual object is not an idea within me, but that percept and
thing, as indistinguishably one, are really experienced there, outside,
you ought not to believe that the merely thought-of object is hid away inside
of the thinking subject. The object of which I think, and of whose existence
I take cognizance without letting it now work upon my senses, occupies its
definite place in the outer world as much as does the object which I directly
see." "What is true of the
here and the there, is also true of the now and the then. I know of the thing
which is present and perceived, but I know also of the thing which yesterday
was but is no more, and which I only remember. Both can determine my present
conduct, both are parts of the reality of which I keep account. It is true
that of much of the past I am uncertain, just as I am uncertain of much of
what is present if it be but dimly perceived. But the interval of time does
not in principle alter my relation to the object, does not transform it from
an object known into a mental state.... The things in the room here which I
survey, and those in my distant home of which I think, the things of this
minute and those of my long vanished boyhood, influence and decide me alike,
with a reality which my experience of them directly feels. They both make up
my real world, they make it directly, they do not
have first to be introduced to me and mediated by ideas which now and here
arise within me.... This not-me character of my recollections and
expectations does not imply that the external objects of which I am aware in
those experiences should necessarily be there also for others. The objects of
dreamers and hallucinated persons are wholly without general validity. But
even were they centaurs and golden mountains, they still would be 'off
there,' in fairy land, and not 'inside' of ourselves."[8] This certainly is the
immediate, primary, naïf, or practical way of taking our thought-of world.
Were there no perceptual world to serve as its 'reductive,' in Taine's sense,
by being 'stronger' and more genuinely 'outer' (so that the whole merely
thought-of world seems weak and inner in comparison), our world of thought
would be the only world, and would enjoy complete reality in our belief. This
actually happens in our dreams, and in our
day-dreams so long as percepts do not interrupt them. And yet, just as the seen
room (to go back to our late example) is also a field of
consciousness, so the conceived or recollected room is also a state of
mind; and the doubling-up of the experience has in both cases similar
grounds. The room thought-of,
namely, has many thought-of couplings with many thought-of things. Some of
these couplings are inconstant, others are stable. In the reader's personal
history the room occupies a single date -- he saw it only once perhaps, a
year ago. Of the house's history, on the other hand, it forms a permanent
ingredient. Some couplings have the curious stubbornness, to borrow Royce's
term, of fact; others show the fluidity of fancy -- we let them come and go
as we please. Grouped with the rest of its house, with the name of its town,
of its owner, builder, value, decorative plan, the room maintains a definite
foothold, to which, if we try to loosen it, it tends to return and to
reassert itself with force.[9] With these associates, in a word, it
coheres, while to other houses, other towns, other owners, etc., it shows no
tendency to cohere at all. The two collections, first of its cohesive, and,
second, of its loose associates, inevitably come to be contrasted. We call
the first collection the system of external realities, in the midst of which
the room, as 'real,' exists; the other we call the stream of internal
thinking, in which, as a 'mental image,' it for a moment floats.[10] The room thus again gets counted
twice over. It plays two different roles, being Gedanke and Gedachtes,
the thought-of-an-object, and the object-thought-of, both in one; and all
this without paradox or mystery, just as the same material thing may be both
low and high, or small and great, or bad and good, because of its relations
to opposite parts of an environing world. As 'subjective' we say
that the experience represents; as 'objective' it is represented. What
represents and what is represented is here numerically the same; but we must
remember that no dualism of being represented and representing resides in the
experience per se. In its pure state, or when isolated, there is no
self-splitting of it into consciousness and what the consciousness is 'of.'
Its subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely, , realized only when the experience is 'take,' i.e.,
talked-of, twice, considered along with its two differing contexts
respectively, by a new retrospective experience, of which that whole past
complication now forms the fresh content. The instant field of the present is
at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or
potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain,
unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that. In this naïf
immediacy it is of course valid; it is there, we act
upon it; and the doubling of it in retrospection into a state of mind and a
reality intended thereby, is just one of the acts. The 'state of mind,' first
treated explicitly as such in retrospection, will stand corrected or
confirmed, and the retrospective experience in its turn will get a similar
treatment; but the immediate experience in its passing is [11]'truth,' practical truth, something
to act on, at its own movement. If the world were then and there to go
out like a candle, it would remain truth absolute and objective, for it would
be 'the last word,' would have no critic, and no one would ever oppose the
thought in it to the reality intended.[12] I think I may now claim to have made
my thesis clear. Consciousness connotes a kind of external relation, and does
not denote a special stuff or way of being. The peculiarity of our
experiences, that they not only are, but are known, which their 'conscious'
quality is invoked to explain, is better explained by their relations --
these relations themselves being experiences -- to one another. IV Were I now to go on to
treat of the knowing of perceptual by conceptual experiences, it would again
prove to be an affair of external relations. One experience would be the
knower, the other the reality known; and I could perfectly well define,
without the notion of 'consciousness,' what the knowing actually and practically
amounts to -- leading-towards, namely, and terminating-in percepts, through a
series of transitional experiences which the world supplies. But I will not
treat of this, space being insufficient.[13] I will rather consider a few
objections that are sure to be urged against the entire theory as it stands. V First of all, this will
be asked: "If experience has not 'conscious' existence, if it be not
partly made of 'consciousness,' of what then is it made? Matter we know, and
thought we know, and conscious content we know, but neutral and simple 'pure
experience' is something we know not at all. Say what it consists of
-- for it must consist of something -- or be willing to give it up!" To this challenge the
reply is easy. Although for fluency's sake I myself spoke early in this
article of a stuff of pure experience, I have now to say that there is no general
stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many
stuffs as there are 'natures' in the things experienced. If you ask
what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the
same: "It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of
intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not." Shadworth
Hodgson's analysis here leaves nothing to be desired.(1) Experience is only a
collective name for all these sensible natures, and save for time and space
(and, if you like, for 'being') there appears no universal element of which
all things are made. VI The next objection is
more formidable, in fact it sounds quite crushing when one hears it first. "If it be the
self-same piece of pure experience, taken twice over, that serves now as
thought and now as thing" -- so the objection runs - "how comes it
that its attributes should differ so fundamentally in the two takings. As
thing, the experience is extended; as thought, it occupies no space or place.
As thing, it is red, hard, heavy; but who ever heard
of a red, hard or heavy thought? Yet even now you said that an experience is
made of just what appears, and what appears is just
such adjectives. How can the one experience in its thing-function be made of them, consist of them, carry them as its own
attributes, while in its thought-function it disowns them and attributes them
elsewhere. There is a self-contradiction here from which the radical dualism
of thought and thing is the only truth that can save us. Only if the thought
is one kind of being can the adjectives exist in it 'intentionally' (to use
the scholastic term); only if the thing is another kind, can they exist in it
constitutively and energetically. No simple subject can take the same
adjectives and at one time be qualified by it, and at another time be merely
'of' it, as of something only meant or known." The solution insisted on
by this objector, like many other common-sense solutions, grows the less
satisfactory the more one turns it in one's mind. To begin with, are
thought and thing as heterogeneous as is commonly said? No one denies that they
have some categories in common. Their relations to time are identical. Both,
moreover, may have parts (for psychologists in general treat thoughts as
having them); and both may be complex or simple. Both are of kinds, can be
compared, added and subtracted and arranged in serial orders. All sorts of
adjectives qualify our thoughts which appear incompatible with consciousness,
being as such a bare diaphaneity. For instance, they are natural and easy, or
laborious. They are beautiful, happy, intense, interesting, wise, idiotic,
focal, marginal, insipid, confused, vague, precise, rational, causal,
general, particular, and many things besides. Moreover, the chapters on
'Perception' in the psychology books are full of facts that make for the
essential homogeneity of thought with thing. How, if 'subject' and 'object'
were separated 'by the whole diameter of being,' and had no attributes and
common, could it be so hard to tell, in a presented and recognized material
object, what part comes in through the sense organs and what part comes 'out
of one's own head'? Sensations and apperceptive ideas fuse here so intimately
that you can no more tell where one begins and the other ends, than you can
tell, in those cunning circular panoramas that have lately been exhibited,
where the real foreground and the painted canvas [14]. Descartes for the first
time defined thought as the absolutely unextended,
and later philosophers have accepted the description as correct. But what
possible meaning has it to say that, when we think of a foot-rule or a square
yard, extension is not attributable to our thought? Of every extended object
the adequate mental picture must have all the extension of the object
itself. The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of
relation to a context solely. In the mind the various extents maintain no
necessarily stubborn order relatively to each other, while in the physical
world they bound each other stably, and, added together, make the great
enveloping Unit which we believe in and call real Space. As 'outer,' they
carry themselves adversely, so to speak, to one another, exclude one another
and maintain their distances; while, as 'inner,' their order is loose, and
they form a durcheinander in which unity is lost.(1) But to argue from
this that inner experience is absolutely inextensive seems to me little short
of absurd. The two worlds differ, not by the presence or absence of
extension, but by the relations of the extensions which in both worlds exist.
Does not this case of
extension now put us on the track of truth in the case of other qualities? It
does; and I am surprised that the facts should not have been noticed long
ago. Why, for example, do we call a fire hot, and water wet, and yet refuse
to say that our mental state, when it is 'of' these objects, is either wet or
hot? 'Intentionally,' at any rate, and when the mental state is a vivid
image, hotness and wetness are in it just as much as they are in the physical
experience. The reason is this, that, as the general chaos of all our
experiences gets sifted, we find that there are some fires that will always
burn sticks and always warm our bodies, and that there are some waters that
will always put out fires; while there are other fires and waters that will
not act at all. The general group of experiences that act, that do not only
possess their natures intrinsically, but wear them adjectively and
energetically, turning them against one another, comes inevitably to be
contrasted with the group whose members, having identically the same natures,
fail to manifest them in the 'energetic' way. I make for myself now an
experience of blazing fire; I place it near my body; but it does not warm me
in the least. I lay a stick upon it, and the stick either burns or remains
green, as I please. I call up water, and pour it on the fire, and absolutely
no difference ensues. I account for all such facts by calling this whole
train of experiences unreal, a mental train. Mental fire is what won't burn
real sticks; mental water is what won't necessarily (though of course it may)
put out even a mental fire. Mental knives may be sharp, but they won't cut
real wood. Mental triangles are pointed, but their points won't wound. With
'real' objects, on the contrary, consequences always accrue; and thus the
real experiences get sifted from the mental ones, the things from out
thoughts of them, fanciful or true, and precipitated together as the stable
part of the whole experience-chaos, under the name of the physical world. Of
this our perceptual experiences are the nucleus, they being the originally strong
experiences. We add a lot of conceptual experiences to them, making these
strong also in imagination, and building out the remoter parts of the
physical world by their means; and around this core of reality the world of
laxly connected fancies and mere rhapsodical objects floats like a bank of
clouds. In the clouds, all sorts of rules are violated which in the core are kept.
Extensions there can be indefinitely located; motion there obeys no VII There is a peculiar class
of experience to which, whether we take them as subjective or as objective,
we assign their several natures as attributes, because in both
contexts they affect their associates actively, though in neither quite as
'strongly' or as sharply as things affect one another by their physical
energies. I refer here to appreciations, which form an ambiguous
sphere of being, belonging with emotion on the one hand, and having objective
'value' on the other, yet seeming not quite inner nor quite outer, as if a
diremption had begun but had not made itself complete. Experiences of painful
objects, for example, are usually also painful experiences; perceptions of
loveliness, of ugliness, tend to pass muster as lovely or as ugly
perceptions; intuitions of the morally lofty are lofty intuitions. Sometimes
the adjective wanders as if uncertain where to fix itself. Shall we speak of
seductive visions or of visions of seductive things? Of healthy thoughts or
of thoughts of healthy objects? Of good impulses, or of impulses towards the
good? Of feelings of anger, or of angry feelings? Both in the mind and in the
thing, these natures modify their context, exclude certain associates and
determine others, have their mates and incompatibles. Yet not as stubbornly
as in the case of physical qualities, for beauty and ugliness, love and
hatred, pleasant and painful can, in certain complex experiences, coexist. If one were to make an
evolutionary construction of how a lot of originally chaotic pure experience
became gradually differentiated into an orderly inner and outer world, the
whole theory would turn upon one's success in explaining how or why the
quality of an experience, once active, could become less so, and, from being
an energetic attribute in some cases, elsewhere lapse into the status of an
inert or merely internal 'nature.' This would be the 'evolution' of the
psychical from the bosom of the physical, in which the esthetic, moral and
otherwise emotional experiences would represent a halfway stage. VIII But a last cry of non
possumus will probably go up from many readers. "All very pretty as
a piece of ingenuity," they will say, "but our consciousness itself
intuitively contradicts you. We, for our part, know that we are
conscious. We feel our thought, flowing as a life within us, in
absolute contrast with the objects which it so unremittingly escorts. We can
not be faithless to this immediate intuition. The dualism is a fundamental datum:
Let no man join what God has put asunder." My reply to this is my
last word, and I greatly grieve that to many it will sound materialistic. I
can not help that, however, for I, too, have my intuitions and I must obey them.
Let the case be what it may in others, I am as confident as I am of anything
that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a
phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals
itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The 'I think' which
Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breath' which
actually does accompany them. There are other internal facts besides
breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a
word in my larger Psychology), and these increase the assets of
'consciousness,' so far as the latter is subject to immediate perception; but
breath, which was ever the original of 'spirit,' breath moving outwards,
between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of
which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as
consciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete
are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as
things are. I wish I might believe
myself to have made that plausible in this article. IN another article I
shall try to make the general notion of a world composed of pure experiences
still more clear. Footnotes 1. Articles by Bawden, King, Alexander, and others.
Dr. Perry is frankly over the border 2. In my Psychology I have tried to show that we
need no knower other than the "passing thought." [Principles of Psychology, vol. I, pp. 338 ff.] 3. G.E. Moore: Mind, vol. 4. Paul Natorp: EinleitungindiePsychologie, 1888, pp. 14, 112. 5. "Figuratively speaking, consciousness may
be said to be the one universal solvent, or menstruum, in which the different
concrete kinds of psychic acts and facts are contained, whether in concealed
or in obvious form." G.T.Ladd: Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory, 1894, p.30. 8. Munsterberg: Grundzugeder Psychologie, vol. I, p. 48. 9. Cf. A.L. Hodder: The Adversaries of the Sceptic, pp.94-99. 12. In the Psychological Review for July [1904], Dr. R.B. Perry
has published a view of Consciousness which comes nearer to mine than any other
with which I am acquainted. At present, Dr. Perry thinks, every field of
experience is so much "fact." It becomes "opinion" or
'thought" only in retrospection, when a fresh experience, thinking the
same object, alters and corrects it. But the corrective experience becomes
itself in turn corrected, and thus the experience as a whole is a process in
which what is objective originally forever turns subjective, turns into our
apprehension of the object. I strongly recommend Dr. Perry's admirable
article to my readers. 13. I have given a partial account of the matter in
Mind, vol. X, p. 27, 1885, and in the Psychological
Review, vol. II, p. 105, 1895. See also C.A. Strong's article in the Journal
of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol I, p. 253, May 12,
1904. I hope myself very soon to recur to the matter. 14. Spencer's proof of his
'Transfigured Realism' (his doctrine that there is an absolutely non-mental
reality) comes to mind as a splendid instance of the impossibility of
establishing radical heterogeneity between thought and thing. All his
painfully accumulated points of difference run gradually into their
opposites, and are full of exceptions. |