Copyright N^ copiTRiGifr DEPOsrr. A SYSTEM OF METAPHYSICS %^>^o ■s » """ O A SYSTEM OF METAPHYSICS BY GEORGE STUART FULLERTON PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 1904 LIBRARY of COMGREbS Two Copies Receivea NOV 14 I9U4 CoDyncnt tntry CLASS A XXc. No COPY B. 1^. 7^ ^v o Copyright, 1904, By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1904. NortDooU H^xtM J. 8. CusliliiK >t Co. — Iterwick & Rmltb Co. Norwooil, Mass., U.S.A. £ TO JULIA WINSLOW FULLERTON THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED PREFACE Some of the material in Chapters I, II, and V of this volume has already appeared in the Psychological Review; and Chapters XV, XVI, and XVII have been reprinted without very much change. They first appeared as articles in the same journal. In Chapter XXXIII I have made some use of two articles published in the Popular Science Monthly. The chapters on Space and Time are reprinted from the Philosophical Review with little change except that, in Chapter XI, some new matter has been added. To the editors of the journals mentioned. Professor Cattell, Professor Baldwin, and Professor Creighton, my thanks are due for their courtesy in permitting me to reprint as I have done. Thus, about one-fourth of the present volume has already seen the light. It is right that I should say that nothing that has already appeared has been taken up into the book as an after- thought. From the beginning the work has been a unit ; it has been for a number of years on my hands, and the publication of the papers above mentioned was due largely to a curiosity to see how the doctrines advocated would impress others. It was, perhaps, hardly fair to present them deprived of their setting, and this injustice, if injustice it be, is remedied now. At the end of the book I have placed a note on the Physical World Order, by my former pupil. Professor Edgar A. Singer, Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania. It has seemed to me of especial interest, as coming from one trained in metaphysical analysis and familiar with the principles and methods of the sciences. GEORGE STUART FULLERTON. Columbia University, New York, July, 1904. vii CONTENTS PART I THE CONTENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS PAGE I. The Mind and the World in Common Thought and IN Science 1 11. The Inadequacy of the Psychological Standpoint . 17 III. How Things are Given in Consciousness ... 33 IV. The Elements in Consciousness 56 V. The Self or Knower 71 PART II THE EXTERNAL WORLD VI. What we Mean by the External World ... 95 VII. Sensations and "Things" 115 VIII. The Distinction between Appearance and Reality . 132 IX. Significance of the Distinction between Appearance AND Reality 146 X. The Kantian Doctrine of Space 162 XI. Difficulties connected with the Kantian Doctrine of Space 172 XII. The Berkeleian Doctrine of Space 184 XIIL Of Time 194 XIV. The Real World in Space and Time .... 210 XV. The World as Mechanism 226 PART III MIND AND MATTER XVI. The Insufficiency of Materialism 245 XVII. The Atomic Self 262 XVIII. The Automaton Theory: its Genesis .... 284 X Contents XIX. The Automaton Theory: Parallelism PAOE . 298 XX. What is Parallelism? 313 XXI. The Man and the Candlestick 33*2 XXII. The Metaphysics of the "Telephone Exchange" . 342 XXIU. The Distinction between the World and the Mind . 364 XXIV. The Time and Place of Sensations and Ideas . . 385 XXV. Of Natural Realism, Hypothetical Realism, Idealism AND Materialism 399 XXVI. The World as Unperceived, and the " Unknowable " . 415 PART IV OTHER MINDS, AND THE REALM OF MINDS XXVII. The Existence of Other Minds 433 XXV'III. The Distribution of Minds 458 XXIX. The Unity of Consciousness 473 XXX. Subconscious Mind 488 XXXI. Mental Phenomena and the Causal Nexus . . . 508 XXXII. Mechanism and Teleology 527 XXXIII. Fatalism, "Free-will," and Determinism . . . 550 XXXIV. Of God 570 XXXV. Of God (continued) 598 Note. — The Physical World Order 609 A SYSTEM OF METAPHYSICS PART I THE CONTENr OF CONSCIOUSNESS CHAPTER I THE MIND AND THE WORLD IN COMMON THOUGHT AND IN SCIENCE It is impossible for the mature mind to turn back to the expe- riences of infancy, and directly to recall, by an exercise of memory, the beginnings of its conscious life. When we have attained to an age at which reflection is possible, and at which the impulse to reflect makes itself felt, the dawn of consciousness has passed into oblivion ; and he who is curious to inquire how the world looked to him, when he first rolled an unmeaning eye at it, must be con- tent with information gained in roundabout ways. As far back as we can remember, the world of our experiences has not been so very different from the world in which we now habitually live. It was formerly, it is true, a more indefinite and a more incohe- rent world, less marked by clear distinctions and less orderly, more full of acutely delightful and acutely distressing surprises, more exciting and more mysterious. Memory gives us a series of pic- tures imperfectly representing the successive stages by which the more sober and orderly world of our later experience came into being. But as we journey into the past the pictures become more and more indefinite and incomplete, and the series comes to an end before their general outline has passed over into a something more rudimentary and of a quite different nature. The world which we can recall is always a world of things^ among which we find one peculiar and interesting thing not to be placed precisely on a par with the rest, the self, which tastes, touches, and possesses things — the sun around which other things are made to revolve. That this series of experiences has been preceded by other expe- riences in which such distinctions do not exist, and that they are B 1 2 The Content of Consciousness the result of a development from an experience of the workl — if one may call it such — in which there are as yet no objects with definite relations to each other, may be satisfactorily established partly by reflection upon the series of experiences which we can recall, with the developments to be there observed, and partly by observation and interpretation of the actions of human bodies which reveal minds just passing through the earlier stages of their existence. Thus, there is good reason to believe that the distinc- tion between the self and the not-self, a distinction which thrusts itself upon the attention of the developed mind with such insist- ence that we are inclined to read it into the experience of every mind, however rudimentary — there is good reason to believe that this distinction, like a multitude of others which make their appearance in later life, was not present at the dawn of conscious- ness at all. But, however it may be with the infant mind, the mature man always finds himself in a real world of real things, and he distin- guishes between himself, as knowing and acting upon things, and the things over against which he stands as a something apart and different. As has been said, he can remember no time at which he did not make some such distinction. Unless he be accustomed to reflective thought, it sounds to him highly absurd to speak of a conscious experience in which such distinctions do not obtain. Can there be, he asks, a pain that is felt by no one ? Can there be knowledge, or even anything faintly resembling knowledge, unless there be something known and some one who knows that something ? His experience at every moment seems to fortify him in this position. He looks at the pen which he holds in his hand, feels it, is sure that he knows it, and that it is he that knows it. The pen seems capable of existing by itself, but surely it cannot know itself. It appears too immediately evident to call for proof that every act of knowledge requires the two participants, the knower and the known. When he suffers, he is convinced that he feels the pain, and he knows that he and the pain are not identical. He regards it as quite impossible to doubt the reality of such experiences, which repeat themselves everywhere in his mental life, and he listens with some impatience to any argument which seems gratuitously to cast doubt upon their reality. That men actually do have such experiences as those cited it •would be folly to deny, and something may be said for the plain The Mind and the World 3 man who turns a deaf ear to the metaphysician, charm he never so wisely. We do know objects, and in the act of knowing, if we think about the matter at all, we are conscious of distinguishing between the knower and the objects known. One can have no legitimate quarrel with this experience, in itself considered, nor is it reasonable to attempt to explain it away. The only reasonable thing to do is to try to analyze it, and to indicate clearly just what elements it contains; in other words, to show plainly what the experience really is. That one may have experiences without being able to analyze them successfully, and that most men make little attempt to analyze their experiences, is matter of common observation. An experience unanalyzed is only half possessed, and may easily give rise to serious misconceptions. It needs but little reflection to convince the man who feels so sure of the existence of the knowing self, of the object known, and of the activity exercised by the former, that there is much in his experience that is vague and indefinite. Some distinctions he read- ily makes which are not made by the child. For example, where it never occurs to the child to define in any way what he means by the self, the unavoidable half-conscious reflection to which one is impelled by everyday life leads the man to, at least, a dim con- sciousness of what is to be included under this name and what is to be excluded. The child does not distinguish between mind and body ; the self is a something vaguely distinguished from other objects, and in it the body stands out as the most prominent element, but there is no conscious distinction between the bodily self and the mental, with the consequent recognition of the latter as the true self which knows and acts upon things, and from which all other things, including the body, must be distinguished. To the man these distinctions have become more or less familiar. Vague and indefi- nite as his ideas are, he has arrived at somewhat the same way of looking at things as that adopted by the psychologist ; and, indeed, it is not unreasonable to regard his view of the mind and the exter- nal world as constituting the beginnings of a science of psychology. He believes that he has a mind, though he has no very clear notion of what it is. He believes that this mind is intimately related to his body, which is a thing outside of his mind. He believes that through this body it is related to an external real world, from which it receives influences and which it can influence in return. In this 4 Tlie Content of Consciousness external world he thinks he finds other bodies more or less closely resembling liis own, and believes that there are connected with them other minds, as his mind is connected with his body. Further, lie believes that as he can express, by the actions of his body, ideas or emotions in his mind, so the minds connected with other bodies can give expression to their ideas or emotions, and such an expres- sion is to him the revelation of the contents of these other minds. By comparing the mental states of other men with his own, he comes to form some general notions of the contents of other minds and of the ways in which they act, thus arriving at the beginnings of a mental science. He may have done all this without ever having heard of the science of psychology. No one who has not done all this has arrived at the knowledge of the world proper to a human being of mature years, however unscientific. Of course, some do the work better than others, and arrive at a more accurate knowledge of the external world and of their own and of other minds. But done in some way it must be, unless healthy mental development be arrested. It is the normal man's way of looking at the world in which he finds himself. That such a knowledge of things as that above described is less indefinite and rudimentary than that of the child in its ear- lier years is sufficiently evident. Minds have come to be distin- guished from material things, and knowledge has become in itself an object of attention. And yet, as I have said above, it requires but little reflection to convince the plain man at this stage of his progress toward clear thinking, that there is still much in his experience which is very indefinitely and unsatisfactorily known. He speaks of an external world, but would be at a loss to describe, if asked to do so, just what he means by that phrase. The mind he distinguishes from the body, and yet when he is brought to ask himself what a mind is, and hoiv he thinks of it, he realizes that his thought is vagueness incarnate. He probably makes a distinction between the mind and its ideas, but can give no intel- ligible account of the relation of the mind to these ideas; and although he feels sure that the mind knows things, he has not the faintest notion how it knows them. From the inaccurate and indefinite knowledge of minds proper to the unscientific, one may take refuge in psychology ; and for a more satisfactory knowledge of the external world one may turn to the various physical sciences. In entering upon the study of ii The Mind and the World 5 these, the plain man does no great violence to the ways of think- ing to which he has been accustomed. He does not change his whole point of view. He merely learns to do more accurately and carefully what he has done before, namely, to observe, com- pare, classify, and infer. He is still in a world of material things, in the one case, and in a world of minds which know things, in the other. For instance, as a plain man, he has known plants and ani- mals. He has observed them more or less narrowly, and he has some rather loosely generalized information regarding them. In becoming a botanist or a zoologist, he collects his information more planfiilly and arranges it more critically. But he goes through no intellectual revolution in becoming a botanist or a zoologist. As a plain man he knew something about plants and animals ; as a scientist he knows much more ; but his knowledge is of the same general nature. There, in the real world, are real objects which he is to examine and upon which he may experi- ment. The results obtained by the botanist and the zoologist are sufficiently intelligible to him, even if he be a very poor scientist himself. They are expressed in a language of which he has always known at least the rudiments. And the physiologist assumes, just as he has been in the habit of doing, an external world, in which are a number of organized bodies, forming a part of a real system of things. He seeks to obtain a general knowledge of the peculiar phenomena presented by these bodies, and to fix their relations to the rest of the sys- tem. Every one knows something about physiology, even if he has never heard the word pronounced. One's ignorance may be profound, but even in that case it differs from that of the physi- ologist only in degree. The point of view is essentially the same. Lungs are lungs, and exist and function in a real external world among other real things, and the only problem is to discover how they conduct themselves there. Physiological truths do not lead one away from the ways of thinking to which one is accustomed in common life. Physiology has to do with external things in an external world ; it assumes that they can, under given condi- tions, be known ; and it troubles itself little about the meaning of externality or the nature of knowledge. It may here be objected that what has above been said of such sciences as botany, zoology, and physiology, can hardly be said 6 llie Content of Consciousness of certain other sciences, such as chemistry and physics; nor, indeed, of the sciences lirst mentioned, in so far as they may be based upon the hitter. The chemist and the physicist seem to take leave of things as we know them, and to pass into a new and different world of things imperceptible to the senses. To the plain man the real external world consists of extended things which may be seen and touched. These things appear to be con- tinuous ; and, although they may be divided, the parts into which they may be divided are conceived as really parts, i.e. as fragments of the things, and as of the same general nature with them. But to the chemist and the physicist these realities have become appearances ; not the things themselves, but phenomena under which the real things, themselves imperceptible, make their presence evident to the observer. Is this the world of things in which the plain man finds himself, and in which he lives and moves and has his being ? But a closer scrutiny reveals that, although the material world is to the man of science by no means the same thing that it is to the unscientific, yet it is a world of essentially the same nature, and it is not difficult for the plain man to understand the language in which it is explained to him. The atom, for example, is supposed to exist in space and to move about in space. It is not directly perceivable by sense, but it is conceived as though it and its motions were thus perceivable. Atoms are thought of as material things ; it is assumed that they can be indirectly known; and no such questions are raised as those of the nature or possibility of knowledge, the nature of space, and what is meant by existence or reality. There is much in the experience of the unlearned man that can make comprehensible to him the views of the nature of matter held by the chemist. He has long known that things consist of parts which are, at least under some circumstances, invisible. Every time that he approaches an object from a dis- tance, it is made manifest to him that parts become visible which were not visible a moment before. The animated speck which crawls away before his eyes, he infers to be an insect, and to be as complicated as insects usually are. That he cannot discern its parts does not prevent him from believing that such exist. Nor is his belief arbitrary and ungrounded ; it rests upon his experiences of things and the variations of things in his experi- The Mind and the World 7 ence. Moreover, lie has had abundant opportunity to remark the fact that what appears to the sense continuous when observed from a distance, may be recognized as presenting many a gap when seen from a nearer point. It is far from inconceivable to him that bodies which seem continuous should really be com- posed of atoms separated by considerable intervals. Finally, the thought that different combinations of atoms should exhibit dif- ferent properties does not strike him as surprising. He who has brewed a bowl of punch, or looked on at the manufacture of a pudding, has observed that things in combination do not have the same properties as the same things taken separately, and he can readily generalize this experience so as to make it cover cases which have not yet fallen within his experience, and even cases which can never enter his experience directly, but for the reality of which he has credible evidence of some sort. The plain man has already reasoned as do the chemist and the physicist, but he has not carried his reasonings so far, nor has he been as accurate and systematic. Had he not had such experiences as I have described, the doctrine of molecules and atoms would strike him as incomprehensible ; and, indeed, had the man of science not had such experiences, he would never have framed the hypothesis in question. There would have been lacking the basis demanded by scientific hypotheses, the foundation in experienced fact with- out which they can have no sort of significance. The truth that the man of science occupies essentially the same standpoint as the plain man may be illustrated, not merely by a reference to those sciences which have to do directly with existing things, whether they be regarded as perceptible or as imperceptible to the senses ; it may be illustrated by a reference to the abstract sciences as well. Some mathematical knowledge is possessed by every civilized man who is not intellectually deficient. He can count things, add and subtract, multiply and divide. These same things are done by the mathematician, and, with the aid of an ingenious system of symbols, are done in a very complicated way. The plain man reflects but little upon the nature of numbers ; his aim is to use them. The relativity of number he has learned at a very early age ; he knows that the same bit of wood may be both a yard long and three feet long, and that one dozen is the equivalent of twelve units. But it does not occur to him to ask himself precisely what happens in his 8 The Content of Consciousness mind when it conceives of something as a unit. The science of arithmetic does not, or at least it need not, trouble itself about such matters a whit more than he. We all know, in a certain dim, unanalytic way, what we mean by a unit and by the successive addition of units. We know what it is to grasp together as a whole a number of individuals, to separate a whole into its con- stituent parts, and to compare two wholes and find them equal or unequal. The arithmetician may assume this knowledge to be present in the mind of the man whom he undertakes to instruct ; and may, proceeding upon this basis, show him how to repeat in more and more complicated ways, operations which, in a simple form, he has been accustomed to perform from his very childhood. If the pupil desires, not so much to perform the operations in question, as rather to pry curiously into their ultimate nature, he may be referred to the psychologist, the logician, or the meta- physician. The arithmetician is in no way bound to answer questions touching such topics as these. The same thing is true in geometry. Every man has some notion of what is meant by a point, a line, a surface, and a solid, however abortive may prove his attempts at definition. He knows that even a very small surface is not to be confounded with a point, and that a narrow strip of surface is not a line. He is willing to affirm with confidence that the thinnest sheet of ice has two faces, and not one only. The axioms assumed by the geometrician appear to him reasonable, because he seems to find them verified in his experience ; and, indeed, he seems to himself always to have known them, although it would not have occurred to him to state them in that general form. He can see that a straiglit line is shorter than a crooked one joining two points. When he con- templates a triangle before him, he sees, and he was able to see before he studied the mathematics, that the sum of the three internal angles is greater than any one or any two of those angles taken alone. The exact determination of the sum of the three angles, and, in general, the exact determination of any geometrical relations save the very simplest, can only come when he has had the proper schooling ; although individuals may differ rather widely in their conception of the proper meaning to be given to the phrase, " the very simplest relations," and some may be able to see at a glance what others can only be brought to see with a good deal of assistance. The Mind and the World 9 There is, then, no absolute line dividing the geometrical knowledge possessed by all normal minds from that possessed by the geometrician. The knowledge of the latter is more exact, more exactly expressed, and it covers a far wider field, since it is possible by the aid of scientific methods to perceive a multitude of relations which it is beyond the power of the untutored mind to grasp. But the fundamental notions of geometry are taken from common experience, and the world of space and of things in space remains essentially the same, after one has become familiar with geometrical reasonings, that it was before. The geometri- cian is under no obligations to ask himself how it is possible for the mind to know extended things, to enter into speculations regarding the nature of space, or even to attempt to solve the con- tradictions which seem to stare him in the face when he reflects upon the continuousness of space and the possibility of its infinite divisibility. All these problems remain, and call for a solution, after the geometrician has done his work. But there is no good reason why they should be laid upon the shoulders of the mathe- matician, nor does it seem that they can be solved by the employ- ment of the methods which he is accustomed to use in his work. If we turn from such sciences as we have been discussing to the science of psychology, we find that the case is in no wise different. We have seen that a certain amount of psychological knowledge is possessed by the plain man before he has made any attempt at scientific accuracy, but we have also seen that his knoAvledge of the mind cannot but be fragmentary and indefinite, unsystematic and unsatisfactory. It must differ from that pos- sessed by the psychologist somewhat as the knowledge of plants common to intelligent persons who take an interest in them differs from the knowledge of the botanist, or as the mathematical knowl- edge of common life differs from that of the mathematician. The difference is here, as in the other cases, a difference rather of degree than of kind. This may be clearly seen from the descriptions given, in the handbooks of psychology, of the way in which the plain man has attained to the psychological knowledge which he enjoys. We there find that the subject of our discussion has had recourse to introspection, that he has made use of the objective method, and that he has not confined himself to mere observation, but has sometimes experimented. Experience of his own conscious states 10 The Content of Consciousness has given him the key which is to make significant the expressions and actions of other men and of the brutes. He has certainly observed these expressions and actions, and has framed a more general notion of mind than he could have done by a mere exami- nation of his own mental processes. And every time that he has sought by persuasion, or by any other means, to produce a given mental state in another, he has employed experiment, as does the galopin who rides on the back platform of the bob-tailed car, at a personal inconvenience to himself, with the avowed purpose of getting the driver " wild." Of course, such introspection as he has attempted has been blind and instinctive ; his observation has been loose and inaccurate ; his experiments were undertaken for no scientific purpose, and some of them sin in all sorts of ways against the canons of scientific experiment. Nevertheless, they remain introspection, observation, and experiment. The differ- ence between the plain man and the psychologist does not lie in the fact that the latter uses any method peculiar to himself, esoteric and above the comprehension of the unlearned. It is simply a case of the difference everywhere found between the scientific and the unscientific, between the man who applies methods carefully and seeks accurate and exhaustive knowledge of a subject, and the man who feels his way blindly, going only so far as he is compelled to go by immediate practical needs. The knowledge of mind gained by the plain man is loose and vague, more or less inconsistent, and very limited in extent. Yet it is, as far as it goes, a knowledge of mind, not different in kind from that of the psychologist, and obtained in the same way. Now that psychology is emerging from that ill-defined medley which has passed by the name of philosophy, and is taking its place as a distinct discipline, it is gradually coming to be accepted that the psychologist must occupy much the same standpoint as the ordinary man. I do not, of course, mean that he must be as loose and careless in his thinking, but merely that he must be scientific rather than metaphysical, accepting without question the assumptions upon which the natural sciences rest, and investigating the phenomena of mind as they investigate material phenomena. It is only necessary to compare the psychology of a generation or two ago with that of the present day, to see how strong is the current which sets for psychology as natural science. The change is both natural and necessary ; it is only another instance of the The Mind and the World 11 division of labor which always follows the successful exploitation of the various fields of investigation, and of which the history of science furnishes so many instances. It is coming to be seen that the psychologist, like the student of the physical sciences, may legitimately restrict the scope of his investigations ; that he may refuse to attempt the solution even of problems which naturally suggest themselves to one laboring in that particular field, if it is not necessary to solve them in the attainment of the definite ends which the psychologist sets out to reach. There seems the more reason for his position when it is seen that the problems referred to — which may, as a class, be termed epistemological or meta- physical — cannot be solved without an apparent repudiation, certainly without a thorough analysis and revision, of those assumptions upon the basis of which psychological investigations more and more commonly, and very conveniently, proceed. In harmony with this position the psychologist assumes an external real world, the world of matter and motion. In this world there are organized bodies presenting certain peculiar phe- nomena which he regards as indications of mental action. He accepts a plurality of minds distinct from each other and from the system of material things, each standing in a peculiar and intimate relation to one body. Each mind knows directly its own states, and knows everything else by inference from those states, receiving messages along certain bodily channels and reacting along others. Upon this basis he strives to give an accurate account of the con- tents of minds and to trace the history of their development. He stands upon the same ground as the ordinary man, and, as has been said above, he follows the same methods in his investigations, making use of introspection, observation, and experiment. He applies the methods in a broader and more scientific way; he is clearer, and more exact and thorough ; but he remains a student of " natural science." However he may modify, as a result of his studies, his views of minds and of their relation to a material world, he still holds to the existence of distinct individual minds in certain relations to such a world and through that to each other. He conceives each as shut up to its representations of things, and dependent upon messages conveyed to it from without, as does the disciple of Locke. Ideas are, to him, like images in a mirror, numerically distinct from the things which they represent, and of which they give information. 12 The Content of Consciousness In all this there is a distinct advance upon the knowledge of minds possessed by the unscientific. Not only does the careful and systematic application of the methods of investigation result in a much larger, better established, and better arranged mass of information, but the clear statement of the assumptions upon whicli the science rests is an important gain. Somewhat as the knowl- edge of the child differs from that of the man does tiie knowledge of the plain man differ from that of the psychologist. The dis- tinction between the self and the external world wdiich exists vaguely in the childish mind has grown more definite in the mature mind, indefinite as it may be even there. In the mind of the psychologist such distinctions have attained a still greater degree of definiteness. For example, whereas the child scarcely thought about his ideas of things at all, or distinguished between his mind and his body, or the minds and bodies of others, to the man these distinc- tions have become familiar. He now regards his ideas of things as distinct from things, and as, in a sense, representative of things. He knows that he may have false ideas of things, and that it is quite possible for the idea and the thing to be very different. He knows that ideas come to him through the avenues of the senses, and that disturbances of the sense may cause a modification of the idea, while the temporary or permanent closing of the avenue causes the temporary or permanent loss of the corresponding set of messages from the outer world. He regards his ideas as in his mind, and he is very apt to look upon his mind as, not merely re- lated to, but in his body — preferably in his head. Moreover, he distinguishes vaguely between himself, a something he can scarcely even attempt to define, and the ideas of which he is conscious. But he does not confound this self with the body, or with any external thing. He has thus arrived at a consciousness of two worlds rather strongly contrasted, an inner and an outer ; nor is his state of mind to be confused v/ith the far more indefinite state of the childish mind. Certain distinctions, before merely implicit, have emerged into the foreground of consciousness. But it is to be remarked that, altliough the plain man distin- guishes between his ideas of things and tlie things which they represent, he is guilty of an inconsistency in vaguely believing that he somehow knows external things directly, and not merely through his ideas. He is quite ready, it is true, to assent to the The Mbid and the World 13 general statement that he and others may have false ideas, and may sometimes be deceived about things. He may have experienced hallucinations, he has certainly had dreams, and he has noticed that the same object may look and feel differently when presented to the sense in different ways. It is because he has had these and certain other experiences that he is impelled to make the distinc- tion between external things and our representative ideas of them. But he has not reflected sufficiently upon such experiences ; and when he stands in front of an object, within a reasonable distance of it, it does not occur to him to regard the object as merely an ex- ternal cause of an internal experience — which may, theoretically at least, be a false and misleading experience. He is confident that he du-ectly knows the object out there before him, and the inter- vention of a representative is overlooked. Here the psychologist is more thoroughgoing. He, too, distinguishes between external things and our ideas of them, making the ideas representative of the objects. But he realizes that, when he has done this, he must not again confound the objects and their representatives, and thus lose the distinction which he has drawn. He insists that the external world of things must in every instance be regarded as numerically distinct from the copies of it built up in indi^ddual minds ; and that, conse- quently, all his own experiences, however vividly they may seem to give him immediate knowledge of external things, are never- theless merely representatives of the things in question. In other words, the psychologist admits that the objects of which he is immediately conscious, and which by the plain man are assumed to be external things, are not really constituent parts of the external world, but are, so to speak, duplicates of these, which exist in the mind itself, and merely stand for what is external. The plain man who looks at an object before him and feels impelled to believe that he is directly conscious of the thing out there in space, may be thrown into perplexity by the very simple experiment of pressing gently upon the side of one of his eyeballs. The object seen is at once doubled. It is fair to ask him whether both of these things seen are the real object, or, if not, whether the one has any better claim to that title tlian the other. If he does not see the real object when his eyes are tampered with, but sees only images, he may well ask himself whether what he saw before was the real object, or merely an 14 The Content of Consciousness image of it. The psychologist solves such problems by declaring all the objects of which we are immediately conscious to be mere representatives of what is without, but maintains that the repre- sentatives obtained tlirough the sense-organs, under certain normal conditions, give truer information regarding the world beyond than those gained under other conditions. It is of course incum- bent upon him to support this position by evidence, and evidence of a kind he can undoubtedly furnish. But there is still another way in which the psychologist's view of the mind differs, or ought to differ, from that of the unscien- tific. The latter has gotten so far as to recognize the existence of ideas, of conscious states, and to distinguish them from external objects, as we have seen. But he believes vaguely in the existence of a self^ which is distinct from any or all of its conscious states, which in some sense underlies them, or has them, and which is the agent in knowing, feeling, and willing. How this self or " I " knows or acts, he does not pretend to say ; even what it is, he can- not make intelligible to himself or to others ; but he believes that it is, and that it should not be confounded with the things which it knows or upon which it exercises its activity. There is, of course, some danger of injustice in attributing to a man beliefs which have never emerged in his mind to any degree of clearness and definiteness, but it seems safe to say that the plain man believes, vaguely and indefinitely, in the sort of a self indicated above. He thinks that he is conscious of something of the kind, and the lan- guage which we have all inherited and daily employ is well adapted to foster such a belief. We say : " I think," " I feel," " I will," and the " I" in our thought vaguely stands for a something different from all mental states whatever. It is a something big with mystery and possible misconception. To the psychologist, however, a mind is, or should be, nothing more than a transcript of the external world supplemented by certain conscious states not supposed to have their protot3'i)es without, feelings of pleasure, pain, etc. If we use the word "idea" to cover broadly all those things, which, according to the less scientific view, the mind "has," we may say that the psychologist should regard the mind as wholly composed of ideas, and should regard his task as accomplished when he has satisfactorily analyzed and arranged these. A mind is, of course, a very complex little world, and the phenomena it presents are by no means easy to The Mind and the World 15 analyze and classify. Some things in it seem to stand out clearly; some remain, after our best efforts, dim and vague. It is quite conceivable that certain things, commonly supposed to have their being in such a world, should turn out, upon investigation, to be mere chimeras. It is not difficult, in the obscurity which still covers much of our mental life, to confound one thing with another, to create a phantasm, or to seek diligently for the solution of a problem which should never have been proposed for solution. These truths the psychologist should acknowledge ; and the diffi- culties of his task should not lead him to jump to unintelligible or merely tautological explanations of obscure mental phenomena, nor despair of analyzing into its elements what has heretofore resisted his efforts at analysis. He need not deny the conscious- ness of self experienced by the plain man and the psychologist alike ; but he may legitimately expect to find it, when subjected to careful examination, a mental state, not wholly different from other mental states, and containing nothing hopelessly mysterious. He simply abandons his task when he introduces obscure meta- physical notions to piece out his incomplete psychological knowl- edge ; and in so far as he does this, he must renounce the claim to be, in any just sense of the word, a man of science. I have said that the psychologist does, or should^ regard minds as consisting wholly of conscious states, and it has been necessary to speak thus guardedly because there are still not a few psycholo- gists who cling to an older and a less scientific way of regarding the mind. But the scope and methods of the science of psychol- ogy are coming to be more and more definitely limited ; and to my mind, at least, there is little doubt that the psychologist of the future will regard it as a work of supererogation to enter upon the discussion of the nature or functions of any self, or ego, or "knower" which cannot be resolved into a complex of mental elements. That the current is running in this direction appears to be abundantly evident. As I purpose somewhat later to revert to this topic, and give definite reasons why the psychologist should abandon the older view, I shall say no more upon the subject at present. From the foregoing, it is plain that the differences between the knowledge of minds common to all intelligent persons and that peculiar to the student of psychology, are sufficiently important. But it is also clear that a recourse to psychology IG Tlie Content of Consciousness will not solve all the problems which arise out of the experience of things which we all possess. The psychologist describes the development of a consciousness, and endeavors to give an accurate account of its contents ; but he assumes, as does every student of natural science, the existence of a world of material things in rela- tion to our mental states. He may tell us how we come to build up a mental image of a system of extended things, but he is no more bound to tell us what is the ultimate nature of space than is the physicist. He pictures the development of a consciousness in time, and he tries to explain how we come to form the notion of time, but we have no right to ask him what time is, or whether it is in itself subjective or objective. His work touches much more closely, it is true, such problems as these, than does the work of the physicist ; we feel impelled to ask him his opinion upon such points at many stages ot his progress. But he has a right to refuse us an answer, on the ground that he is prosecuting studies in a natural science, that his science rests, like others, upon assumptions which may be further analyzed, but that it is more convenient to refer the carrying out of such analyses to a special discipline, which is similarly related to many sciences. As a psychologist, he is justified in putting such things aside, and in remaining upon the plane of the common understanding, the plane of natural science. There is, of course, much that is vague in the thinking of the man who rests wholly on the plane of natural science. The physicist may have no very clear notion of all that he means by matter and energy, and yet he may be a good physicist. He may experiment with ingenuity, and observe and record phenom- ena with accuracy. And the psychologist may have the vaguest of notions as to the whole connotation of the word " mind," or of the phrase "a material world," and yet he maybe a good psycholo- gist and materially add to our knowledge of minds. If he has not carried on with some measure of success the sort of reflective thinking demanded in metaphysics, he will probably mix from time to time with his psychology more or less crude material that is not strictly psychological. But this is on his part a work of supererogation. He has the right, as has the physicist, to work in his own field, and to make use of some concepts which he has not completely analyzed. CHAPTER II THE INADEQUACY OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL STANDPOINT It is easily apparent that the position taken by the plain man and by the psychologist touching the relation of minds to an external world calls for further criticism, and cannot be regarded as final except within the field of psychology. It is, indeed, a convenient fiction, and must not be accepted as though it were a literal statement of the truth. Upon examination it turns out, when taken literally, to be flatly self-contradictory, and thus to annihilate itself. And since this position is natural to all men, so long as their thinking remains upon the plane of the common understanding, and the need of subjecting it to further criticism is evident only to the few who have made some progress in reflec- tive thought, it is well worth while to spend a little time in the examination of the psychological standpoint, and to make the above-mentioned contradiction stand out with distinctness. We have seen that this view of the mind and the world assumes that each mind has only its representative images of things, and cannot directly attain to the things themselves. When it asks how a given mind comes to have a knowledge of an external thing, it concerns itself with the messages that have been conveyed to the mind by means of the bodily senses — with the materials, so to speak, out of which the image has been built up. It describes in detail the process of building up such an image, and distinguishing sharply between the image and the eorresponding thing, it maintains that the mind knows only so much about the thing as is contained in this image and in other images obtained in a similar way. It admits that, given an image in the absence of the thing (an hallucination), the mind will have absolutely no way of knowing the thing to be absent except by referring to its other experiences and assuming this one, as abnormal, to be a false representative, and without a corre- sponding reality behind it. In other words, it shuts the mind up c 17 18 TJie Content of Consciousness to its own circle of consciousness, and makes the external world present to it only by proxy. The outer world, as the mind imme- diately knows it^ is a complex mental experience, built up out of mental elements, and not the real outer world at all. Thus the very idea " outer " is, to the mind possessing it, only a some- thing in consciousness — an inner representative of genuine ex- ternality. It is not a real " outer," but merely its image. Let us try by the aid of an illustration to get a clear notion of this view of the mind. Let us imagine a man imprisoned in a doorless and windowless cell, whose heavy walls shut out every aspect of the luminous and resonant world without. He has always been thus a prisoner, in solitude and darkness, and in a silence broken only by the click of the telegraphic key which is the sole avenue by which messages may arrive from the unknown beyond the walls which encompass him. He can grope his way about his cell, and has, hence, some experience of space and of things in space. He can make sounds which he can himself hear. And he has, in addition, the series of sounds mentioned as pro- duced independently of him, and constituting messages from another world. To such elements is his experience limited. What sort of a world can he build up out of such experiences^ and how must he proceed in its construction ? It is evident that he is not in the position of one who has thus been im- prisoned after having enjoyed an extended experience of things as they appear to those who walk abroad. He is not possessed of the secret which makes a message at once recognizable as a message, and turns a series of meaningless sounds into a wealth of information regarding, not sounds merely, but also a variety of other things which bear little resemblance to them. It re- quires a certain amount of information to be able to recognize that a given experience is a representative of something beyond itself ; a message does not announce itself as such under all circumstances ; and one may gaze long upon the cross-section of a bit of cord without being able to guess, from that single experience taken by itself, what manner of thing it is to which this little plane surface belongs, or, indeed, whether it belongs to anything at all. One cannot have the least idea that a suc- cession of sounds is a message, and has come from witliout, so long as one knows absolutely nothing about it save that it is found within. The Prisoners in the Den, which Phito has The Inadequacy of the Psychological Standpoint 19 described for us, could not know the shadows upon which their eyes were fixed to be shadows, so long as they had no experience of real things with which to contrast them. Thus our prisoner must build up the world of his knowledge out of such experiences as he actually possesses, and we must be careful, in picturing his condition, not to attribute to him possibilities which can arise only out of the possession of the larger experience which we ourselves possess. He has some knowledge of space and of things in space, and it is conceivable that, by what would be to him a bold flight of the constructive imagination, he might imagine, and perhaps come to believe in the reality of, a much larger material world than that with which he is immediately familiar. He could conceive the theoretic possibility of his passing the barriers which hem him in, and of finding other real things of the same general nature as the things he knows. In doing this he would be doing what we all do when we speculate regarding the possibility of a boundless ma- terial universe, or create in imagination an unseen world of atoms and molecules in relation to the world of things we im- mediately perceive. And having perceived that sounds made to originate in one part of his cell could be heard in another part, and that sounds may give some indication of the nature of the occurrence that brings them into being, he might even come to refer those sounds, for which he was not himself responsible, to imagined occurrences in the outer world which he had con- ceived, and recognize them as in a certain sense messages. How far human ingenuity could go in building up, upon so slender a basis of experienced fact, an idea of an outer world bearing a resemblance to the real outer world which surrounds our prisoner, it is perhaps hardly profitable to attempt to guess. That human ingenuity may do much in extending the limits of knowledge beyond the confines of the immediately perceptible, all who have some acquaintance with the results attained by science must admit. But certain things should be carefully noted : — In the first place, it is clear that the subject of our illustration must find in his own actual experiences some sort of justification for the transition to an unseen world which he now conceives as beyond them. He must reason by analogy, passing from like to like, from a limited to a possible wider experience not dissimilar from the former. Did he not find in his experience some fact 20 The Content of Consciousness wliich could best be explained by the assumption of such a world — I mean really explained, as facts are explained within his experience — tlie larger world would remain to him, if he framed the conception of it at all, a mere dream. It could not be a legiti- mate object of belief. In the second place, it is clear that the larger world arrived at by inference cannot contain any element not present in some form in the little world of the experiences which we are supposing to be actually present. The man who has come to believe in it has not created a new world, he has merely extended in thought the world in which he finds himself. Had he not already an experience of space and of things in space, did he not know by actual experience what is meant by spaces, he would not have the elements which, fitted together, constitute his idea of a larger world. Thus we see that the larger world of which we are now speaking cannot possibly be a world of colors. No triumph of ingenuity can transport our captive within " the borders of light." However he may exercise his ingenuity to enlarge the world in which he is condemned to live, it must remain forever a world of essentially the same character. How could he possibly so put together experiences of sound or of touch as to make them truly representative, not of other sounds or touches, or combinations of such, but of a something so diverse as colors ? Here we find a gulf, which must remain forever impassable, a gulf which he can- not even recognize as a gulf, for there is to him nothing at all in that direction, not even a void — there is, indeed, not so much as a direction, there is nothing. Now the isolation of the mind, as conceived by the psycholo- gist, is far more complete than that of the hypothetical inhabitant of the cell. It is, in fact, cut off from the external world as a whole, as our prisoner is cut off from the world of colors. There is simply no bridge leading from the inner world to the outer. That this is not an extreme statement of the case it needs only a moment's reflection to reveal ; although the fact appears at first sight to be contradicted by the existence of the several avenues of sense, furnishing to the mind a mass of information of a very varied nature. One is tempted to picture the mind, not as imprisoned in a gloomy cell, and laboriously working out for itself, by the aid of analogical reasoning, a hypothetic world, which constitutes a somewhat shadowy continuation of the world The Inadequacy of the Psychological Standpoint 21 of immediately experienced fact ; but rather as the inhabitant of a fair mansion well provided with windows on every side, and as being able to gaze freely upon a varied and extended landscape. But this impulse is checked at once by the thought of what the psychologist's position really implies. The mind is, he teaches, quite shut up, so far as its immediate knowledge goes, to its own ideas ; and though it may think of an external world, it is wholly impossible that it should look out of the windows and into the world beyond, at any moment of its existence. That there are such things as windows it can only know by inference ; the windows are not immediately perceived. Nothing is immedi- ately perceived save sensations and other mental elements, which we may indicate by the use of the term "idea." The fact that these elements are of diverse sorts, and that they may be built up into complex constructions, does not in itself prove that they are something representative of a world without, and that they furnish some sort of a picture of such a world. A complex of ideas is, after all, only a complex of ideas ; and the belief that there is in existence anything beyond the ideas and their actual and possible combinations, should, if it is to be a rational belief, be founded upon some sort of evidence. Such evidence would be furnished, if, for example, a mind could have immediate knowledge of some external occurrence resulting in a stimulation of one of the bodily organs of sense, could have similar knowledge of this bodily organ and its con- dition of stimulation, and could perceive a conscious sensation to be the effect of such external occurrences. Given such an experi- ence, there would be at least a starting-point for further rea- sonings. Sensations not thus perceived to be the result of external happenings could be inferred to be such. And a direct comparison of things external and internal in a few instances might furnish material for a general theory regarding the rela- tions existing between the two worlds, and the similarity or diversity of nature obtaining between them. Could one from time to time apply an observant eye to the peep-hole in the curtain which separates the stage, upon which our conscious life enacts its drama, from the theatre of the larger world beyond, even fugitive glimpses would serve to show that the stage is but a limited part of a larger whole, and stands in relation to the rest. But such a glimpse of the external world the psychologist 22 Tlie Content of Consciousness denies us, as he must, when he has once made and carried out with impartial thoroughness the distinction between ideas and the things for which they stand, mental representatives and the realities which they are supposed to represent. Yet even where all direct knowledge of the external world is denied, it is conceivable that a mind might, under certain con- ditions, obtain some knowledge of an external world of a certain sort. It is, however, very important to remark these conditions, and to remark also the sort of an external world that could be reached. We have seen that the man in the cell could conceivably extend his knowledge beyond the world of his cell, by reasoning in a legitimate way upon a basis of experienced fact. But we have seen also that the outer world must be for him a continua- tion and extension of the world he knows, not something quite different in kind. It must be something really capable of repre- sentation by elements actually given in his experience, and what is not thus given, even in its elements, cannot be for him an outer world at all. The same thing is true in the present instance. If, for example, we conceive of a mind as occupying a certain portion of space, as containing ideas which are extended things — not mere non-extended representatives of extended things, but really extended — then it is quite conceivable that a mind may, stand- ing upon a basis of actual experience, represent to itself, in some intelligible sense of those words, an external world lying beyond itself. It knows what extension means ; it knows what it means when it speaks of things as beyond each other. It can, by a mental construction, conceive symbolically, as we always do conceive symbolically, immense spaces not given in any immediate experience. But the external world thus conceived would not be a world of a wholly new and different kind from that directly known. It would be, as was the outer world of the man in the cell, a continuation of the little world directly perceived. It goes without saying that such a world must not be a merely gratuitous assumption. Tliere must be some good reason for believing it to exist, or the belief has no justification. More- over, the justification must be found within the little world which serves as the sole basis for the whole construction. Now it is of the first importance to remark that no such conditions as the one adduced are fulfilled iu the conception of The Inadequacy of the Psychological Standpoint 23 the mind furnished us by the psychologist. He does not con- ceive of the mind as occupying a small portion of space, and as passing in its knowledge beyond the limits of that portion in the manner described. He does not mean by an external world a mere continuation of the internal world, and a world of the same general character. Such a continuation of the world of ideas would give us only a more extended circle of ideas, not a world of things supposed to differ in kind from ideas of whatever sort. The psychologist usually tells us, for example, that the inner world exists only in time, while the outer world exists both in time and in space. In other words, nothing within the mind is extended, but material things do possess this property. But if this be so, it is fair to ask, How can the mind find even a starting-point from which it may represent to itself in any way a world of extended things ? It may build to- gether into a system the ideas that it has ; it may observe their connections and the order in which they succeed each other ; it may even look forward with confidence to experiencing in a different way ideas which it has not as yet experienced except as images in the imagination ; it may thus extend the world of its experiences by believing in the possibility of further experiences. But in all this there is not the least justification for passing from a world of actual or possible experiences to a something of a quite different kind. For such a procedure there is not that first founda- tion in experience without which the whole fabric of one's reason- ing must, in every case, become as unsubstantial as a city in the clouds. Moreover, since there is in the circle of ideas no element which can, in an intelligible sense of the word, represent an ex- tended thing, there is not only no justification for an extension of knowledge to a realm beyond consciousness, but there is not even the possibility of framing the least conception of what such an ex- tension may mean. The man in the cell may, in imagination, extend the little world of the things which he knows beyond the limits given in his experience, though he may doubt whether he is justified in believing in the existence of such an outer world. Still, he at least means something when he conceives it. His mind is not a mere blank. But if his experience furnished him with no knowledge of extension whatever, he would be as unable even to think of such an outer world as he is now to conceive the world of 24 The Content of Consciousness light and colors. Thus it is with the hypothetical mind of the psychologist. It cannot even conceive the possibility of an '' outer " world which is not really an " inner," a mere distinction within the circle of its ideas. Not only is there no justification for an advance, but there is not even a direction in which there may be an advance. There is not a limit, as we ordinarily conceive of a limit ; there is simply nothing. And what has been said of extension may be said of any other quality attributed to the outer world which is Vv^holly denied to the inner. There is no conceivable way in which a knowledge of it may be attained by a mind circumstanced as is the one we have been picturing. For such a mind it is incon- ceivable that the external world should exist at all. Such must be the condition of a mind shut up to an immedi- ate knowledge of its own ideas solely. Its images of things cannot be to it images giving information regarding things be- yond them. They must themselves be things ; the only things it knows, unless we include other things of the same kind, reached by an inference from these, in the manner indicated above. In contemplating its condition of complete insulation, we are struck by the oddity of the fact that this whole doctrine rests upon reasonings in which it is assumed that the mind is not shut up to its own experiences, but directly knows an exter- nal world of things. The contradiction is palpable and unmis- takable ; between premises and conclusion there is an abyss which may be concealed by obscurity and confusion of thought, but which cannot be bridged by any legitimate procedure. The argument supposed to yield the conclusion in question may be set forth briefly as follows : — A man looks at his own body, the body of his neighbor, and some material object, in front of which both are standing, and lie seems to himself to be immediately conscious of all three. He grants his neighbor a knowledge of the object, reasoning as I have in- dicated in the chapter preceding, and distinguislies between tliis man's knowledge of the object and the object itself. The former he makes a representative of the latter, connects it in thought with the man's brain, and admits that it may even not wholly resemble the object as he sees it. He holds that the man is not directly conscious of the object itself, but infers it through the representative image. He then applies the same reasoning to himself, and concludes that he is liimself not really conscious of The Inadequacy of the Psychological Standpoint 25 the three objects with which he started, but only of representative images. Through such images he must infer the whole outer world — his own body, other men, other things. But if he is not really conscious of his own body, the other man's body, and the real object, what becomes of his reasoning ? Of what is the other man's image representative, and with what is it connected? Is it representative of an external object? The object which it has been assumed to represent is now seen to be an image in his own consciousness, and there is not a shadow of evidence that it represents any other. With what brain is it connected ? The brain belonging to that body which is under observation ? That body, too, is now seen to be his own image, and is relegated to consciousness. And what do his own images represent, and where are they ? His image of the object cannot represent that object seen out there in front of his body. That object is his image, if he is shut up to images, and his body as perceived is another image in his consciousness with the object. The real object, the real body, are things to be inferred. They are not open to direct inspection. His image of the thing must not be referred to the brain, which belongs to the body of whose existence he is directly aware. It must be referred to a brain in a totally different world. Where look for evidence that it is connected with any such brain in any such body? Yet evidence must be adduced for all this. The doctrine that there is an external world, and that it is mirrored by a number of minds which are shut up to their own representations of it, is not usually advanced as a gratuitous fiction. It is supposed to rest upon evi- dence. Is not one conscious of one's own mental experiences? Can one not observe the relations of these to the material world ? Can one not arrive by analogical reasoning at some notion of the mental states of others, and apply one's results to one's self ? The appeal is to experience, to observation, and induction. And yet, if the conclusion of the argument be true, the foundation upon which it rests is a delusion. If one be really shut up to one's own mental states, one has never observed their relations to material things, and never inferred from changes in material things the mental states of another. It is a strange argument that rests upon an assumption which its conclusion declares to be false. The difficulty here pointed out is not assumed gratuitously. It is really inseparable from the psychological position both of the 26 TJie Content of Consciousness plain man and of the psychologist, tliough it is forced into greater prominence by the superior consistency and clearness of the latter. The plain man distinguishes, in his loose fashion, be- tween a man's ideas of things and the things themselves, and he admits that if the ideas are not true representatives, their pos- sessor will not truly know the things. The psychologist makes more distinct the line of separation, and conceives the man's whole experience of an outer world to be a mere copy of what is external, describing in detail the elements of which it is built up, and the process of its formation. Both hold, explicitly or implic- itly, that we perceive directly the outer world, and that we do not so perceive it, but only infer it. The contradiction is there. It is embedded in the very structure of the psychological position, the standpoint of common thought and of natural science. Psy- chology is not called upon to solve it, for it does not concern psychology. The psychologist has done and still does excellent work while simply disregarding it. It may safely be left to the metaphysician. And the metaphysician, if he be wise, will not quarrel with the psychological standpoint. He will recognize its value as a basis for work of a certain kind, and he will object to the psychol- ogist's mixing with his psychology reasonings which, however true and valuable in themselves, serve only to darken counsel when mingled injudiciously with other things. He may, as meta- physician, point out where the difficulty really lies, show why the psychologist's assumption need not lead to error, and indicate how the results obtained by him are true even for metaphysics, when restated in certain ways. But he will regard such discus- sions as more or less out of place in a text-book of psychology, and will regret finding them there, much as he would regret finding metaphysical reflections introduced to any great extent in a treatise on physics. To what has been advanced in the pages preceding, exception may be taken in two very different ways. It may be claimed, on the one hand, that the psychologist need not take, even provision- ally, so untenable and inconsistent a position as the one described, but may restate his facts at the outset, rejecting what is untrue or misleading, as the metaphysician proposes to do. On the other hand, one may hold to the psychological standpoint in a somewhat modified form, and attempt to remove the contradiction by declar- The Inadequacy of the Psychological Standpoint 27 ing that both the ideas and the things they represent are directly given in perception. Tlie first of these objections has already received an answer in the last chapter. I have there tried to show that the natural man finds himself in a world of things, and distinguishes between those things and his ideas of them. That he is not consistent and thoroughgoing in carrying out this distinction has been pointed out, and it has been shown that the psychologist goes further in this direction than he does. But it has been insisted that, how- ever psychology may improve upon the thinking of the natural man, it must, if it is to remain a natural science, remain upon the plane of the common understanding, accepting the standpoint of the natural man, a standpoint accepted by the natural sciences generally, and must avoid passing over to the sort of thinking which has by common consent come to be distinguished as meta- physical or epistemological. The two kinds of thinking are by no means the same, and one who does very good work upon the plane of natural science may still be incapable of doing good work of the latter kind, unless he has some degree of aptitude and has enjoyed some special training — a fact not infrequently over- looked, and sometimes with disastrous consequences. That the psychological view of the mind and the external world appeals to the common understanding as a natural one, must be evident to any one who has had the task of introducing classes of students to an acquaintance with the mental sciences. The distinction between ideas and the things they represent, the limiting the direct knowledge of the mind to the circle of its ideas, the description of the building up of a mental picture of an external world by the fitting together of the messages received from with- out — all this they find quite comprehensible and not incredible. It is only when they are asked to dissolve the very foundations of the world of ideas and things, with which they are uncritically familiar, by entering upon a metaphysical analysis which refuses to recognize such a view of things as ultimate, that they draw back in dismay. It is difficult for them to attain any intelligent comprehension of the new point of view. And this is equally true of those who are accustomed to work at all exclusively in any of the natural sciences. It is easy to see, when they make an excur- sion into philosophy, as they sometimes do, that they find it very hard not to carry over with them the assumptions upon which 28 The Content of Consciousness their work has proceeded in their own field. They are apt to remain psychologists when they think they have become philoso- phers. They cannot shake off the old ways of thinking. Since this is so, and since psychology can express its truths without recasting them from the standpoint of the metaphysician, it is surely wiser for the psychologist to pursue his investigations as do the workers in other natural sciences. Much modern psychological work is done in this way, and I can see no good reason why all should not be. The psychologist should accept without question an external world ; should assume that his own ideas of things represent it, and can be proved by observation to represent it truly ; should infer from the actions of other bodies ideas more or less like his own, which are representatives of ex- ternal things as are his ideas. He should then, in harmony with the psychological fiction that no one is directly conscious of exter- nal real things, assume that each mind is shut up to its own repre- sentations ; that the world is mirrored in each consciousness, and that the pictures of it in different minds may differ. To him each mind's knowledge of the external world should mean the presence in it of such a picture — of such and such mental elements arranged in such and such ways. He can then set before himself the difficult but perfectly definite task of discovering just the elements present in a consciousness, and the method of their arrangement. He may describe the building up of a conscious- ness, and may relate everything in it to the system of real things in an intelligible way. His work is, in a real sense of the word, scientific, and resembles closely what scientific men are trying to do in other fields. It does not demand metaphysical reflection. The best results are to be obtained in psychology, I feel sure, by holding firmly to this scientific standpoint. It is true that this position is not taken by all psychologists, or even by all psychologists who give abundant evidence that they are deeply influenced in much of their work by the spirit and the methods of modern scientific investigation. Such men may object, as some do object, that in starting with such a view of the mind we are starting with a rather complicated theor}^ and not merely with a number of observed facts. A science, they may maintain, should result in a theory, not begin with one. The objection seems plausible, but I tliink it is sufficiently answered by saying that, in accepting the psychological standpoint, we are The Inadequacy of the Psychological Standpoint 29 starting with what appear to the normal mind, untrained in meta- physical reflection, to be facts, and deserving of acceptance as such ; that until one has made some progress in the investigation of these, it is not clear what one should accept as ultimately true and what one should reject as misconception ; and that, here as everywhere, that method of investigation is the best which accomplishes the best results with the minimum expenditure of energy. It is quite true that the man who recognizes a sensation as a sen- sation, with all that that implies, is not performing the relatively simple operation of being conscious of that sensational content, ab- stracted from all else. He is really relating this content to the sys- tem of his experiences in rather a complicated way. But men perform such operations long before they have heard of psychology, and in building up the system of relatively exact knowledge which we call a special science, it is not necessary to begin at the very begin- ning. We may presuppose a certain amount of knowledge on the part of tkose to whom we speak and for whom we write. If every science had to justify all its assumptions before it proceeded with its special investigations, scientific treatises would have to be provided with prolegomena containing a mass of introductory matter which most authors would scarcely be in a position to fur- nish, which most readers would not need, and which many even of those to whom the body of the book was sufficiently intelligible, could not understand at all. Hence the psychologist may legitimately begin talking at the very outset of an external world and of sensations. His words will not be unintelligible even to a beginner^ and a thorough analysis of the conceptions which he is using may be postponed to some more convenient season. If we deny the psychologist the right to proceed upon the assumption of an external world and of minds mirroring it, insisting that he must first criticise these conceptions, where, I ask, shall we draw the line between the work of the psychologist and that of the metaphysician ? If we refuse to draw any such line, and thus to recognize the latter as having a field of his own, we must choose between two alternatives : either we must leave a number of very interesting questions un- answered, or we must burden psychological treatises with meta- physical disquisitions which have no necessary connection with the matter of which it is their chief purpose to treat, and with 30 The Content of Consciousness which it is certainly contrary to the more modern usage to burden them. To the second objection mentioned above as urged against the psychological position which cuts the mind off from a direct knowledge of things and shuts it up to the world of its own ideas, namely, the objection that the mind should not be regarded as thus isolated, but should be conceived as directly knowing, in the act of perception, both ideas and things — to this objection it is not difficult to find an answer. The psychological position is, as we have seen, self-contradictory ; but it has been indicated that the contradiction may be removed by a restatement which leaves unaffected any psychological truths which have been established by the accepted psychological methods of investigation. I shall try to show later how one may set about the removal of this con- tradiction, and thus prove that psychological truths really are truths, and are worthy of our acceptance. It will, I hope, become clear that the psychologist really describes the facts of our expe- rience, and that his statements, properly understood, are not con- tradicted by those facts. But such a justification of the psychologist cannot be found in the attempt to improve upon his position by distinguishing as he does between ideas and things, regarding ideas as, in a sense, representative of things, and some ideas as more or less like the things they represent, and then granting the mind a direct knowl- edge of the thing, as well as of its representative idea — placing idea and thing, so to speak, side by side before it. It is within the reach of every man to satisfy himself of the error of this posi- tion, for it is refuted by his simplest experiences. If consciousness testifies to anything clearly and unmistakably, it is to the fact that we do not, under normal circumstances, see things thus doubled. The inkstand in front of me I see. I see only one. It appears to be out in front of my body in real space. Is there also a copy of it somewhere else? perhaps, within my body? I perceive nothing of the sort. I have never perceived any kind of an ink- stand, whether original or representative, within my body. If I press upon the sides of my eyeballs in the manner before alluded to, I perceive two inkstands, and I can make both of these dance about. Are there now in my experience two originals and one image, or two images and one original ? I perceive nothing save tlie two inkstands, apparently of the same nature, which are both The Inadequacy of the Psychological Standpoint 31 in motion. If it be insisted that there is but one real inkstand before me, and that that one remains at rest, I answer, that this fact, if assented to by me, must be assented to as a consequence of a process of reasoning, for it is certainly not given within my immediate experience. I simply do not see anything of the kind. It is only the philosopher, or the man whose mind has been per- verted by intercourse with such, that can so impose upon his senses as to seem to himself, when he gazes upon a material object in front of him, to be conscious both of a copy and of an original. This doctrine, moreover, if taken up seriously into psychology, must be productive of much perplexity and distress. It must para- lyze the ordinary activities of the psychologist much as an incur- sion of the barbarians paralyzed the wonted industries of a busy and peaceful community. The psychologist enters, for example, upon a laborious description of the way in which a mind, by putting together and arranging the messages reaching it through the senses, builds up a more and more complete and satisfactory repre- sentation of an external world of things. He discusses the various elements of which such a consciousness must consist, limits the knowledge of the mind concerned to the materials which have been furnished to it, and holds that if any one class of elements be lacking, the mind's knowledge of the world will be correspond- ingly defective. But here is a doctrine which grants the mind a direct knowledge of external things independently of the existence in it of such a representative image. Of what importance, then, is the image, and what does it matter whether it be defective or not ? The mind will know things just the same, whether it has ideas of things or lacks them, and the function of ideas in knowing is not apparent. Upon this supposition a mind could conceivably know the external world and comprehend its properties and its happenings without having any ideas at all. Surely the psycholo- gist must stand aghast at such a possibility. What has become of his doctrine of the senses, of the conveyance of nervous impulses to the brain, of the elaboration of the impressions received, of the gradual emergence of a knowledge of things ? And how, on such a basis, can the psychologist explain the possibility of being deceived about the natures of things ? How explain an hallucina- tion ? If, in perception, there were immediately present to the mind, in addition to the image, also the thing represented by the 32 The Content of Consciousiiess image, no mistake as to the objective reality of the experience would be possible. The fact is that this doctrine simply cuts away the foundations of the science of psychology as it at present exists. This is not the direction in which we must look for a way of escape from the difficulty which seems to confront us when we occupy the psychological standpoint. For an indication of the right path I shall ask the reader to wait a little, and, in the meantime, I shall ask him to believe that the psychological standpoint is not without its justification, even if it cannot be regarded as final. CHAPTER III HOW THINGS ARE GIVEN IN CONSCIOUSNESS From what has already been said it should be plain that he who would subject the world of his experiences to reflective analy- sis must begin his labors with an examination of the world in which he seems to find himself — the world of common thought and common sense. In his attempt at critical reconstruction he must use the material at hand ; and he must employ words and phrases, in communicating his thought, which are the common property of the race, and which have been coined for the purpose of making distinctions recognized by men generally, and not those which may come to be marked by the more reflective. The metaphysician is a man, like other men, and may easily be misled into accepting as final, merely because he is accustomed to them, ways of thinking which sorely need revision ; and since he is compelled to take language as he finds it, and do his best with a decidedly imperfect instrument, he may easily be misunderstood when he is not really at fault. It is necessary for me to emphasize the last point, at this stage of my discussion, because I propose in this chapter to examine how things are given in consciousness. This expression may easily give rise to misconception. It may be taken to mean, and by the man who occupies the psychological standpoint it will most naturally be taken to mean, that I intend to describe certain impressions, made by an external world quite beyond consciousness, upon a particular mind. But the criticisms contained in the last chapter have, I hope, made it evident that we have no reason to believe that anything is literally " given " to consciousness in this way. If we really do find ourselves in an external world, and have any reason at all for admitting its existence, it must itself be " given in consciousness " in some sense of the words, and it only remains for us to discover in what sense. This inquiry I shall relegate to certain chapters D 33 34 The Content of Consciousness farther on in this work. Meanwhile, I ask the reader to follow me in marking certain distinctions in our way of being conscious of things, which, if clearly grasped, will be of no small service in helping us to approach the task intelligently. It is of the utmost importance to recognize that what is *' given in consciousness " may be given in consciousness in very different ways. In the first place, there is the distinction between that of which we are conscious vaguely and indefinitely, and that of which we have a distinct and analytic consciousness. Of this distinction even the unscientific man cannot be wholly ignorant, and it has been discussed at great length by the psychologist. No one pre- tends to recognize singly all the elements that enter into that highly complex mass of sensations which gives information of the various parts of the body. The man who gazes upon a landscape, and enjoys both the beauty of the scene and the manifold associa- tions to which it gives rise, knows that he cannot enumerate off- hand all of the elements which enter into his mental state and attribute to each its relative importance. The stream of our conscious life does not consist as a whole of sharply distinguished parts, although certain portions of it from time to time stand out distinctly from the rest and are known in a much more satisfactory way than are the other parts. It is like a picture with a few clear figures which detach themselves more or less vividly from a dark and indefinite background ; a picture peculiar in the fact that the figures which thus reveal themselves clearly keep changing, growing brighter or fading away and giv- ing place to others ; a picture ever varying, yet retaining in its general outlines the character which it had before. The fluctua- tions in the clearness with which given elements stand out from the rest are to some extent dependent upon our own volition. By attending to this element or that we give it a greater prominence, and drag it, as it were, into the light. The vague feeling of bodily discomfort may lead a man to notice that the chair upon which he is sitting must be an unusually hard one, or that his foot luis been drawn up under him in a cramped and unnatural position. The traveller viewing the landscape may deliberately single out certain features as especially pleasing, or consciously dwell upon some other scene, recalled by this one, and recognize it as largely account- ing for the emotion which inspires him. Tlie importance of the part played in our conscious life by its dimly conscious or scmicon- How Things are Given in Consciousness 35 scious elements most men are inclined, from a lack of reflection, to underestimate ; but the fact that there exist in consciousness the two kinds of elements, and also that elements are continually emerging from an unnoticed obscurity and taking, for a time, a position in the foreground of consciousness, where their character and their relations to other elements may be clearly discerned — these things are admitted by all. Reflection upon the foregoing makes it easy to assent to the statement that it is difficult to know Avhat the contents of con- sciousness really are. It seems at first sight absurd to maintain that a man does not know all that he is conscious of; and yet there is a sense of the words in which the statement is strictly true. The verb to know may be given more than one meaning. If we choose to take it in a very broad and loose sense, we may say that we undoubtedly know everything that exists in consciousness, however dimly it may exist. We are, of course, conscious of every- thing in consciousness — the statement is purely tautological — and we may, if we please, call this knowing it. But when we speak of knowing a thing, we ordinarily mean that we know it with some degree of clearness and definiteness. We mean that we can hold it up before the attention and scrutinize it, marking its peculiari- ties and distinguishing it from other things. The differences in the clearness with which things are known are not accurately determined by the unscientific, and the fact that there are such differences is apt to be overlooked. But when we have come to a recognition of the fact that, in great part, the contents of consciousness lie in obscurity, that the different ele- ments do not stand out from their background, and that they offer no little resistance to the attempt to bring them into the light, we can understand that the task of the psychologist is not an easy one. We cannot expect him to sit down and draw up without further ado an inventory of the elements in his conscious experi- ence. When he attempts to describe for us what he finds "given in consciousness," he is in no little danger of mixing truth with error, and he needs to be endowed both with caution and with dis- cernment. For example, the man who watches the diminishing speck which represents a vessel fading away on the horizon, reaches a point at w^hich he is uncertain whether he still sees the vessel or not. He does not experience a moment of clear vision, imme- 36 TJte Content of Consciousness diately followed by one in which the object is clearly recognized as absent. He experiences a series of gradual changes in which certainty passes into uncertainty, definiteness into indefiniteness. He continues to look, thinks, at one moment that he still sees the thing, at the next moment that he does not, and at still the next believes that he sees it again. In a legitimate sense of the words, he does not know what is in his own mind — whether he is ex- periencing a sensation or whether he is not. Sensations maybe vivid and unmistakably present ; but they may, on the other hand, approach the border line at which they fade out altogether, and their existence may easily be overlooked. The man who is quite sure that a hand has been laid upon his shoulder, may be unable to decide whether he has or has not been touched by a feather. There is no class of experiences which may not occupy this dim region of consciousness. A man may be in doubt whether he is hungry. He may be in doubt whether he is pleased. He may seriously debate whether he is still angry ; and he may wonder whether he is still in love. Some experiences in consciousness, even when they are present as vividly as it is possible for them to be, remain curiously vague and elusive. We may be strongly moved, and yet realize that it is quite impossible for us to describe in detail our emotion, although we dimly feel it to be a voluminous and a complex thing. In the second place, it is important to recognize that it is one thing to be "given in consciousness " directly, and another thing to be " given in consciousness " indirectly and by means of a memory-image. In our endeavors to make a careful analysis of what is given in consciousness, we must hold this or that experi- ence in the focus of attention; and in a vast number of instances what is thus held in the focus of attention must be the memory- image of the experience it is desired to analyze, and not the ex- perience itself. The man, for example, who is in a towering passion is in no condition to analyze, or even to attempt to analyze, the content of his consciousness at the time. This he can do only when he has grown cool enough to reflect, and when he has grown cool enough to reflect he has, of course, nothing left to work upon but the memory of his rage. Upon the general trustworthiness of memory all science must rest, and yet it must be recognized that everything that presents itself as a true memory-image should not ipso facto How Tilings are Given in Consciousness 37 be accepted as such. Here, as elsewhere, one experience must be corrected by another, and the truth must be arrived at as the result of a systematic investigation. Every thoughtful man is aware of the fact that, in the endeavor to recall a given scene, he can be even reasonably sure only of the more striking elements, which impressed him vividly at the time when he viewed it ; that he is in no small danger of misapprehending others ; and that he may easily introduce into the memory-image elements which were not present in any form in the original, and which may even be taken bodily from quite other scenes. Thus, if a man be required to draw the plan of a suite of rooms through which he has passed, and which he has inspected, it will usually be found that his sketch resembles in some respects what he has seen, but in others does not truly represent it. Doors and windows are not in their proper positions ; there are stretches of unbroken wall in the plan which were broken in the original, or vice versa ; the proportions of the several rooms are not correct. The man has not reproduced just what he has seen, and he has not reproduced anything which was in his imagination at the time of the inspection. Some elements in his representative image do not truly represent anything that was in his mind before. They are products of the creative imagination, not memories. And if there is this possibility of error in recalling mental ex- periences which belong to that province of our mental life the objects in which emerge more readily from obscurit}^ and stand out more clearly than those belonging to the rest, how great must be the danger of misrepresenting in memory other experiences, such as the complex emotions of anger or fear. If the elements in such experiences are to be distinguished from one another, they must be brought into the focus of attention individually, they must be held in the foreground of consciousness in some way. Yet such elements primarily occur in consciousness as an almost undistinguishable mass; we are not in the habit of picking them out as we do this or that tree in the landscape before us. We rather /ee? our anger than hnow it, and the exigencies of practical life do not compel us to pay attention to its elements as they do force us to notice the individual material objects that constitute a group. This brings me to a third, and a very important, consideration. It is clear that when we endeavor to attain to a clear, analytic 38 The Content of Consciousness knowledge of the content of some experience that we have had, we are not merely trying to reproduce that experience in the memory with fidelity and accuracy. The accurate reproduction of a vague and confused state of consciousness can only be a vague and confused state of consciousness. We do not seek to gain a mere reproduction ; what we seek to gain is a representative which, although it must be a true representative, must nevertheless differ in important respects from the experience for which it stands. Reflective thought does not merely reproduce common thought ; it analyzes it, breaking up complexes into their elements, and making those elements stand out independently, with fictitious clearness. The plain man thinks in complexes, and gives himself little conscious effort to analyze them. He sees a man before him, and although he is quite able to distinguish, if asked to do so, between the visual experience which he actually has and other possible visual experiences of the same object, as also between all his visual experiences and his tactual, yet he does not, until he is led to do so by the psychologist, reflect upon and clearly realize the complex nature of this percept and of all others, or attempt to enumerate the elements which enter into such. He does not distinguish what is in the sense from what is in the imagination, and it is not necessary for him to do so. He can touch the man if he wants to, and it is nothing to him whether the tactual qualities of the thing he sees are what philosophers call " actual " or what they call "potential." He uses his percept as he uses his food. He leaves it to some one else to analyze it. So also he agrees to meet us at a certain place at a given time, and his thought is sufficiently definite to be useful. He can find the place at the time appointed, but he cannot tell exactly what he means either by space or time. It is quite possible to employ with a good deal of accuracy a given mental state, without having any such distinct consciousness of its component parts as to be able to enumerate them. We all know things and do things with- out, as we express it, knowing how we know them and do them. But it is evident that even in common thought there is always going on an analytic procedure of a certain kind, and determined by practical needs. It would be quite impossible for a man to compare two material things and discover that they are in some respects similar and in some dissimilar, were it not possible for How Things are Given in Consciousness 39 him to distinguish, in at least a vague way, between the several aspects or elements of the things in question. When a man looks at two trees and sees that they are of equal height but contrasted in color, he has distinguished with some clearness between the elements of form and color. Could he not do this, he might dimly recognize two trees as alike or as unlike, but he could not point out the elements which determine the similarity or the dissimilar- ity. Nor is it possible to comprehend how any man can compre- hend the thought contained in a page of any ordinary book unless we recognize that words can mean something to him without standing for individual objects, as we usually understand that term. The elements of consciousness for which they stand may be something too simple and fragmentary to constitute pictures, to form what have been so happily termed the " substantive " parts of consciousness; but these elements must obtain some sort of individual recognition, however fleeting and, for reflective thought, unsatisfactory that recognition may be. When we say, therefore, that the plain man uses his mental complexes without analyzing them, the statement needs modifica- tion. He does not analyze them consciously and with a deliberate view to a clearer comprehension of the elements which compose them, but he does analyze them instinctively and automatically, impelled by practical needs. Those things which come into the foreground of his consciousness and occupy his attention, are not whole objects, but rather aspects and elements of objects — just what reflection strives to obtain a clear view of. The man who scrutinizes a newly purchased desk runs his eye over every part of it ; he marks its length, its breadth, its color ; he finds it too high or too low, or remarks with satisfaction that he can write on it with comfort. These aspects of it occupy his mind successively, and not simultaneously. There is, however, a very important difference between such an analysis of mental complexes and a distinguishing of their separate elements as unavoidably takes place in all thinking, and the delib- erate analysis of reflective thought. In the former, although cer- tain elements do enter the foreground of consciousness, and receive, for a moment, something like individual attention, yet their prom- inence is but momentary, it is means and not end, and the mind passes on to something else without attempting to determine clearly what has taken place. The elements upon which attention 40 The Content of Consciousness is fixed do not occupy the mttid to the exclusion of others ; they merely enjoy a relatively greater prominence. It is not possible either to see or to imagine the length of a table quite by itself. What one sees or imagines is something much more complex, and the fixing of attention upon the element of length does not banish the others, but merely throws momentarily an added ray of light upon this one. With our best efforts we cannot hold it perma- nently before the mind in this way, nor can we attain to such a clear consciousness of it as we seem to obtain of certain groups of elements taken as groups. We may thus fail to recognize what has actually taken place, and may even deny that the mind has in any way singled out separate elements and made them the object of special attention. It is easy to see, in following the nominalistic utterances of such writers as Berkeley and Hume, that it was this impossibility of holding before the mind as clear images the ele- ments singled out in the rapid analysis which takes place in all comparison of objects, that led them to deny the possibility of abstraction in any form whatever. The mind does not rest in abstractions, but rather in a somewhat diffused consciousness of groups of elements, and it finds it as difficult to describe the path of its rapid flight from group to group, as does the man who has tied his shoes to describe the motions that he has made during that operation. But reflection upon our mental processes makes it evident that mental elements quite incapable by themselves of forming pictures are singled out by the attention and become determinative of men- tal constructions of many sorts. Not only is it clear that this must be so, if objects and aspects of objects are to be compared with each other, as they certainly are compared with each other, and if the structure of a language is to be comprehensible ; but we find in a less obscure field of our experience a similar procedure which makes it not difficult to comprehend what must take place in such cases as are under discussion. It is recognized by every one that all the objects in conscious- ness do not stand out with equal vividness ; and though there may be a dispute as to what is actually in my mind when I fix attention upon the length or the color of the pen which I hold in my hand, no one will dispute that the pen as a whole, so long as it is an ol)ject of attention, is singled out from the other contents of con- sciousness and stands forth with a certain prominence. Tlie fnot How Things are Given in Consciousness 41 that there is a diiference between a clear and a vague conscious- ness of things, the fact that there may be various degrees of clearness, and the fact that all those things which constitute the consciousness of a single moment are not perceived with equal clearness, are generally admitted. But if we can thus distinguish between the objects of consciousness, singling out some from others and bringing them into the focus of attention, is it not easily com- prehensible that the mind, by an analogous procedure, should single out certain elements of these objects from other elements and recognize their presence individually in a somewhat similar way ? That these elements cannot singly be held before the mind as pic- tures in no way invalidates the argument. The man who reasons thus may next have recourse to direct introspection. When he looks at his pen and distinguishes it from other things, he is conscious that he singles it out and makes it stand forth from its background in an individual way. And when he fixes attention upon the length of the pen, abstracting for the time being from its other aspects, he must feel that something analogous is taking place. When attention is diffused over the pen as a whole (a somewhat loose expression, but expressive of a truth), the background upon which it is seen does not disappear from consciousness. It simply lies in a comparative obscurity. And when attention is fixed upon the length of the pen, the other elements which go to constitute the object do not disappear from consciousness ; they only suffer a partial eclipse, they withdraw momentarily into the shade. The two cases are not wholly dis- similar, the difference is rather one of degree than of kind ; and a careful attention to what actually takes place during the con- centration of attention upon one aspect of an object, accompanied by an effort not to be misled by a preconceived notion derived from the nominalistic philosophers, or by a false expectation of being able to turn a single element, seized in a fleeting glance, into a relatively permanent image, will reveal that single elements of consciousness (I use the phrase somewhat loosely) can be made to stand out for a moment from those accompanying them, and may be at least sufficiently recognized to be named and used in later reasonings. It is the part of reflective thought to seek to determine such elements with some degree of accuracy, to fix them by the use of a symbol, and to obtain as exact a knowledge as may be of the inti- 42 The Content of Consciousness mate structure of those mental complexes which we all use, but which we do not all analyze, except in the rudimentary and semi- conscious way indicated above. To common thought such com- plexes present themselves usually as units ; the fact that they are really analyzed in a vague and inadequate way, even in common thought, is apt to be overlooked. The procedure of reflective thought in separating them into their component parts appears to be unnatural, a juggling with mere words. And in a sense, such a procedure is unnatural. It is dealing with things as man in his primitive simplicity, or even as man endowed with merely scien- tific culture, does not deal with them. It is eating the forbidden fruit, and results in expulsion from the unreflective paradise in which every man passes his youth, and in which most men bring to an end their declining years. Thus reflection attempts to obtain a clear and detailed knowl- edge of the contents of consciousness, to resolve complexes into their constituent parts, and to recognize these parts as it is impos- sible for common thought to recognize them. The task is suffi- ciently difficult, and it is evidently quite possible that, in the endeavor to represent to one's self clearly the actual content of this or that experience, one may fall into serious error. The experi- ence in question is not reproduced ; it is represented by a proxy, and it may be misrepresented. In approaching such a reflective analysis of experience there are certain things upon which it is worth while to lay emphasis at the outset. For one thing, it should be recognized that, just because of the difference that obtains between common thought and reflection, the plain man cannot be regarded as a satisfactory witness touch- ing the things which are to be found in his own experience, when it is desired to obtain such a knowledge of these things as common thought does not usually furnish. It has been pointed out that a man may agree to meet us at a given place at a given time, and may keep his appointment, without knowing at all clearly what he means by space and time. He has no such knowledge of these as the reflective man wishes to obtain. When questioned he often gives very silly answers ; and he may make statements which find absolutely no justification in the expe- riences which he has had and which he is endeavoring more narrowly to determine. Scientific progress is not attained by shov- elling together opinions and counting heads, and it requires some How Things are Given in Consciousness 43 sagacity to know what sort of testimony one may accept in establishing facts of a particular kind. It would not be well to accept the undivided vote of the continent of Africa as evidence of error on the part of a handful of European mathematicians. Nor can reflective thought accept without criticism, as giving a satisfactory account of the elements in human experience, that crystallization of common thought which we call language. The latter reflects the kind of thought which it was developed to express, and however well adapted to its purpose it may be, nay, just because it is well adapted to its purpose, it has the limitations which we might justly expect to find in it. It is sufficiently common to appeal both in psychology and in philosophy to the opinion of the plain man or to the common use of certain words, but the appeal must, in very many instances, be as senseless as the reference of a complicated technical question to the decision of a petit jury. If it is a question of something that lies within the province of reflec- tive thought, the man who does not reflect will probably be right only by accident. It goes without saying that both the opinion of the vulgar and the thought revealed in the structure of a language furnish most valuable material for reflective thought to work upon. Men may have experiences even if they cannot analyze them, and their inadequate descriptions of those experiences may yield to others some indication of their true nature. The popular vote is not valueless ; it is simply material for investigation. Again, we must not be surprised if we discover to be composite and analyzable some things in consciousness that common thought is inclined to regard as ultimate and simple. It is natural to suppose that experiences which the instinctive and imperfect analysis of the unreflective does not show to be com- plex, may, when subjected to a more careful and thoroughgoing analysis, turn out to be highly complex. For the purposes of common life it may be unnecessary to distinguish with any degree of clearness between the elements which enter into these ; and, as we have seen, such analysis as is found in common thought has its limits determined by practical ends. Hence, it is unwise to assume a given experience to be unanalyzable just because it presents itself at first glance under this aspect, or because men generally are in the habit of so regarding it. Any experience should be regarded as really simple only at the end of a very careful investi- gation, and after the application of every direct and indirect method 44 Tlie Content of Consciousness known to reflection in the effort to resolve it into something more simple. Even then, the conclusion should be held tentatively, and there should be a readiness to change one's opinion if new evidence is forthcoming. Furthermore, we should in some cases be content to arrive at our conclusions as the result of a process of deductive reasoning, and should not insist upon evidence of a kind which, under the circum- stances, we have no right to expect to obtain. This point has been touched upon a little above, where I have pointed out that con- sciousness-elements, incapable by themselves of forming pictures in the sense or in the imagination, may yet be singled out by the attention and become determinative of various sorts of mental con- structions. I can best illustrate my position by quoting from David Hume, that arch-enemy of all abstraction, a passage marked by his characteristic lucidity, which, however, only serves to reveal the more clearly the erroneous nature of his reasoning. He writes : " Thus, when a globe of white marble is presented, we receive only the impression of a white color disposed in a certain form, nor are we able to separate and distinguish the color from the form. But observing afterwards a globe of black marble and a cube of white, and comparing them with our former object, we find two separate resemblances, in what formerly seemed, and really is, perfectly inseparable. After a little more practice of this kind, we begin to distinguish the figure from the color by a distinction of reason; that is, we consider the figure and color together, since they are, in effect, the same and undistinguishable ; but still view them in different aspects, according to the resemblances of which they are susceptible. When we would consider only the figure of the globe of white marble, we form in reality an idea both of the figure and color, but tacitly carry our eye to its resemblance with the globe of black marble : and in the same manner, when we would consider its color only, we turn our view to its resemblance with the cube of white marble. By this means we accompany our ideas with a kind of reflection, of which custom renders us, in a great measure, insensible. A person who desires us to consider the figure of a globe of white marble without thinking on its color, desires an impossibility ; but his meaning is, that we should con- sider the color and figure togetlier, but still keep in our eye the resemblance to the globe of black marble, or that to any other globe of wliatever color or substance."^ 1 " Treatise of Iluinan Nature," Book I, Part I, § 7. How Things are Given in Consciousness 45 But it is very evident, as has been pointed out, that such a comparison of objects would be impossible were they not analyzed into their elements, dimly and momentarily perhaps, but still with sufficient clearness to make it possible to recognize these elements as entering singly into certain combinations. If the figure and the color of the globe of white marble really remained to my mind " the same and undistinguishable," it is inconceivable that I should be able, in comparing this object with another, to assert that it was similar to it in one respect and dissimilar in another. What can the phrases "in one respect" and "in another" possibly mean when we are dealing with what is strictly " the same and undistinguishable " ? If form and color are really undistinguishable, then any object which resembles another in form resembles it in color too, for the two words mean the same thing, if, indeed, they have any meaning. Hume has recognized as existing only those things which exist in consciousness as pictures, which do not merely stand out for a fleeting moment, but retain their position of prominence long enough to force upon the unreflective a recognition of their exist- ence. And since single aspects of the complex experience he is discussing cannot be made to stand out in this way, he refuses to recognize their existence at all. I have indicated above that one who has, by reasoning, arrived at the conclusion that such expe- riences as Hume assumes to be simple must be complex, and that single aspects of them must receive some sort of individual recog- nition, may in some instances verify his conclusion by having recourse to introspection. He may convince himself that in com- paring the marble objects he is really conscious of form as he is not of color, at the one moment, and conscious of color as he is not of form, at the next. But the utterances of consciousness, thus directly appealed to, are not so clear and unambiguous that they may not be misunderstood ; and, in certain instances, where we are dealing with what is highly abstract, it may be impossible to have recourse to introspection at all. Introspection may, thus, support the general conclusions arrived at by processes of deductive reason- ing, and it may serve to show that our method is a correct one ; but it cannot be expected to speak with as clear a voice as Hume insisted upon hearing. We cannot be analytically conscious of the many resemblances and relations of which a perceived object is susceptible, as vividly as we are conscious of the complex out of which they are successively singled. But it is quite impossible to 46 IVie Content of Consciousness explain the phenomena of our mental life unless the existence of these, its more evanescent aspects, be recognized. The temptation to overlook the truth here insisted upon is by no means so great to-day as it was at an earlier time. The investiga- tions of modern psychology have made it very evident that the contents of consciousness are perceived with varying degrees of clearness ; and have also revealed that what has been called the threshold of consciousness is not a line, but a strip of territory, a debatable land peopled by shades which have a real though a shadowy being. For example, the subjects who, in Professor Cattell's experiments on the perception of small differences, were given the task of judging which of two lights, exhibited at a brief interval, was the brighter, could usually distinguish the difference with a good deal of clearness when it really was a considerable one, and with less clearness when it w^as smaller. But it was found that even where the subject felt that he was making a decision at a venture, and doubted whether he had anything at all to go upon, he was right a sufficient number of times to reveal that his decisions were not the result of pure chance.^ He appeared to be determined by a sense of difference that had sunk below the level of clear consciousness, but had not disappeared from con- sciousness altogether; a sense of difference which still retained sufficient influence to bring about a correct decision in a certain proportion of cases. Of course it would be rash to conclude from this that every difference, however minute, in the external stimuli, must be the occasion of a parallel difference in the corresponding sensations. There may be physical differences to which there are no corresponding differences in physiological function and psychical reaction. The limits of such systems still lie pretty much in the dark. But we have, at least, warrant for assuming that the limits of such systems lie beyond the point at which one ceases to have a clear and unmistakable consciousness of differences in sensation. A good illustration of the method of arriving by deductive reasoning at a knowledge of the existence of mental elements which do not present themselves in a clear light to the eye of direct introspection is furnished by an investigation into the nature of similarity or likeness. That in some instances, at least, we mean by similarity nothing more nor less than partial identity 1 " On the Perception of Small Differences," Philadelphia, 1892, pp. 142-145; see also pp. 124-127. How Things are Given in Consciousness 47 appears sufficiently evident. When we look at two buildings and recognize that they are constructed in the same architectural style, but differ from each other more or less in the manner of their ornamentation, we are evidently analyzing the buildings into their component elements and recognizing that certain of these elements are, in the two cases, the same and certain are different. If the differences are unimportant in comparison with the identical elements, we declare the buildings to be very much alike, but if the contrary is the case, we declare them to be but little alike. And we recognize two chairs to be similar when both are provided with rockers, even though the one may be constructed of wood and the other of cane. The man who has a forehead and a nose like Napoleon may have a very feeble chin, and it is easy for us to indicate in such a case wherein the two men resemble each other and wherein they do not. We at once recognize the complexes we are comparing to be complexes, and we separate them by analysis into their component parts, distinguishing clearly between those which are identical and those which are different. Even where it is not very clearly recognized that the objects to be compared are complexes, the fact may be virtually recognized, the elements may be separately named, and the points of identity and diversity may be pointed out in detail. Such was the case in Hume's illustration of the marble globes and the marble cube. Color and form were distinguished from each other, and it was seen that there might be an identity in the one element and a diversity in the other. The critic who reads Hume's discussion can see that he treated his globes and his cube just as he would have treated a building, a chair, or a human face, and that his conclusions arise from the fact that he was not clearly conscious of his own mode of procedure. There can be no legitimate dispute now as to what took place in his mind. But it is possible to cite instances of a more doubtful nature. For example, it may be questioned, and is questioned by some, whether we class together different colors, such as red and blue, because, together with the differences which distinguish them, they also contain identical elements, elements not to be found in such sensations as those of sound or taste ; or whether we treat them in this way merely because they happen to be sensations referred to the same bodily organ. This question seems to find a sufficient answer in the fact that 48 The Content of Consciousness within the province of any one sense we recognize minor classes, putting together and distinguishing from each other various kinds of blues and various kinds of reds. These minor classes cannot find their explanation in the grouping of wholly different sensa- tions through a common relation to a single sense-organ, nor can they find it in a reference to some one physical cause. They were made before anything was known about the luminiferous ether and the number of its vibrations per second. If an explanation is to be found for them at all, it must be found, as it seems, in the nature of the sensations themselves. And unless we take refuge in the assumption that it is an ultimate fact, to be accepted, not explained, that we compare and find similar but not wholly iden- tical various sensations which are not complex, but simple, and cannot present different elements of identity and difference, we must assume that our mode of procedure is similar to that in the cases described above, and that the obscurity of the question simply arises from the fact that we have passed into a region where all things are obscure, the misty region between clear consciousness and no consciousness at all. The assumption that we have arrived at what is ultimate and inexplicable is either one made provisionally for convenience in certain fields of psychological work, or it is the asylum of igno- rance — the refuge to which a man betakes himself when he would rather have almost any settled opinion than no opinion at all. Certainly it is not justified in the face of the fact, that when we are investigating cases of resemblance in a region in which the objects in consciousness present themselves with some degree of clearness, we find resemblance to consist in partial identity, and of the added fact that many of the elements of our conscious life lurk in the shade, and refuse to reveal themselves so distinctly that they can be told off one by one without danger of error. Analogy points to the conclusion that the same explanation may serve here which showed itself to be the true one in other instances. But what shall we say of the choice of the one word " sweet- ness " to describe things so diverse as the taste of sugar and the sound of a human voice ; or of the word " brilliance " to character- ize experiences so different as the light of a lamp and a flight of eloquence ? Is there any element of identity by means of which such experiences are grasped and classified? Of course, this use of language is not arbitrary ; there is How Things are Given in Consciousness 49 felt to be a certain appropriateness in such expressions as " a sweet voice," " a smooth voice," " a brilliant speech," " an inflated style," etc. We feel that, in any given instance, a particular expression is the suitable one, and cannot be replaced by a dif- ferent one without detriment to the thought. There must be something, either in the experiences themselves, or in the relation which they bear to other things, to justify such a selection. In the instance of the colors there seems good reason to believe that the bond between them lies in an identical element in the expe- riences themselves ; at least, there is no good reason to believe that this is not the case. But, in the other instances referred to, the more reasonable explanation may be that the two experiences between which we remark an analogy stand in a common relation to something else, and that it is this common relation that we mark by the use of the expression employed in description. For example, even if we conclude that a sweet taste and a sweet voice have no common element, a conclusion which we should not draw hastily, we may have reason to believe that both give rise to emotional states which contain such an element, and we may discover the analogy, which we recognize, to be an instance of partial identity after all — of partial identity, so to speak, at one remove. It is quite clear that things may resemble each other, not merely in what they are in themselves, but also in their relations to other things. Two trees, in themselves not unlike each other, may also be alike in the fact that they are equally distant from a third tree. If this last point of similarity be the important one for the purposes of any special bit of reasoning, it may be the one to be singled out and held before the attention, and other points of resemblance may be allowed to pass unnoticed. This analysis of the nature of similarity not only furnishes a good illustration of the method of arriving, by deductive reasoning, at a knowledge of the existence in consciousness of elements which do not reveal themselves clearly and unmistakably to direct introspection, but it serves to bring into relief the true nature of thinking by the aid of a representative or symbol. The distinction between what is " given in consciousness " intuitively and what is given in consciousness only by means of the symbol has long been recognized, and it is one of which no thoughtful mind can be wholly ignorant. It is simply the dis- tinction between the thing itself and the representative of it 60 Tlie Content of Consciousness which we choose to employ or may be compelled to employ in dealing with it. When I look at a single pebble lying before me in the road, I am clearly conscious of it as one. If, however, I collect fifty such, and spread them out before me, I cannot, in looking at them, be conscious of the whole fifty, as I was con- scious of the one. The number of elements that can stand out clearly in consciousness at any one time is limited, and that number is here exceeded. It is true that, if the whole number fall well within my field of vision, I may, for aught I know to the contrary, be dimly conscious of the whole fifty at once. This does not mean that I am conscious of them as fifty — as more than forty-nine and as less than fifty-one. To be conscious of things in this way is not to be dimly conscious of them. When I say I may be dimly conscious of them all at once, I mean only that there may be dimly present in consciousness all those distinctions which, could they be more clearly marked, would be recognized as constituting this group a group of fifty individuals. But since it is out of the question to substitute for this dim experience a clear consciousness of fifty individuals, we are forced to represent it by a symbol, and treat the symbol as though it were the thing itself. The symbol may, of course, represent any aspect of the thing with which we have to deal ; in the instance given, it represents their quantity or number. A system of symbols may become ex- tremely complicated, and single symbols, or whole groups of them, may represent, not merely a collection of things which can only be dimly perceived in a consciousness at any one time, but also what cannot be directly present in any consciousness, even dimly. In other words, much of our knowledge must ever remain sym- bolic. It is hardly necessary to point out that a system of symbols cannot be a purely arbitrary creation. Symbols must truly represent things, or some aspect of things, and the sole foundation upon which they rest, the sole source from which they obtain their meaning and worth, is the intuitive knowledge which furnishes us with a direct experience of things. It is of no little importance to recognize what constitutes the symbol as such. We frequently speak of the marks which the mathematician makes upon his paper as symbols, but a little reflection reveals that the figures themselves are merely the "Trager," the arbitrary carriers, of the true symbol, the mathe- How Things are Given in Consciousness 51 matical relation which it is desired to express. They are the hooks upon which it is convenient to hang thoughts, the handles by which the thoughts may be grasped, not the thoughts them- selves. They suggest thoughts, and do not, properly speaking, represent them at all. Their whole meaning lies outside of themselves. In a broad and loose sense of the word they may be called symbols ; and it is certainly possible, by their aid, to deal with complicated experiences in a way in which it would be impossible to deal with them directly ; but when one deals merely with figures, and performs mechanically various operations which one has learned to perform without insight into their significance, one can only by way of courtesy be said to be occupied with mathematical reasonings. The figure 6 may suggest six objects, but it does not represent them as a short line may represent a long one. In the latter case some of the elements of the line represented are actually present in the representative — for ex- ample, its divisibility into parts, or the nature of its curve. The mind may fix attention upon these points of similarity, and neglecting the differences, may observe mathematical relations with a vivid sense of the precise nature of the mental operations which it is performing. It may then carry its results over to the longer line with a feeling of confidence that it will not fall into error, since its representative truly represents the longer line it is desired to determine, in the only qualities which enter into the question. It is really dealing, not with a short line and a long one, but with certain aspects common to both ; and in using the representative as it does, it simply employs a convenient device for holding those aspects steadily and clearly before the mind. The short line does not as a whole represent the longer one : it represents it only in its identical elements, and the mis- taken belief that it represents it also in others can only result in confusion and in error. A line can conveniently represent a line because it is like it ; it cannot represent a mathematical point in the same way, because the two do not thus resemble each other. A careful examination of our knowledge by means of a repre- sentative or symbol, in the many instances in which our mental operations do not lie too much in the shade to permit of our scrutinizing them with some degree of clearness, reveals the fact 52 lite Content of Consciousness that we are really dealing, either with aspects of things, brought before the mind, for convenience, not singly, but combined with elements not directly concerned in our reasonings ; or with con- ventional signs of such aspects of things, such as the figures used in arithmetic. And it seems reasonable to hold, at least until good reason be adduced for abandoning the assumption, that the same explanation may be given of those instances of representative knowledge which do not easily lend themselves to analysis. Moreover, when one has firmly grasped the significance of the symbol, one is in a position to form some estimate of the possible limits of symbolic knowledge. It is quite possible for a man to mistake the arbitrary signs of thoughts for thoughts, and to sup- pose that, when he has made an intricate combination of such signs, he is necessarily dealing with an intricate thought. Yet he may be doing so or he may not — it is necessary to bear in mind that one may so put together the conventional signs of thoughts that the combination does not in itself represent a thought of any sort. It does not follow that such a combination may not be of service for certain purposes, that it may not, at least, be a useful record of a series of operations which have been performed or which may be performed. That the whole group of signs, taken as a group, cannot truly symbolize any conceivable experience, does not prove that the combination is of no value, and may not have a legitimate place in a science. But it is well to remember that it is easy to mistake the significance of signs when they are used in an abstract science. That this is a constant danger, no one knows better than the thoughtful mathematician, and he will be the first to admit that all mathematicians are not thoughtful. A clear comprehension of the nature of symbolic or representa- tive knowledge is of the utmost importance to the metaphysician. Those who are inclined to hold to the existence of an external world quite different from the world of our experience usually admit that we can never know these external things directly, but hold, as we have seen, that we may know them indirectly through their representative images. But it is as clear as day tliat we can onlV" know through a representative those things which this representative can truly represent, that is to say, those things which contain identical elements with it, and in so far as they contain identical elements with it. A representative can never stand for something else in so far as that other thing differs from it. Holo Things are Given in Consciousness 53 A sound, as sound, cannot represent a color as color, nor can it make in any way comprehensible to a man who has never seen a color, what the nature of the latter may be. Thus if we know immediately only elements in consciousness, it is inconceivable that we should, by means of these, represent to ourselves elements of a different kind in so far as they are different. The necessary limitations to the knowledge of the prisoner in the cell described in the preceding chapter are seen to be not unfairly set forth, when one reflects upon the nature of representative knowledge. The metaphysician must^ then, cast about for a better doctrine than the one which thus misconceives the nature of symbolic knowledge. But when he has rejected the doctrine just criticised, shall the metaphysician maintain that the external world is given in con- sciousness immediately ? At the beginning of the present chapter it was indicated that we must assume it to be given in conscious- ness in some sense of those words. It is palpably absurd to maintain that the external world is intuitively present to any human consciousness in the immensity and overpowering wealth of detail that we seem justified in attributing to the external world. How, then, shall we conceive it to be given in con- sciousness? The problem does not seem incapable of a reason- able solution when one has come to a clear comprehension of the nature of symbolic knowledge, as I shall try to make plain in the appropriate place ; but it appears to be a hopeless problem to one who has not grasped this distinction. This last truth emerges with great distinctness when we examine the perplexities and inconsistencies into which men have fallen when they have endeavored to give an accurate account of the nature of space and time. I feel that it would hardly be fair to set forth, as I have done in this chapter, the method of arriving, by deductive reasonings, at an analytic knowledge of the elements in consciousness, with- out at the same time indicating some of the rather startling conse- quences to which it appears to lead one when applied with logical consistency and thoroughness. Few would shrink from the con- clusion suggested by an examination of Hume's illustration of the globes and the cube of marble, the conclusion, namely, that we do really distinguish between form and color, and in some way grasp each element separately. It is generally recognized that a percept 54 The Content of Consciousness is a complex mental experience, and an attempt is made in modern handbooks of ])sychology to enumerate in detail its elements. But there are cases in which what appears to be the most reasonable conclusion, from a theoretical point of view at least, is of such a nature that even a trained psychologist may hesitate to give his assent to it. Such an instance is the following : in studying sensations the psychologist distinguishes in them certain aspects, such as their duration, extensity, intensity, and quality. Let us consider only two of these, and let us suppose a man to be conscious at a given moment of two apparently unextended points of color, the one red and the other blue. These the psychologist will recognize as differing in quality, since the colors are not identical ; but he may maintain that the intensity of the two color-sensations is the same. In other words, he recognizes the two sensations to be in the one respect identical, and in the other different, just as in Hume's illustration two globes were found to agree in form and not in color. But if it is reasonable to infer, from the fact that the one globe is perceived to resemble the other in one element and to be dis- similar from it in another — if it is reasonable to conclude from this that each of these experiences is complex, and that this com- plex is analyzed in the act of comparison, why is it not reasonable to carry over the same reasoning to the two experiences of color which we are discussing ? If two color-sensations really have the same intensity while they have not the same quality, it surely follows that intensity and quality are not identical, but are distinct elements, recognized as distinct, at least implicitly, by every one who distinguishes them from each other. Each of the sensations is, then, a complex thing, and not simple, and the successive acts of attention which mark at one time its intensity and at another its quality, are singling out its elements just as attention always singles out certain things in consciousness from certain others, and gives them a relatively greater prominence. But if such sensa- tions are really complex and may be thus separated in thought into their elements, is it not, at least theoretically^ possible that the one element might disappear from consciousness altogether, and the other remain undisturbed ? In other words, can we not conceive a state of consciousness which would be a consciousness of intensity alone, divorced from quality, or of quality divorced Holo Things are Given in Consciousness 55 from intensity? It seems rather appalling to contemplate the possibility of a consciousness of color which has no intensity at all, or of a consciousness of intensity without anything to be intense, but it may be questioned whether we can legitimately arrive at any other conclusion. It will not do to say that we cannot imagine a color of no intensity at all, and hence the problem may be dismissed. Of course we cannot imagine it as we imagine colored surfaces with all the characteristics which usually mark them. But then we are also unable, when we look at a globe of marble, to separate the color-sensations pure and simple from all the other elements which a past experience of things has furnished us, and hold them up before the mind's eye by themselves. This does not prevent us from distinguishing between them and the rest of the elements constituting our percept, and even believing that in certain con- sciousnesses — those of infants at the outset of their mental life — they may present themselves in a more independent way. The question is, to be sure, one of theoretical rather than of practical interest, but it is worth while to discuss it, if only because it brings into relief the general method of attaining an analytic knowledge of the contents of consciousness, and empha- sizes some of the difficulties connected with it. That there are such difficulties should be frankly admitted, and it should as frankly be admitted that we are at present far from having as complete a knowledge of the contents of consciousness as it is desirable that we should attain. Were it easy to attain to such a knowledge, many disputes which have been carried on with energy through whole centuries, and which we have inherited from our predecessors, would have died away in a remote past. They still live because they have a reason for living. Our most dan- gerous error lies in supposing it to be easy to describe our own experience, in assuming that the panorama of our mental life unrolls itself before the introspective eye in a clear light, and that the objects which it pictures stand out in unmistakable detail. It is too often forgotten that it is one thing to have an experience, and quite another to reflect upon it. And until one has reflected upon one's experiences with some degree of success, one can only in a restricted sense of the word be said to have " had " them. CHAPTER IV THE ELEMENTS IN CONSCIOUSNESS The attempt to obtain a general view of the contents of con- sciousness at first results in a bewildering sense of the variety and complexity of the material which presents itself for examination. But attention soon reveals that there are certain broad distinctions which one may make, and which have been recognized more or less clearly for a long time past. In the first place, there is the distinction between what is given in the sense and what is reproduced in memory or imagination — a distinction marked by Hume by the use of the terms " impres- sions" and "ideas." In a given instance it may not be easy to decide offhand whether a certain experience is to be relegated to the one class or to the other; but in general the distinction is a sufficiently apparent one, and is recognized by the plain man and the scholar alike. Sense-experiences, or at least such of them as usually occupy the attention and stand out in our minds as representa- tives of their class, possess a vividness denied in most cases to "ideas." I cannot confuse the vivid experience of tlie pen which I see on the table before me with the shadowy and unsubstantial image of the pencil which I imagine to be lying beside it. The contrast is here very great, and it needs no system of tests to con- vince me that the two objects fall under different categories. It is true that sense-experiences do not always distinguish themselves so clearly from the images present in the imagination. These images may become very vivid and insistent, and sensations may be extremely vague and obscure. A series of experiments may be needed ])efore it is possible to decide that a certain experi- ence, which is not recognizable at first glance as belonging to the one class or to the other, at least behaves in such a way, stands in such a connection with other experiences, that its proper place may be assigned to it with confidence. If we are wise, we will 56 The Elements in Consciousness 57 not assume that the sheeted ghost which presents itself to our startled eyes when we awake from slumber on the stroke of twelve, is a real phantom, a creature of the sense, merely because it is vividly perceived. We will ask it to present its credentials, prove its claim to respectability of character, and, in short, to con- duct itself as a real ghost, claiming a right to be admitted into the circle of real things, should conduct itself. If it fails to establish its claim, we will harden our hearts to its unsubstantial sighs, and banish it to the limbo of the things that are not what they seem. Fortunately, it is not always necessary to employ such indirect methods in distinguishing between sense-experiences and " ideas." In most instances the two classes fall apart of themselves. Were any man capable of confusing them at all times, his progress in a crowded street would be an eccentric one. We may assume that they may be distinguished directly by most meii with sufficient accuracy for the purposes of common life, although we must admit the possibility of error in individual cases, and must make a final appeal, when any dispute arises, to the methods of investigation described by the logician. The attribute of possessing a greater vividness is sufficient to mark out roughly the one class of expe- riences from the other. If there is any other difference in the experiences themselves, we must turn for information regarding it to the psychologist. Thus we find the phenomena of our mental life divided into two broad classes. It is generally admitted that one of these must be regarded as, in a sense, copied from the other. It is self- evident that the images in the memory cannot be original crea- tions, but can come into being only when there have been certain experiences in the sense ; and it has often been pointed out that there is no flight of the imagination which can carry it out of the region of the elements derived in the first instance from the senses. We may combine these elements in many ways, and we may build up complexes which, as complexes, are new ; but further than this it is impossible for us to go. No man who has never seen a color can imagine one, nor can he truly represent to himself any expe- rience into which the element of color enters. These truths are commonplaces of psychology, and it is unnecessary to dwell upon them at length. There is another broad distinction between elements in con- sciousness, upon which much emphasis has been laid for a few 58 Tlie Content of Consciousness generations ptost. This is the distinction between /orm and matter^ between the arrangement of certain elemeutii in consciousness and those elements themselves. It is manifestly not a complete description of our experience to say that we find in it such and such sensations of sound, color, touch, pain, etc., and such and such reproductions of these in memory and imagination. These sensations and ''ideas" are arranged in divers ways, and stand in manifold relations to each other. These relations exist as truly as do the things which stand in relation, and we constantly recognize them in our rea- sonings in much the same way. For example, when we look at three blue spots so arranged that lines joining them with each other would form an equilatei-al triangle, and then look at three red spots similarly arranged, we recognize a sameness and a difference, just as we do when we compare a globe of white marble with a globe of black. We see that there is identity in the formal element in our experience and diversity in the material. And when we compare three blue spots arranged as above mentioned with three similar blue spots arranged in a row, we find the material element to be identical, and the formal to be diverse. In such a case there is no difficulty in distinguishing between the two elements, and in picking out the one from the other. We are evidently dealing with a com- plex and are analyzing it into its constituents, and the difficulty of holding relations separately before the attention, and obtaining a clear view of them, appears to be only an instance of the dif- ficulty which always confronts us when we attempt to grasp, in an analytic way, elements of the complexes which constitute our experience. The material elements in consciousness may either be present simultaneously, or they may be successive. In this distinction we have the two most general classes into which the ways of arrang- ing them may be divided. The former class it is convenient to subdivide further, for not all those material elements which appear in consciousness simultaneously stand to each other in what we call spacial relations. These latter form a special class, a form of coexistence of such importance that it is sometimes over- looked that there are coexistences of a different kind. Relations of succession are those classed together as temporal. It is important to bear in mind the fact that these ways of The Elements in Consciousness 59 arranging material elements are actually found in our experience. It does not appear possible to reduce them to anything simpler, or to identify them with one another. Philosophers and psychologists have sometimes maintained that spacial relations are not actually given in consciousness, but are merely represented by non-spacial experiences, which in some way stand for really extended things without; and they have similarly maintained that we have no immediate consciousness of succession, on the ground that we can exist only in successive instants, that all that is in consciousness at any one instant must be simultaneous, and that any past in- stant, since it has vanished away and given place to its successor, can only be represented in the actual present by some proxy, in itself not a past experience, but capable in some inexplicable way of standing for one. Thus the images in the memory are, it is claimed, present experiences, but are recognized as symbolic of the past. It is a sufficient answer to such doctrines to recall to mind the nature of symbolic or representative knowledge in general. We have seen that things can represent each other only in so far as they have identical elements. If this be so, how is it possible for a consciousness, which contains no spacial arrangement of elements, to represent in any manner objects extended in space — to obtain the faintest inkling of what is meant by spacial extension ? It contains nothing which can stand for such; coexistent elements not spacially arranged cannot serve its purpose, for the one thing it is desired to represent is not present in them in any form what- ever. A small space may represent a large one, in so far as both are space ; but the man who seriously holds that nothing in con- sciousness is truly extended, that none of its elements stand in spacial relations, must either deny to us all knowledge of space whatever, or virtually maintain that sound as sound may represent color as color, or that taste as taste may represent straightness or triangularity as such. It is the old difficulty, the attempt to make something out of nothing ; and it is only the obscurity in which the action takes place that prevents the whole procedure from receiv- ing instant condemnation. So it is also in the case of time. If we have no immediate con- sciousness of succession, if our memory-images do not themselves belong to the past, even a very slightly remote past, but are present elements which merely rejpresent the past, where do we get that 60 The Content of Consciousness idea of succession which we read into them, thus making them, not present images, but something more? In such a case, this some- thing more must be a mere negation ; there can be no positive con- tent to read into our symbol, for none such is furnished by our experience. Doubtless the reader will here start at the paradox to which our reasonings seem to point, namely, to the doctrine that the past is not really past and vanished, but remains in some sense present in the present moment. This paradox is many centuries old, and many have wagged their heads against it. I shall be compelled to enter into the question at length in a later chapter, and shall try to show that the difficulty is not an insurmountable one.^ But, for the present, it is enough to insist that a symbol deprived of its meaning is no true symbol, and that if we have no immediate knowl- edge of the lapse of time, we shall never gain a mediate knowledge of such by fitting together elements in which no element of succes- sion is contained. To declare the representation of the past by present images in the memory to be something ultimate and in- explicable, which one must simply accept, is not merely a refusal to seek further for the explanation of an accepted fact ; it is to furnish a false explanation ; it is to demand of a representative what it is clear that no representative is able to perform. When one has distinguished between the formal and the mate- rial elements in consciousness, it is important to remember that they are both elements in consciousness and should be treated in our reasonings in much the same way. Sometimes this caution is not heeded, and we not infrequently find the element of form handled in what can only be called a fantastic and irresponsible manner. It seems to be assumed that it is freed from the limita- tions which attach to the material element and make its manner of existence comprehensible. For treating it in this way there is no good warrant, and doing so only introduces needless confusion into our thought. An illustration will serve to make this clear. It was pointed out a little above, that, in comparing three blue spots so arranged that the lines joining them would make an equilateral triangle, with three red spots similarly arranged, we recognize a sameness and a difference, an identity in the formal element and a diversity in the material ; while in comparing the former with three blue 1 Chapter XIII. The Elements in Consciousness 61 spots arranged in a row, we recognize an identity in the material element and a diversity in the formal. But it should be remarked that the words " sameness " and " identity," as here used, cannot be taken as indicating identity in the strictest sense. Three spots of blue color in the one place are not strictly identical with three spots of blue color in another place ; they are merely like them. Even if they are so much like them that there is no possible way of distinguishing the two groups of spots from each other except by noticing that they are in different places, there still remains at least this difference. The one thincr, no matter what the nature of that thing may be, cannot at once exist in two different places. Nor can the one thing, strictly speaking, exist in two different times. We may, of course, apply the term " one thing " to a complex whose elements are in part successive, and we constantly do thus use it. But the sameness of such a thing is manifestly a very different one from that strict identity which excludes all diversity whatever, whether of time, place, or quality. In common speech we do not determine our thought with great accuracy, and we frequently speak of a color perceived in one place or at one time as identical with one perceived in an- other place or at another time, not stopping to think whether we are indicating a complete or a merely partial identity. But a little reflection shows us that we must have reference to the latter, and not the former. It is no more possible for two spots of color to be one, or the color of two distinct spots to be one (how hard it is to be clear when language is adapted to indefinite modes of thought I )? than it is for two cows or two horses to be one. In the latter case we are dealing with complex experiences, and in the former with elements of such, but temporal and spacial distinctions, which mark the difference, remain just the same. It is impossible that a thing should in any way be distinguished from itself, but it can be distinguished from other things. Where any diversity whatever can be remarked, we are not dealing with the one thing alone. It is difficult for some minds to see that, in making such state- ments, we are justified in taking the word "thing" in the broadest possible sense, in asserting that to be true of single qualities of things which is generally admitted to be true of things as com- monly understood. The reason for this lies in the fact that we do not usually find it necessary to distinguish between two occurrences of the same quality and mark that distinction by words. When 62 Tlie Content of Consciousness one asserts that the color of one spot is identical with that of another, and maintains that it is strictly identical on the ground that qualities are not to be subjected to the local and temporal distinctions which mark individual things, he is simply fixing his attention upon color in the abstract, and failing to notice that color is not precisely the same as this or that occurrence of color, for the latter is a more complex experience — it is color with a differ- ence. He is recognizing the universal, but failing to distinguish it from the individuals "in" which it appears. It is manifestly an error to confound one individual with another, simply on the ground that they contain a common element, whether those indi- viduals be relatively complex experiences or relatively simple ones. " Color here " and " color there " are not one and the same experi- ence, and must not be confused. But even those who can see quite clearly that this is so, are not always capable of seeing that the same distinctions must be firmly held to in dealing with the formal element in consciousness. If I can recognize, in comparing two experiences, that they are identical in the material element and diverse in the formal, or diverse in the material and identical in the formal, I am manifestly capable of singling out the latter element from the former and talking about it. It is, of course, important that I should not talk about it incoherently, or deal with it in an arbitrary way. If I fail to recognize that the relations between these tliree spots of color are not strictly identical with the similar relations between three other spots, but are merely resembling, if I insist that the relations are truly identical, though the material elements are not, I show gratuitous and unjust discrimination, and I throw into hope- less confusion my ideas regarding the formal element in conscious- ness and its manner of existence. When I look at the three spots before my eyes I am conscious of both the elements we have been discussing, the sensations of color and their arrangement. If these three spots are these three spots and no others, surely the relations between them are these particular relations and no others. I do not distinguish the spots merely from other spots which differ from them in color, but also from those which resemble them in color but either existed at a different time or now exist in a different place. There is surely as good reason to distinguish these particular relations, existing at this time and place, not only from all relations of a different sort. The Elements in Consciousness 63 but also from those like them which may have formerly existed or now exist elsewhere. It is not necessary for the purposes of com- mon life to mark such distinctions, and it is possible to explain psychologically the error of the man who fails to recognize them. But it is not easy to bring him to a sense of his error. One cannot show him that his reasons for making of a relation a monster capa- ble of existing in several places at the same time are insufficient. He has no reasons for taking such a position. He simply takes it. Possibly it might have some effect upon his mind to show him that all sorts of different objects may be identified with each other by just the same mode of procedure, by fixing attention upon the ele- ments of identity which they present, and overlooking all differ- ences, including such as are spacial and temporal ; by taking leave, in other words, of real things, having their definite place in the world-system, and taking refuge in abstractions. Of course, the man who does this has no right to place his abstractions in the real world. That world contains no "place" in general; it contains only definite places that must be occupied by individual things which are not abstractions. Thus, whether we are dealing with the material element in consciousness or with the formal, we must reason coherently and remain intelligible. A relation is not possessed of miraculous powers any more than a color or a sound. Relations which exist at different times or in different places are thus distinguished as different, however closely they may resemble each other. In short, the difference which we recognize between the elements of form and matter does not justify us in treating them in our reasonings in a different way. It may seem to the reader a gratuitous cruelty to inflict upon him so lengthy a discussion of what appears a simple and evident matter, but there has been so much mysti- fication connected with the formal element in consciousness that one cannot be too explicit. But if it is possible to fall into the error of treating the formal elements in consciousness as so different from the material that the manner of their existence becomes unintelligible, it is also possible to fall into the contrary error of confounding the two classes of elements with each other, and failing to recognize any ultimate difference between them. One may argue that when we look at two patches of color, and distinguish the spacial relation in which they stand to each other 64 The Content of Consciousness from the colors themselves, we are not really separating, in thought, form from matter, for each patch is necessarily extended in space, and is itself a complex composed of both elements, the various parts of the patch standing in spacial relations to each other. If, it may be said, instead of considering the two patches, we take any two parts of the one patch, we will find again that the material element, which we are trying to single out, is not a purely material element, but contains also an element of form ; and since any patch of color whatever is infinitely divisible, it is hopeless to attempt, by repeating the operation, to arrive at an element wliich is material and nothing more ; we shall always find color and form combined, never one alone. From this it may be concluded that we have not really to do with two elements, for the material ele- ment we may recognize, at any stage of our progress, as consti- tuted^ or made what it is, by the formal element. In this bit of reasoning it is very easy to find flaws. I shall say nothing here of the assumption that every patch of color is infinitely divisible, for that can best be discussed in a later chapter on the nature of space ; but even assuming for the present that no objection can be made to this assumption, the argument may be seen to be an extremely loose one. In the first place, it admits that we distinguish between the two patches of color and the spacial relation between them. It is fair to ask whether this rela- tion is confounded with either of the patches or with both of them, or is supposed to contain any material element ? The relation is not a color, and is not supposed to be such by any one. In the second place, it is discovered that each of the patches of color is itself a complex, and consists of material elements which stand in relations to each other. Here again there is no confusion between the elements in relation and the relations themselves. No one thinks of the halves of a patch of color, whether that patch be large or small, as identical with the relation between those halves, or even as like it. So it is at each stage of our progress ; the things perceived are distinguished from the relations in which they stand, and they are always recognized as different from them. The fact that the things perceived are not simple elements, but complexes, has nothing whatever to do with the possibility of their being recognized as standing in certain relations to each other, and as being themselves distinct from those relations. By hypothesis, a further progress simply repeats the former experi- The Elements in Consciousness 65 ences ; we must always be conscious of two elements, a formal and a material ; we cannot arrive, by any possibility, at what is simple and ultimate, but must ever deal with complexes. And from this there is sometimes drawn the surprising conclusion that we do not really have to do with two elements. By what art this conclusion may be abstracted from such premises it is impossible to conceive. Perhaps the difficulty arises partly from the use of such ambiguous forms of expression as that qualities are " constituted by " rela- tions,^ If we take this as meaning "made up of," we certainly have no warrant in any of the above-described experiences for assuming that a patch of color is constituted by relations. If we take it as meaning " partly made up of," we have no warrant for declaring that the distinction between relations and material elements is not an ultimate one, for our patch of color may also be constituted by elements of a different sort. Another form of the argument to prove that the distinction between the formal and the material elements in experience is not an ultimate one is the following : It is maintained that every attempt to bring before the attention pure and simple, a mere material element, reveals that what we actually succeed in attend- ing to contains or implies other elements, formal elements, as well. For instance, we are conscious of the color red. But reflection shows us, not merely that we think of the color red as somehow spread out, definitely or indefinitely, in space ; but also that the mere consciousness that this is red implies a discrimination between this and other colors ; implies, that is, a consciousness of relations, a classification and separation of different elements. What the consciousness of red alone would be, we cannot, it is claimed, possibly conceive. It is clear this reasoning, too, arises out of a confusion. It may perfectly well be admitted that we are not normally conscious of single sensations all by themselves, and that our total conscious- ness at any time is something highly complex. But, as we have seen, it is possible by an act of attention to single out and in a certain sense cause to stand forth individually, for a passing moment, elements of consciousness which form a very small part of that total of which they form a part. We cannot banish all the rest of consciousness into nothingness, and we cannot hold such elements clearly and permanently in the foreground of our thought. 1 T. H. Green, " Prolegomena to Ethics," § 20. 66 The Content of Consciousness But we can distinguish between these elements and others ; we can retain them in the attention while those with which they are associated vary, as is evidenced by the formation of concepts or general notions ; and we can indicate to others by the use of lan- guage that it is these particular elements that we are interested in for the time being and not others. The denial of such a power makes the procedure of thought in analyzing and comparing com- plex experiences wholly incomprehensible. But if this be admitted, it must also be admitted that we can distinguish between the color red and any relations in which it may stand to other things in our consciousness, as well as between the color itself and any other material elements with which it may be combined. To think of the color red and abstract from other elements given with it, it is by no means necessary to reduce our consciousness to a something whose sole content is an ex- perience of red color. And yet, by thus abstracting from other elements we may represent to ourselves, with a greater or less approach to accuracy, what would be the experience of a con- sciousness thus limited in content. We do not make our whole consciousness representative of the content of such a conscious- ness ; we search among its elements and try to single out from all others only that which will truly represent such a content. It may be difficult in any given case to perform this task with accuracy ; it may be hard to strip away all that ought to be stripped away; but there is no theoretical impossibility of performing such an operation. We do something of the kind every time that we think of this person or of that as thinking of this or that. We never suppose that our whole experience is representative of such a per- son's thought ; we merely single out from it so much as we think may be truly representative, and, for the time being, we abstract from the rest. There is, hence, no theoretical difficulty in distinguishing be- tween the material and the formal elements in our experience ; in " thinking of " a pure sensation which does not stand in relation to other things. Of course we cannot hold such an element of our experience before the attention in the same vivid way in which we can represent to ourselves more complex experience, trees, houses, animals. But there is much that cannot thus be held before the attention, which we must still recognize as " thought of," and our thought of such things may be, and indeed is, such an The Elements in Consciousness 67 essential constituent of our mental life, that it could not go on without it. The question may very justly be raised whether, when we attempt to analyze into their constituents the complexes given in our experience, we may conceivably hope to arrive by this process at ultimate elements, in their nature incapable of further analysis, or whether we must always and unavoidably expect to find before us further complexes susceptible of a similar treatment. In the preceding chapter it has been pointed out that it is rash to assume that any given experience is not further analyzable, merely on the ground that it does not at once reveal itself to be complex. Direct introspection is too coarse an instrument to reveal all the parts of that which we may have good reason to believe composed of parts. But this prudent reflection leaves unanswered the ques- tion whether there is a point at which a further analysis becomes, in the nature of the case, impossible, or whether the process of subdivision by analysis is theoretically without limit. Various considerations may be advanced in support of the latter of these alternatives. " Abstract the many relations from the one thing," argues Mr. Green,i "and there is nothing." We have seen that there is no great force in his argument, for it is substantially the one criticised above as denying the fundamental distinction between form and matter. It may be held again that, since space and time are infinitely divisible, every experience given in space and time must be infinitely divisible, too, and it is hopeless to attempt to isolate the simple and uncompounded. For an answer to this objection we must wait, as I have indicated above, until we come to certain chapters in which the nature of space and time is more carefully investigated. It will there appear that no true argument may be drawn from this source against the possible existence of ultimate and unanalyzable consciousness-elements. But it may be urged still again that we cannot know a thing without knowing what it is, and that it is impossible to know what it is without comparing it with other things, i.e, without defining or classifying it. Definition seems to imply the resolution of the object defined into its constituent elements. If we defime man, in the traditional way, to be a rational animal, we give genus and difference — what assimilates him to other objects belonging to a certain class, and what marks him out from all other objects 1 "Prolegomena to Ethics," § 28. 68 The Content of Consciousness of that class. Anything that we cannot thus separate into its elements we cannot define, and anything which we cannot define we cannot recognize as similar to or different from anything else. Such a thing can in no true sense be an object of knowledge, for we simply do not know what it is. It is not hard to discover in this argument a confusion between the thing of which we are supposed to be talking and the relations in which this tiling may stand to other things. If to know what a thing is is taken as meaning to know the thing in its relations to other things, of course it follows that a single element of con- sciousness, abstracted from all others, cannot be known as this thing or that. To know what a thing is appears to be equivalent to knowing the thing and a number of other things besides. No reasonable man would care to deny that such a knowledge as this must be complex. But we do not accept such a knowledge as an absolute unit and use it as such; we separate it into its constituents, and run over these one by one. We distinguish the thing itself from the rela- tions in which it stands to other things, and we distinguish single relations from each other. The only question about which there can be any legitimate dispute is, whether, in every case, these constituents of our admittedly complex experience must be, in their turn, complex. Undoubtedly each of them may be grouped with other elements, we may seek to know what each is by bringing it into relation with all sorts of other things; but this does not in the least imply that we confuse it with the other things with which we bring it into relation, or with the relations in which it stands to such. Tlie thing (I use the word in the broadest possible sense) is not strictly identical with any of these, and is not proved to be complex by pointing out that when it is combined with these the result is a complex. A knowledge that a thing is, and a knowledge of what a thing is, if by the latter we mean to indicate a knowledge of the thing in relation to other things, should be carefully distinguished from each other. It is not legitimate to assume that, because we do not happen to have the latter, we do not have any knowledge at all. If it is possible to distinguish, as we have seen it is, between some object in consciousness and the relations in which this object stands to others, there certainly ought to be some word to indicate the consciousness of that object abstracted from the relations in wliich The Elements in Consciousness 69 it stands to others, and it ought to be possible to contrast such a knowledge with a knowledge which includes these relations. The force of the objection made above to the presence in consciousness of simple elements evidently depends upon the tacit assumption that it is impossible to know a thing in any manner whatever without knowing what it is, in the manner described. Such an assumption is sufficiently refuted by showing that it is impossible even to describe the complicated process of knowing what a thing is, without recognizing the presence of acts of knowledge of a more elementary kind. The question of the propriety of using the word "know" to indicate such is a purely verbal one, and need not detain us. It is worth while to point out that this argument against the possibility of knowing simple elements in consciousness may be urged with equal force against the possibility of knowing complexes in consciousness which have not yet been analyzed. The most ardent champion of the composite nature of our experience will hardly maintain that all that enters into his experience is, not merely analyzable, but already analyzed. It must follow that whatever he has not at any time analyzed is unknown ; and if it is a fair argument to 'bring against simple elements in con- sciousness that they are unknown, it is an equally fair argu- ment to bring against unanalyzed complexes that they are unknown also. That they can be known does not remove the difficulty, for they can be known only by the substitution for them of other unknown things, i.e. other unanalyzed complexes. All knowledge must rest upon the unknown as much in the one case as in the other, the only difference being that here the unknown becomes a shifting one. But it is not worth while to spend much time over this argument for the necessarily composite nature of all our mental states. The fundamental error upon which it rests is that, while it insists upon their complexity and maintains that we can always discern them to be composed of parts, it fails to recog- nize that this very doctrine necessarily implies that we must in some way be singly conscious of those parts or we could not recognize our complex as a complex. It has no name for such a conscious- ness of the parts of a complex experience. There is, indeed, good reason to believe that our sensations and our " ideas " are composed of simple elements. From all that has preceded, it will be readily understood that it is impossible to prove 70 TJie Content of Consciousness this fact by direct introspection. The only way to prove it is to show that such an assumption harmonizes best with our knowledge as a whole, and offers the least difficulties, and that a satisfactory explanation can be given of the fact that men of intelligence embrace the contrary doctrine and defend it with ardor. As to the formal element in consciousness, it has been maintained that rela- tions should be treated in a coherent way, distinguished as distinct from each other when they occur at different places or different times, and, in short, reasoned about very much as we reason about sensations. It seems to follow that complex relations may be analyzed into simple ones, and that there may be simplest relations which resist any further analysis. Certainly geometrical reason- ings recognize the presence of complexes, and endeavor to deter- mine the constituents which enter into their composition. But when all this is admitted, it must be acknowledged that we have no such knowledge of the contents of consciousness as would make possible a detailed description of the individual elements which compose it, and there is small hope that such a knowledge will be attained within any assignable limit of time. If exception be taken to the use of the word " description " in such a connection, one may say, instead, such a knowledge as would enable us to represent to ourselves truly the simple elements which enter into our complex experiences. What it is to represent anything has already been explained. CHAPTER V THE SELF OR KNOWER Doubtless it has seemed to many of those who have read the preceding chapter that its most characteristic feature is one glaring omission. Where is the hero of the whole piece ? Where is the self that perceives sensations, has memories, pictures ideal scenes, distinguishes between material and formal elements, and bustles about upon the stage before which the curtain has been raised? To deny the existence of this self, and to deny that it is immedi- ately perceived to busy itself in divers ways seems little short of madness. Do we not say : I see, I hear, I touch, I taste, I smell, I think, I feel, I will? A sensation is always experienced by some one ; a thought is thought by some one ; an emotion does not float about unattached, like a storm-tossed bit of seaweed, or a dry leaf riding on the wind. It is useless to try to persuade the plain man that he is not conscious of himself as well as of other things, and that he does not do and suffer. As well try to persuade him that he has no consciousness at all. But it is a misconception of what has been said in the preced- ing chapter to suppose that it denies these experiences upon which the plain man so stoutly insists, and which certainly no one has a right to overlook. We are conscious of self, and we do have experiences that we call knowing, feeling, willing, comparing, etc. In the last chapter, however, we were not concerned with complex experiences as complexes, but were endeavoring to fix certain broad distinctions which mark the elements of which these are composed. We were concerned with the elements of conscious- ness merely, and can be accused of an oversight only if it can be shown that in our complex experiences there is present something that cannot be made to fall within any of the classes there recog- nized ; something so different that it must stand alone and as con- trasted with all else. That the experiences adduced above contain such an element cannot be satisfactorily established by accepting 71 72 The Content of Consciousness the testimony of the plain man, who knows little, as we have seen, of the separate elements which enter into his experience, and is capable of giving very foolish answers when he is asked to indi- cate them ; and it is equally clear that even the psychologist can- not depend upon so coarse an instrument as direct introspection in the ultimate analysis of mental complexes, and has no right to say offhand just what elements they do or do not contain. Hence, it is no refutation of the preceding account of the con- tent of consciousness merely to adduce the experience which we call the consciousness of self, and to point to the fact of knowledge. He who accepts that account will maintain that these things are complexes, which may be resolved into the elements he has recog- nized, and which can only be clearly understood when they are seen to be capable of such an analysis. He will insist that he is not denying the experiences at all, but is merely showing what they really are, and is clearing away needless obscurity and mis- conception. It is, of course, possible to hold that his analysis is an unsatisfactory one. But one who takes this position should not content himself with baldly stating that fact ; he should prove it by showing that it does not satisfactorily adjust itself to our knowledge as a whole ; and he should likewise show that what he lias to offer in place of it does not contain what is incomprehensible and self-contradictory. It is of importance to remark that both parties to the dispute accept such experiences as the conscious- ness of self and the knowledge of things. The only question at issue is : How are such experiences to be analyzed, or are they to be analyzed at all ? Those who hold that in addition to the elements which have above been recognized as constituting the content of consciousness, there must also be recognized a self or knower, which cannot be resolved into a number of such elements, but must be regarded as something of a quite different kind, lay emphasis upon such ex- pressions as : I see, I hear, I think, and the experiences which they call up. A sight cannot see itself, they insist, nor can a sound hear itself. Thought without a thinker is something incomprehensible. Are we, they ask, to regard it as without significance that we speak of " bringing objects within the focus of attention," " directing " the attention to this or that, or " holding " something before the atten- tion ? Do we not in the use of such phrases plainly indicate that there is a something which is busying itself about the objects, The Self or Knower 73 turning, in a certain sense of that word, toward them or from them, summoning them before it or dismissing them as no longer of in- terest ? Such phrases have been freely used in the preceding pages, and it may be asked with what right this has been done, when it is denied that there exists anything that either " brings " objects before it or " directs " attention to them. Furthermore, and this is perhaps the point upon which the most emphasis is laid at the present day, it is pointed out that conscious- ness is highly complex, and yet our knowledge may be said to possess a certain unity. Colors, sounds, tastes, touches, memories — why does not every element of these exist absolutely by itself and for itself? Why does each stand in relation to other ele- ments aud help to form a whole ? Things are known together : we run over many elements in succession, and then group them as a total : we do not lose one in gaining the other, nor does one take the place of the other; they exist in our thought side by side, and constitute its parts. Two sensations in the mind of one man belong to each other in a very different way from two sensations each of which exists in the mind of a separate man. Whence the differ- ence ? Does it not seem as if the mind itself gave this unity to its contents, knit together elements which would otherwise fall hope- lessly apart, if, indeed, they could exist at all? Must not some principle of unity be assumed, if the coexistence of things in any fashion is to be rendered comprehensible ? To some of these questions it is not possible to give a complete answer at the present stage of our discussion. But it is suffi- ciently easy to point out that the assumption of a " knower " to per- form the various functions indicated above is a gratuitous one, and rests upon misconception. Any principle or agent the existence of which is assumed in order to account for certain experienced facts should really account for them ; that is, it should be capable of making comprehensible the manner of their occurrence. It will not do to make the facts their own explanation, to assume the exist- ence of an agent whose whole being is, as it were, a shadow cast by the things it is assumed to explain. It was thus that " occult " qual- ities were once assumed as the explanation of observed phenomena ; that the possession of a " dormitive virtue ^' was made to account for the soporific properties of opium. It is thus that mental "fac- ulties " of various kinds are still used in some quarters to explain the divers sorts of mental phenomena. How the dormitive virtue of 74 The Content of Consciousness opium brings about its results, and how mental " faculties " produce their effects it is not pretended to explain. It is simply assumed that they are the causes of the phenomena under observation ; and since all occurrences must, in the nature of things, have adequate causes of their existence, it is assumed that these causes must be ad- equate to produce these effects. It is evident that any such expla- nation adds no whit to our knowledge of the thing to be explained. It is, as has been said, nothing more than the shadow cast by the fact itself. If, therefore, we are to assume the existence of a " knower" or " self " distinct from the elements recognized in the preceding pages as constituting our consciousness, we must be able to prove that we are not dealing with a shadow of this kind ; we must show, and not merely say, that such a self can perform the functions attributed to it. We must, in short, have something to stand upon other than the mere facts it is desired to explain. Here it may be objected that we have at least the existence of the self given in consciousness, whereas no one pretends to perceive directly either the dormitive virtue of opium or the mental facul- ties distinct from the various classes of mental phenomena. And it may be maintained that if this be so, even if we cannot describe in detail how the self knows things and does things, we can at least assert with confidence that it exists, and is somehow con- cerned in these operations. Such a fact alone would be enough to take it out of the shadowy realm of occult qualities, and make our explanation, if incomplete, at least something more than a mere tautology. But it should be borne in mind that the very point in dispute is the existence in consciousness of such a self as is here claimed. Were the self a something in consciousness that stood out vividly, as do material objects which we examine under a good light, the quarrel would be settled at once. That it is not something which can be thus inspected, any one can satisfy himself by attempting to get a good look at it and to describe it. Its indefinite and elu- sive character is abundantly evidenced by the efforts which have been made by philosophers and psychologists to give a satisfactory account of it, and by their attribution to it of incomprehensible and contradictory qualities. It is very clear that they have been groping in the dark, and have not been describing something seen under a good liglit. Hence, the existence in consciousness of such The Self or Knower 75 a self as is described above must not be assumed at the outset, but must be reached, if at all, as the result of a process of reasoning. It must be shown that the assumption is a reasonable one, and that by the assumption of such a something in consciousness we can explain how attention is directed to this or that, how diverse ele- ments in a consciousness are held together in a certain unity. This demand is not met by those who assume the existence of the self under discussion. Their assumption is not a purely gra- tuitous one, and it can be given at least a psychological explanation, as will be shown below. But it does not really explain any of the facts it is desired to explain, and on examination it proves to be no better than the assumption of "occult" qualities. For example, although it is insisted that this self knows the other things in consciousness, it is not in the least indicated how it knows them. What is its knowledge, and wherein does it consist ? The thing known is what it is, and the knower is what it is. They are distinct and different; what is the bond which unites them ? Is the knowledge something distinct and different from both knower and known ? What manner of thing is it, and how shall we represent it to ourselves ? If one thing can know another different from it, what nature must it have in order to exercise this function? Why cannot one sensation know another, or a picture in the memory know an emotion ? Can we represent to ourselves with any degree of clearness some element ^ in con- sciousness which stands to the other elements in a wholly different relation from that in which they stand to each other? Can we endow it with some attribute which will make comprehensible its activity in knowing? To all such questions we receive no answer. The whole sub- ject lies buried in Egyptian darkness, and we are forced to content ourselves with words and phrases, with mere repetitions of the statement that the knower does know. When we are told that the walker does walk, it means something to us ; he possesses legs, and his activity is not incomprehensible. But the knowing of the knower remains something occult ; it lies in a well so deep that there is no evidence that truth is to be found at the bottom. So it is also when we weigh the phrases which are used to indi- cate the movements of the attention. That some elements in 1 As the reader may see, I use the word " element " here in rather a loose sense ; I found no argument upon the mere word. 76 llie Content of Consciousness consciousness stand out more vividly than others, and that there is constant change in this respect, we know by direct observation. But when we speak of " directing " the attention or " holding " something before the attention, do we mean to indicate that one element in consciousness, the self or knower, is perceived to be treating another element in some definite way ? The phrases have, of course, their origin in a material analogy. A man holds an object before him in his hand when he wishes to look at it ; he turns his head and directs his eyes toward another object which he wishes to examine. But these are bodily movements, and serve only as a rude image of the peculiar activity attributed to the knower. What is the nature of that activity? How does the self in consciousness make some elements advance into a posi- tion of greater prominence and others retreat into obscurity? We are granted no hint of the nature of its activity, and it appears to be assumed that it can do such things, for no better reason than that such things do happen. Finally, we ask, how does the knower, an element in conscious- ness among other elements, hold things together and create a unity in diversity ? If this knower is any way composite, it is fair to ask what holds its parts together ; and if it is not com- posite, but exists as a simple element of some sort in consciousness, we may well inquire what means such an element possesses for holding together other elements different from itself. Hands it has not ; and mere material analogies will not serve to make clear the method of its procedure. How can a self hold together colors and sounds, any better than a sensation of touch can hold together tastes and smells ? Can even the faintest hint be given of what it is to thus hold things together ? If it cannot, it is very clear that we are dealing with mere words, and are not in the least explaining the unity of consciousness and the knowing of things together. In reasoning thus we are first assuming that an expla- nation is necessary, that things would not stay together unless held together, and then taking refuge in an occult quality as fur- nishing the explanation desired ; in other words, we are simply making a fact to be explained, its own explanation. It seems odd that reasonings so loose should impress any thoughtful person as worthy of acceptance, but, as has been indi- cated, it is possible to give at least a psychological explanation of the fact that they carry conviction to many minds. Their influ- The Self or Knoioer 77 ence is not incomprehensible when we reflect upon the genesis of the traditional knowing self that has been such a stone of stum- bling to the speculative mind. It is generally accepted among psychologists that, at an early stage of the mind's development, the chief constituent of the notion of the self, and perhaps the only one that stands out with sufficient clearness to occupy the attention, is the idea of the body. When the child says, " I see," " I hear," " I feel," he is not think- ing of the self of the philosophers, but is recognizing the fact that, given his body in such and such a relation to other objects, he has certain experiences. His body stands over against other objects and is distinguished from them. It sees with its eyes, hears with its ears, feels with its hands. It not only sees, hears, and feels other objects, but also sees, hears, and feels itself. It perceives not merely that it is acted upon, but also that it acts upon other things, bringing about changes in them. It is the constant factor in experience, while the objects with which it occupies itself suc- ceed one another in a more or less rapid succession. Moreover, it is an interesting object, with which are bound up in a peculiar manner the pains and pleasures of the individual. No wonder it becomes the centre of the little world in which it has its being, a world concrete, unreflective, external, if I may be permitted to use this relative word when the correlative cannot as yet be regarded as having made its way into the light of clear conscious- ness — at least a world objective and material in the sense that what comes later to be recognized as objective and material almost wholly constitutes it. And from the crude materialism of the infant mind to the crude animism of the savage the step is but a short one. That duplicate of the body, which in dreams walks abroad, sees and is seen, and acts as the body acts, has simply taken the place of the body as knower and doer, and its knowing and doing obtain their significance in the same experi- ence. The thought of the child is duplicated in the new world opened up by the beginnings of reflection. Now, I believe that the student of the history of philosophy who is able to read between the lines can see in the highly abstract and inconsistent self of the later philosophers a something that has grown by a process of refinement from these rude beginnings. We find early in the history of thought a material soul which knows things by contact with the effluxes thrown off from mate- 78 The Content of Consciousness rial objects. It is an object among other objects, as is the body, and the nature of its knowing is clearly analogous to that of the body. We have, later, a soul in part fettered to the body, and, as it were, semi-material. We have, finally, a soul abstract and unmeaning, a shade, a survival from a more concrete and unre- flective past. It would be wearisome to attempt anything like an exhaustive examination of the opinions of philosophers, ancient and modern, in support of the above assertion, but a mere glance at a few of them may not be out of place. The philosophers have recog- nized, almost from the beginning, the distinction between that which knows, the mind, soul, or reason, and thing known, which may be either an external thing or a psychical state. It is difficult to select from among such a cloud of witnesses, but I may mention, in passing, among the ancients, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Sceptics, in all of whom the distinction is sufficiently emphasized. Thales doubtless distinguished in an unanalytic way between him- self and the objects of his knowledge, but in what little we know of his doctrine, his ideas upon this subject do not come to the surface. Perhaps the problem of knowledge had not presented itself to him as a problem. With the progress of reflective thought it comes more and more into view, and the knower grows, I cannot say more definite, but at least more definitely an object of discus- sion. At the same time the knower grows on the whole less con- crete and material, though the chronological order and the order of logical development do not absolutely coincide. This is easily seen when one compares the teachings of Anaxagoras and Democ- ritus with what Plato and Aristotle have to tell us of the nature of the mind. The distinction made by the latter between the reason and the lower psychical functions has a flavor of the mod- ern distinction between the rational and the empirical self, a topic upon which we shall have occasion to dwell a little below. It is not necessary to enter into detail in speaking of matters so familiar as these to students of philosophy. It is sufficient to remind them that the impression which the Greek philosophy as a whole makes upon the modern mind, notwithstanding the devel- opment which it took in the hands of Plato and Aristotle, is that it represents the thought of a people to whom it was not un- natural to think of the mind as a breath, a fire, a collection of The Self or Knower 79 atoms, — a something not widely different from the body, and the relation of which to the objects of its knowledge was essentially similar to that which obtains between the body and the objects which surround it. And it is well to remember that, even when Aristotle has endeavored to purge his notion of the Divine Mind, the First Cause of Motion, of all material elements, he can still conceive of it as touching the world, although it remains itself un- touched.^ It sets the spheres revolving, after all, in somewhat the same way in which the Nous of Anaxagoras sets in motion the little particles which are by their combinations to form a world. Such a conception of the nature of the self or knower does not appear very different from that entertained by one who has gotten so far as to distinguish between mind and body, but has not re- flected much upon his conception of mind. To be sure, we moderns are not in the position of the ancient Greek. There has been much speculation upon these matters since, and the fruits of this specu- lation have to a great extent become common property. Even the plain man has heard the soul spoken of as immaterial, and he is apt to repudiate with energy all talk of identifying it with atoms, or attributing to it extension in space. Nevertheless, he conceives it as in some vague way within his body, and present to the objects of its knowledge. When he has learned something of the impres- sions made upon the sense-organs, and of the knowledge of things through representative images, his doctrine may justly be regarded as merely a refinement of the ancient doctrine of effluxes from objects, which penetrate to the mind through the avenues of the senses. Whatever inherited and contradictory forms of expres- sion he may use in describing the mind, he nevertheless thinks of it as a thing among other things, present to them in somewhat the same way in which the body is present to the objects upon which it directs its eyes ; and when he speaks of the mind as knowing, it is this latter experience that gives its content and significance to his thought. He does not take quite seriously the refinements of later specu- lation, for, indeed, they cannot really be taken verj^ seriously. They can be assented to only in words. As early as Plotinus the soul or subject of knowledge has definitely put on the incompre- hensible aspect with which later speculation so constantly clothed 1 Gen. et Corr., I, 6, 322, b, 21. See also Zeller, " Die Philosophie der Griechen, Aristoteles und die alten Peripatetiker," Leipzig, 1879, pp. 357, 377. 80 The Content of Consciousness it. It is not in space ; or rather it is in space in an unintelligible and inconsistent way; it is all in the whole, and yet all in every part of the body. It is divided because it is in all parts of the body, and undivided because it is in its entirety in every part.^ With Augustine, who set his stamp so authoritatively upon the thinking of the centuries that succeeded his own, it behaves no better, being still all in the whole and all in every part of the body .2 It knows itself and what is not itself. Its properties are not related to it as material qualities are to material substance ; they share in its substantiality, although it has them, and must not be regarded as being them. The knowledge of the mind ex- tends beyond the spiritual substance. Objects of sense become known because they are touched by the various senses. Material qualities, on the other hand, are coextensive with the substances in which they inhere, and they fall within the same limits.^ To make this confusion, if possible, worse, Cassiodorus maintains that the soul, which knows things spiritual and material, is, as a whole, in each of its own parts. It is, of course, impossible for any human being to represent to himself so inconsistent an entity as a soul of this description. If he asserts that he believes in it, we must charitably suppose that he thinks he does so, and must then endeavor to find out for ourselves what is really in his thought. In many instances it is possible to discover the motive which has lead serious men to make statements so fantastic, and seemingly so arbitrary. In the endeavor to distinguish clearly between mind and body, they have gotten farther and farther away from that primary experience in which the body plays so important a part, and which furnishes the first foundation for the idea of one thing standing over against another and knowing it. But it is clear that the}' have not elimi- nated this wholly from their thought. They make the mind, as it were, an inconsistent little body, an ill-behaved atom, which is in space and yet not exactly in space ; present to things, and yet not present to things as bodies are present to each other. This makes it and its knowing something very vague, but there is present at least a suggestion, drawn from experience, that prevents the sen- tences used to describe them from impressing the mind as a quite meaningless form of words. 1 " Ennead," IV, 2, 1. 2 " De Trinitate," VI, 8. 8 " De Civitate Dei," IX, 5-8 ; " De Trinitate," X, 10 ; XII, 26 ; X, 4. The Self or Knoiver 81 In the scholastic philosoph}^ Ave find much the same concep- tions as in the period preceding it. Everywhere there is acknowl- edged a knower and a known ; and this knower, which knows both itself and what is not itself, and ma}^ even know itself more cer- tainly than it knows external objects, remains throughout a mystery and a perplexity. And in the modern philosophy, until we come to Hume, the problem of knowledge remains much what it was before. With Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes the mind is still the knower, and a vague and shadowy knower. It is interesting to see that Descartes, who announces an inten- tion never to be governed in his thinking by tradition and authority, and a determination to accept as true only what he clearly and distinctly perceives to be true, nevertheless held to the vaguely and inconsistently localized soul of the Schoolmen and their prede- cessors. He places the soul, it is true, in the little pineal gland in the midst of the brain ; but for him that is only its " chief seat " ; it is, so to speak, thickened doivn at that point in the body, but it retains its nebulous scholastic diffusion throughout the body not- withstanding its predilection for this convenient spot. It is like a divinity which can best be influenced by supplication at a given shrine, but whose sphere is not circumscribed wholly by it. Still, the reader of Descartes must feel, that even this half-hearted attempt to place the soul somewhere, in an intelligible sense of that word, is a move in the direction of an earlier conception, and, hence, a move in the direction of intelligibility. It at least means something to speak of this or that as in the pineal gland ; it does not really mean anything to speak of it as in its entirety in several places at once. And he must also feel, I think, if he be one of those who must have the traditional knower, that a localization in the pineal gland seems to make it more comprehensible that a knower should actually know things. Did not Descartes provide for the delivery of all sorts of messages to it at that little central office ? Do not things to be known come to the knower ? The position taken by Spinoza is especially interesting and suggestive. The mind he regards as the " idea " of the body, as that mode in the attribute thought which corresponds to the body, a parallel mode in the attribute extension. Mind and body do not interact ; they merely correspond, since they are aspects of the one thing. Man is a physical automaton with parallel psychical states. The mind is a complex of ideas, and may be called the knowledge 82 The Content of Consciousness of the body. But there is also such a thing as the idea or knowl- edge of the mind. We not only know things, but we know that we know. How shall we conceive this knowledge ? Spinoza maintains that this knowledge of the mind is related to the mind precisely as the mind is related to the body. He finds it impos- sible, it is true, to keep this " idea " of the mind distinct from the mind itself, since they are both modes in the one attribute, thought, and are not different modes. He first distinguishes them and then lets them melt into each other. His doctrine is not consistent, but its purpose is clear. It appears to him that knowledge demands a knower and a known, and he cannot conceive the knower as playing the part of both. He therefore explains the mind's knowledge of itself by splitting it into a fictitious duality, which fades again into unity. He thus rids himself of that inconceivable chimera the "subject-object," which knows itself; and his thought retains a sufficiently vivid suggestion of that experience from which our notion that one thing in our experience can know another is drawn. It is interest- ing to remark that to Spinoza the mind is composed of ideas ; it is not a something distinct from them and behind them ; and it is not localized in the inconsistent fashion which obtained in Scho- lasticism and in the philosophy which preceded it. In Locke there appears again the ambiguous double self, the substance or substratum, and the qualities or attributes in which it makes itself manifest. It is the latter that we directly perceive ; the former remains " an uncertain supposition of we know not what," but to which is attributed the function of holding together the ideas. Berkeley, the Idealist, basing himself upon Locke's conclusions, classifies the objects of human knowledge as ideas of sense, ideas of memory and imagination, the passions and operations of the mind, and the self that perceives all these. Those who are familiar with the " Principles " will remember that even Berkeley's clear and graceful sentences leave the reader's mind in a hopeless confusion regarding this last object and the nature of its relation to its own ideas. It is clear that none of the above doctrines give any hint of liow the knower is able to know things, or what sort of an activity knowing may be. They simply assume that there is a knower that knows ; and, however fantastic may be their descriptions of the nature of such a being, they all appear to rest ultimately upon The Self or Knower 83 the experience which I have adduced as the most probable explana- tion of the whole notion of things knowing each other. It is not without significance that the act of knowing appears to grow more and more unintelligible as the knower becomes more refined and sublimated. But before proceeding further it is desirable to mark certain distinctions of much importance to clear thinking, but which were not so clearly marked as they might have been, or at least were not given due weight, in the mediaeval and in the mod- ern philosophy down to the period at which we have arrived. Leaving out Spinoza, the writers whom I have cited appear to recognize, explicitly or implicitly, a dual element in the self or knower. It is a substance or substratum with certain properties or attributes. Locke dwells at great length upon this distinction, and concludes that the properties of the knower or self may be known immediately — they are elements in consciousness, or, as he expresses it, ideas of reflection. The "substratum" self he banishes to outer darkness, and after proving that there is no con- ceivable way by which we can arrive at a knowledge of its exist- ence,^ he assumes it to exist, by an act of violence. He maintains, moreover, occupying, as he does, what we have called the psychological standpoint, that our immediate knowledge, in so far as it is not a knowledge of self, is a knowledge merely of sense-ideas, or representative images of things. The things them- selves lie beyond these and can only be known to exist by infer- ence. Berkeley, his successor, denied the justice of such an inference ; and while holding, apparently, to a self not very differ- ent from that put forward by Locke, refused to recognize Locke's external things at all. Hume, that astute and admirable analyst, applied Berkeley's argument to the " substratum " self as well as to external things, and concluded the self or mind, and by this he means to include all that is immediately known, to be "but a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement." Whatever may be thought of the conclusions arrived at by these philosophers, it will be admitted that we have here at least a clear recognition of the distinction between immediate knowl- edge and mediate, facts of consciousness and that which may be inferred from them. This is in itself a great gain. The question 1 " An Essay concerning Human Understanding," Book I, Chapter IV, § 18. 84 The Content of Consciousness of the existence or non-existence of substmta of any sort is seen to be a legitimate subject for investigation ; but it is accepted that anything not directly found in consciousness must be indirectly proved to exist, and that the proof furnished must ultimately rest upon what is directly given in consciousness. W hen one reflects upon the illustration of the prisoner in the cell, and when one realizes what it is to know thinors mediatelv and through a representative, one is prepared to realize the importance of the distinction between phenomena and noumena^ between what can appear in consciousness and what is by hypothesis debarred from being thus known by any possibility whatever. One is also prepared to follow Kant in banishing noumena from the realm of things knowable ; indeed, one is prepared, if one be consistent, to go further than Kant, who appears to the unbiassed reader of the ** Critiques *' to have done much the same thing that Locke did, to have denied that certain thinors could be known, and vet to have refused to quite let go his hold upon them. His hold, however, is so slight a one, and it is so manifestly in contradiction with his principles to retain any hold at all, that it may be assumed for the purposes of this discussion that he repudiated noumena altogether. Kant shuts up psychology to the world of experience, the phe- nomenal world. He is not, however, content with Hume's " bundle " of perceptions, but distinguishes between the multiplicity of psychi- cal elements forming the content of consciousness and a something, — not a noumenon, but a something in consciousness, — an activity, or whatever one may choose to call it, which makes possible the combination of this multiplicity into the unity of a single conscious- ness. On this depends the consciousness *' I think " which accom- panies all my ideas. The empirical self, as a complex of psychical elements, is to be distinguished from this rational self. This doc- trine has had, and still has, so deep an influence, that it is especially worthy of note in any historical sketch of the self as knower. The distinction between the empirical self and the rational has been taken up into modern psychology. The former is a mental complex which has been analyzed and discussed much as one analyzes and discusses any other mental content. It may, it is true, be difficult to enumerate the elements of which it is com- posed ; but tlie attitude of the psychologist toward it is sufficiently definite, and the only mystery that the subject presents is the mys- tery of incomplete knowledge. The Self or Knower 85 In discussing it the psychologist at least means something. He applies the scientific method, aiming at and hoping for clear and exact results. He is dealing with sensations and memories, and with nothing occult and incomprehensible. Even those psycholo- gists who emphasize most strongly the need of a "knower" to explain the facts of our mental life, sometimes find in this empiri- cal self such elements as the idea of the body, the idea of personal possessions, muscular sensations of various sorts, and, indeed, just those things which we all recognize as making up our experience, which we do not think of as knowing themselves, and which some of us assume there must be a knower to know. This empirical self is admitted to be highly composite ; it is what a man has in mind when he thinks of himself as such and such a personality, as being different in capacity, training, character, and past experience from some one else. It was the identity of this self that was a subject of doubt, and needed to be established, in the case of the old woman who awoke with curtailed skirts : — " If it be I, as T hope it be, I've a little dog at home, and he'll know me.'* It seems absurd to lay upon such a self, so constituted, the bur- den of performing the traditional functions of a knower. How can it know anything, unless all sorts of elements in our experience can know all sorts of others? And how can it hold anything together? It is, at times, not even successful in "staying together " itself, as is clear from a study of those morbid condi- tions which have been classed together as diseases of the person- ality, as well as from those temporary derangements of the person- ality observed in hypnotic subjects. It needs itself to be held together, if anything does. Kant distinguishes between such a complex and the rational self, which is to do for this complex and for other elements in con- sciousness what this multiplicity of elements cannot do for itself. He does not make clear what this rational self is, and he gives no indication whatever of the way in which it brings about the results attributed to its activity. His idea was elaborated by his intellectual descendants, a rather numerous body, not entirely at one among themselves, but nevertheless addicted to much the same way of thinking. As the protagonist of these I shall take Professor T. H. Green, although I do not mean to make all neo-Kantians or neo-Hegelians responsible for all of his utterances. 86 The Content of Consciousness Mr. Green repudiated the Kantian noumenon and avowedly con- fined human knowledge to the field of experience, but he did not approve a Humian experience consisting of a bundle of percepts. He found it necessary to assume in experience a principle of synthetic unity; a principle not to be confounded with any of the elements making up the experience, nor subject to their con- ditions ; a principle which, in some fashion, knits together the manifold of sense into an organic unity. " Thus," he writes,^ *' in order that successive feelings may be related objects of experience, even objects related in the way of succession, there must be in consciousness an agent which distinguishes itself from the feelings, uniting them in their severalty, making them equally present in their succession. And so far from this agent being redu- cible to, or derivable from, a succession of feelings, it is the condi- tion of there being such a succession ; the condition of the existence of that relation between feelings, as also of those other relations which are not indeed relations between feelings, but which, if they are matter of experience, must have their being in consciousness. If there is such a thing as a connected experience of related objects, there must be operative in consciousness a unifying principle, which not only presents related objects to itself, but at once renders them objects and unites them in relation to each other by this act of pres- entation ; and which is single throughout the experience." According to this passage, the knowing or distinguishing agent is conscious and self-conscious, is in consciousness, makes a con- sciousness possible by uniting different elements, and is single throughout the experience. We find elsewhere that this principle is not in consciousness but is consciousness, and that everything that exists is in it ; that it is intelligence ; that it is a subject or agent which desires in all the desires of a man and thinks in all his thoughts. Notwithstanding that it is all this, it has, neverthe- less, no existence except in the activity which constitutes related phenomena ; and it is, in the words of the author ,2 '' neither in time nor space, immaterial and immovable, eternally one with itself." The mere statement of the attributes of Mr. Green's spiritual principle would seem to be sufficient to condemn it. A faith robust enough to remove mountains might well shy fit the task of believing that the single subject or agent which desires in all the desires of a man and thinks in all his thoughts, which is con- 1 *' Prolegomena to Ethics," § 32. 2 j^^i^ § 54. The Self or Knoiver 87 scious and self-conscious, is still only an activity without existence except as it constitutes the objects of experience, and which, though it does not exist in time, is equally present to all stages of a change in conscious experience. This means that the activity which constituted my thought of yesterday did not exist yesterday, when my thought did ; and the activity which constitutes my thought of to-day does not exist to-day, while my thought does. Both activities are one, for the activity which constitutes objects is "eternally one with itself." What can this mean? If the phrase is to be significant at all, must it not mean that the activity in question is "always " the same activity? and does not " always" mean "at all times"? And what is an "immovable" activity? Moreover, is it fair to a genuine activity, however abnormal, to call it a principle, or subject, or agent? Mr. Green's utterances are not, in one sense of the word, incom- prehensible. His doctrine is not fundamentally new. He has taken the Kantian unity of apperception, made of it an hyposta- tized activity, tried to keep it free of space and time relations, and used it as an explanation of the unity of experience, or, as I should prefer to say, of consciousness. He has given us the same incon- sistent tota in toto soul that we find in Plotinus and Augustine. He is, to be sure, a post-Kantian, and he has included this thing in " experience," but it is no whit more thinkable than it was before. With all this, Mr. Green has explained nothing. Even if we suppose it possible for an activity to be all that he asks it to be, even to be timelessly present at all times, how are we to conceive of such a thing as uniting the elements of any possible experience ? Shall we merely assume that it has a vague and inscrutable uniting virtue, akin to the discredited dormitive virtue of opium ? Mr. Green does not even try to show how this activity obtains its result. He does not seek light upon this point by a direct reference to experience, for he does not obtain his activity by direct intro- spection ; he obtains it as the result of a labored process which strives to demonstrate that it must be assumed or experience will be seen to be impossible. The rational self as treated by Kant and Green appears far re- moved from the crude bodily self which is to the child the knower and doer, and also from the material or semi-material self that takes its place at the dawn of philosophic thought ; but it is not difficult 88 Tlie Content of Consciousness to see that it appears upon the stage as a successor to these, and undertakes to play the same r61e. As has been pointed out, Kant never wholly abandoned the noumenal self which his doctrine con- demned. It lurked in the background of his thought, and percep- tibly colored it. In calling the uniting activity which he found in consciousness the rational self, he connected it with the notions which he had inherited from the past. He stands in a certain line of development, and must be regarded rather as modifying old notions than as creating something distinctly new. The same may be said for Mr. Green. He quite discards the noumenal self, it is true, but then he turns the uniting activity into something as incomprehensible, and forces it to perform the same functions. It is a subject or agent which presents objects to itself, is conscious, and distinguishes itself from the feelings it unites. It is somehow "present" to the things it knows. We have seen that, with this development, the self and its method of knowing appear to become more and more unintelli- gible. How the self as noumenon or as super-temporal activity can know anything or do anything, no one can pretend to under- stand. In the successive transmutations through which it has passed almost all reference to the primary experience out of which the notion of a self .as knower and doer took its rise has been lost. Were such reference completely lost, it would go hard with the hypostatized abstractions of the noumenalist and the neo-Kantian. As it is, they hold their own and appear not wholly without plausi- bility, because men really do find in their experience something which seems to speak for them in a certain vague and inarticulate way. They can form no conception of the manner in which a noumenon or a neo-Kantian self-activity can account for their experiences, but they prefer even these to nothing at all ; for must there not be a knower? do they not really know? Their position is one quite easy to understand. It is not exclu- sively to the childhood of the individual or of the race, that we need go to find the body an important element in the self idea. The developed man has much the same experience as the child, and instinctively interprets it in the same way, although reflection has furnished him with the means of correcting this instinctive interpretation. When, therefore, he speaks of perceiving himself among other objects, he has a more or a less immediate reference to an experience which he and others constantly have ; and uses The Self or Knower 89 a certain expression to call attention to that experience. His thought may be highly nebulous and his attempts to describe it incoherent. Still, he means something, and it is the duty of the psychologist to show him what he means. Our noumenalist, or our neo-Kantian, thus takes his stand upon an experience, though he misinterprets it. He draws from experience the impulse to carry over into a region in which it has no right to exist, the notion of a bodily self. He refines this notion, he purifies it of all that is earthly and concrete, he starves it to a shadow of its former self, and yet he expects of it its former tale of bricks — knowing and doing. It is worth while to emphasize the fact that the original expe- rience to which we have brought back all forms of the doctrine of the knower, contains nothing which will justify such develop- ments as those which we have been discussing. The conscious- ness of self is a relatively permanent factor of our experience; and that important constituent in it, the consciousness of the body, is perceived to be a condition of the occurrences in consciousness of other experiences. Should it be objected that, not the con- sciousness of the body, but the body itself is the condition of the occurrence in consciousness of other experiences, I may answer, that such an absolute separation of the body from the conscious- ness of the body, as one makes when occupying the psychological standpoint has, in Chapter II, been shown to be unjustifiable. Were the body thus cut off from consciousness, no man could rec- ognize the body as a condition of conscious experiences, or as related to them in any way. The distinction commonly recog- nized between the body itself and this or that man's consciousness of it, cannot be made clear without a detailed examination into what is meant by an external world and by minds related to it. For the present, I shall content myself with asserting that the distinction, when properly understood, is seen to be a distinction within consciousness. I shall say, in accordance with this doc- trine, and without more narrowly defining the significance of the statement at this time, that the body — a something of which we are conscious — is perceived to be a condition of our having other experiences. By this I mean that we perceive that when we close our eyes, we cease to see the colors of surrounding objects, and when we reopen them, we again have such experiences ; that when we raise our hand from the table before us, we cease to feel 90 lite Content of Consciousness it, and when we lower it again, we feel the table once more. These and many others of a similar nature are experienced facts, and it is natural that we should be influenced by them to connect the thought of the body with the thought of other experiences of all sorts. But the fact that one group of experiences is observed to be a condition of the appearance in consciousness of various others, should not be made more mysterious than it is. The group of experiences we call the body does not "hold together" our expe- riences as a whole, as the knower has been assumed to hold to- gether all the things that it knows. It constitutes, to be sure, a central point in our experience ; other things come to be grouped around it, and related to it. But all this gives us no such new and occult relation as has been imagined between knower and known. The body remains a complex in our experience, and we have before us the perfectly intelligible task of marking the pre- cise nature of its relations to other complexes or to single ele- ments, much as we mark the relation of any element to any other. We have no good excuse for speaking inconsistently or growing incoherent. Again : the body is made up of parts, and the parts of things may intelligibly stand in relations to each other, as well as may whole objects. A hand can touch its fellow; the eyes can, as we say, see the hands and the feet. Thus the body may, in a loose sense of the words, be said to know itself, to be the condition of its own appearance in consciousness. The expression is inaccu- rate and rather misleading, but it must not be set aside as wholly unmeaning ; it is based on experiences which can be described in detail. But when we get away from the notion of the bodily self, put in place of that a noumenon or a super-temporal activity, declare it to be an absolute unit^ and then maintain that it knows itself^ we fall into mere incoherence. There is nothing whatever in our experience which can serve to make intelligible to us the signifi- cance of such a statement. The man who maintains that one thing knows another, may admit that he does not know clearly what this relation of knowing is, but may hold that it is a relation of some sort between two things. Certainly the relations between things may be of many sorts. But he who is capable of positing a relation of any kind between a thing and itself, is capable of The Self or Knower 91 maintaining seriously that one man may look alike or may walk in single file. It is merely playing with words to attempt to split any one thing into the thing and itself, distinguishing the two as knower and known, and at the same time asserting that knower and known are not really two but only one. The subject-object of the old psychol- ogy, the self as self-knower, is a monstrosity. It needs but a moment of unprejudiced reflection, it seems to me, to see that what is said about it is absurd and unmeaning. The only question of real interest is: How have men come to speak in this way? The answer has been given above, and it seems a sufficiently plausible one. A notion derived from experience of the body is carried over into a realm in which it wholly loses significance, and it is held on to notwithstanding this fact. In the preceding pages three different selves have been dis- tinguished from each other and subjected to criticism ; they are the self as noumenon, the self as a group of phenomena in con- sciousness, and the self as the neo-Kantian self-activity, whatever that may mean. Were we discussing any other subject, it would seem a work of supererogation to endeavor to show that these should not be confounded with each other. But here such confu- sion has reigned that it cannot be out of place to emphasize the truth that a noumenon — by definition a something which cannot by any possibility enter consciousness — cannot be strictly identi- cal with a group of elements in consciousness ; and that neither of these can be strictly identical with a unitary activity which is supposed to hold together the divers elements of which a conscious- ness is composed. When a man talks about the self, therefore, he should know clearly to which of the three he refers. They are evidently not one, and they should not be treated as one. They are not only numeri- cally distinct, but they are not even conceived to be similar ; and to the question why they should be given the same name and thus put into the one class, no answer save an historical one seems to be forthcoming. Those who hold to the existence of all three or of any two of these are apt to identify them loosely with each other, and to pass in their reasonings from the one to the other without clearly marking the transition. Such a procedure evidently is born of and gives birth to confusion of thought. The preceding pages have, I hope, made it clear that the nou- 92 The Content of Consciousness menal self must be thrown aside as a mere figment of the imagina- tion, as an entity the real existence of which cannot be proved by any legitimate evidence based on experience, and one which furnishes no real explanation of anything. Its loss can cause no annoyance to the man who realizes what it is, and distinguishes between the three selves we have been discussing. It can surely matter nothing to me if an " I " of which I have, by hypothesis, never been conscious and can never be conscious ; an " I " which is not the " I " that I perceive myself to be and that I distinguish from other selves ; an " I " so different from the " I " of which I am conscious that its bearing the same name can only be explained as due to a misapprehension ; an "I " which accounts for nothing in my conscious experience and, indeed, turns out upon examination to he nothing but a name for an unknown — it can surely matter nothing to me if such an " I " be divested of the mis- conceptions which appear to give to it a semblance of substantiality and be made to appear the unsubstantial cipher that it is. He who clearly realizes just what is meant by the noumenal self, who sees how completely it stands outside the circle of his actual and possi- ble experiences, and how totally without significance it must be for them, can have no sense of loss in the discovery that it must be dis- carded. But it is not easy to strip off inherited misconceptions, and such reflections as are contained in the preceding pages are apt to bring to many a sense that they are being defrauded of something, a feeling that the self that is left them is little better than a hollow shell, without substance and without true reality. The feeling is a vague one, and cannot justify itself in the face of analysis, but it is rather persistent. Its disappearance can only be brought about by substituting a habit for a habit — the habit of clear thinking, for the habit of thinking loosely and vaguely. As to the shadowy successor of the old noumenal self, namely, the self as timeless self-activity, that must evidently be rejected also. And since it is the only self brought forward as a something in consciousness or in experience to be set over against all else that is in consciousness, and as being different in nature from all the ele- ments indicated in the preceding chapter, its rejection leaves us only what has been called the empirical self as a proper subject of investigation for the psychologist and the metaphysician. That the investigation of the nature and constitutive elements of The Self or Knower 93 the empirical 'self is no easy task has already been made clear, but it is equally clear that the task is not in its nature a hopeless one. It does not differ in kind from the task which confronts us every time that we undertake to obtain an analytic knowledge of any complex in consciousness. This is true no matter what aspect of the empirical self we are concerned with. When we say, " I know," " I think," " I feel," these expressions indicate the presence of cer- tain complex states of consciousness. When we say, " I know myself as knowing," " I think about myself," etc., we indicate the presence of conscious states in some respects different from those above mentioned. It is the duty of the analyst to try to substitute for the vagueness which usually characterizes the recognition of these states of consciousness and their differences from each other some degree of clearness and definiteness. Much has been said, and much is still said, about the unity of consciousness. Undoubtedly, the thought of one man as knowing two things and the thought of two men as each knowing one thing are not to be confounded. When we speak of " a mind," we mean something, and it is perfectly just to seek to know clearly what we mean. But it is one thing to find in consciousness a unity and to endeavor to determine with definiteness what is meant by the unity of consciousness ; and it is another thing to attempt to explain how the unity of consciousness is brought about, by the assumption of hypothetical entities not to be found in consciousness, or by ascrib- ing inconceivable virtues to hypostatized spiritual activities. Hence the rejection of the two selves which we have weighed and found wanting, the noumenon and its post-Kantian successor, need not in the least compel us to deny to consciousness a certain unity. It is merely the rejection of two unsatisfactory attempts to explain how that unity has been brought about — attempts which not only fail in the aim which they have set before them, but which leave un- touched the much more important problem of what manner of thing the unity of consciousness actually is. To this problem nothing but a careful analysis of our experience can furnish a satisfactory answer. 1 1 See Chapter XXIX. PART II THE EXTERNAL WORLD CHAPTER VI WHAT WE MEAN BY THE EXTERISTAL WORLD The word " consciousness," taken in the broad sense, embraces every element of our experience and all combinations of such elements. That it is impossible to pass, in any intelligible sense of that word, beyond this realm, we have already seen.i We can- not, of course, know directly what is outside of our experience, and an examination of representative or symbolic knowledge reveals 2 that it is impossible, by putting together consciousness- elements, to construct something truly representative of an external world supposed to be of a quite different nature — of a world which in no sense belongs to our experience or forms a part of it, but lies over against experience as a whole, and is contrasted with it. But if we take the word " consciousness " in a narrower sense, if we think of a consciousness as the particular group of experiences forming an individual mind, there is nothing to prevent us from distinguishing between consciousness and an external material world standing over against it, nor is there anything to prevent us from distinguishing between one consciousness and another. We certainly mean something when we speak of a world of matter and contrast it with the world of minds ; and we are not talking mere nonsense when we say that we think of this man or that as thinking this or that. These modes of expression denote real distinctions within our experience ; distinctions that may be, it is true, imperfectly appre- hended, as much that belongs to our experience may be imper- fectly apprehended, and may even be seriously misinterpreted. 1 Chapter II. 2 Chapter IH. 96 The External World Such a misunderstanding has arisen when one accepts as final the psychological doctrine of the isolation of the mind, of a knowledge of things external solely through representative images. That this doctrine must have its origin in a misapprehension becomes quite clear when we develop its consequences. But if we avoid such logical shipwreck by holding fast to the thought that those distinctions which we are discussing are distinctions within our experience, that we are in some true sense of the word conscious of them, we may regard it as a difficult, but we need not regard it as a hopeless, task to give a reasonably clear and satisfactory account of them. It is merely a question of drawing a vague and indefinite state of consciousness into the light of definite and analytic knowledge. We all know vaguely — it may be very vaguely, indeed — what we mean by an external material world ; and we all know dimly what we mean when we speak of our own or of another mind. These expressions are not mere noise to us ; the conceptions for which they stand we can use, and we do use, more or less intelligently. The metaphysician should strive to bring us to a better under- standing of what we actually have in mind when we use them. It ought to go without saying that we have a right to expect from him, when he undertakes to prove anything, the same sober con- duct that we expect from other men who undertake to prove things. He must observe the ordinary logical rules ; he must not speak unintelligibly, and he must not contradict himself. He must begin with the somewhat dim and unsatisfactory knowledge which characterizes unreflective thought, and he must really accept the fact that it is dim and unsatisfactory. He must not assume at the outset that he is already provided with the information which he sets out to seek, and is already in possession of an array of ''intui- tions," "necessary truths," "first and fundamental truths," and what not, that it is only necessary for him to describe at leisure. He who adopts this latter method of procedure does not really describe the ultimates which he assumes ; he merely enumerates them. He does not analyze, for he assumes that he is dealing with unanalyzables. He remains upon the plane of the common under- standing, or, at most, only skirmislies a very little beyond it. His writings are apt to be peculiarly satisfactory to the plain man, for the good reason that the latter, in following him, is not compelled to pass beyond his usual modes of thought. He remains the man What we Mean hy the External World 97 he was, even when he becomes a philosopher — which seems a gain counterbalanced by no corresponding loss. To those who feel themselves attracted to this common-sense philosophy, which recognizes the distinctions with which the metaphysician should occupy himself — such distinctions as those between the mind and the external world, one consciousness and another, appearance and reality — but which contents itself with recognizing and emphasizing these distinctions, and refuses to analyze the conceptions which it employs into their component elements; to those who feel themselves attracted to this phi- losophy, I earnestly recommend reflection upon the lesson to be drawn from the experience of that remarkable man Descartes. We may see in Descartes a shining illustration of the fatal ease with which a critical mind, not a weak one, may gulp down into itself, and assimilate, without inconvenience, doctrines which appear to a later age questionable or even preposterous ; and may be led to do this for the one reason that it is accustomed to these doctrines, that these ways of conceiving things fit it like an old glove, and it can see in them nothing to criticise. Descartes began with the resolve to repudiate all his previous opinions, and to take back only such as could really justify themselves before the impartial tribunal of his reason. But when he had cleared the room of all occupants, and opened the door for the admission of the elect, there entered unchallenged (^ex uno disce omnes') o, soul whose ticket primarily entitled it to a seat in the pineal gland, but which, not content with so definitely limited a location, insisted upon its right — one inherited from Scholasticism — to occupy simultaneously all the chairs in the room. This right poor Descartes admitted at once ; he was accustomed to having souls act in that way, and he expected of them nothing better. From this and from a multitude of other instances which will suggest themselves to the student of the history of philosophy, it is easy to draw the inference that the fact that certain ways of looking at things strike us at once as natural and reasonable, does not necessarily prove that these are the best ways, and those in which the metaphysician should rest. He who would be a meta- physician should learn to distrust his " intuitions " ; for a multi- tude of things that have passed by this name have been nothing more than somewhat obscure conceptions, familiar and hence acceptable to the mind, inherited from the past, furnishing 98 The External World important material for investigation, it is true, but demanding analysis and, perhaps, reconstruction. One does not become a metaphysician by simply falling back, for example, upon our " intuitive " (which here means " unana- lytic " ) knowledge that there is an external world, and that we must distinguish between matter and mind. One may say this over and over again at great length, and yet not add a whit to the clearness of our comprehension of the nature of these things. And if the doctrine of the external world, implicit in the thought of the plain man, and rendered somewhat more explicit by the psychologist, contains an inconsistency and needs reconstruction, any metaphysi- cal theory which simply rests in it and defends it, refusing to pass beyond it to something, in a sense, more unnatural, certainly more unaccustomed, must be vitiated by the same fault. Thus the metaphysician should be willing to adjust himself to new and unaccustomed ways of looking at things, provided that his reasonings, in which repeated examination can discover no unsoundness, seem to conduct him inevitably to such conclusions. If he has good reason to believe that he has reasoned well, that he has simply analyzed conceptions which all use but few succeed in analyzing, he may console himself with the reflection that those who oppose him do not really disagree with him, but only think that they do so ; that they misapprehend both their own experience and his analysis of it; and that they carry within themselves the refutation of their own words. It is to be hoped that he will give a very modest expression to this conviction, which is likely to be found highly exasperating to the opposite party. It is not every one that wishes to meet a sympathy so broad that it is impossible to go around it. The astute reader will have seen in the preceding pages an apology for the doctrine which I am about to set forth. It is a view of the nature of the external world which, I am glad to think, is not fundamentally new, even though it differs in some details from other doctrines with which the reader is familiar. Possibly some will be tempted to call it, at first glance, idealistic ; but this name, with the associations that cling to it, can only lead to a mis- apprehension of its true nature, and I must beg that the doctrine be allowed to remain nameless, at least until this volume has been read through to the end. In undertaking an investigation of the nature of the external What we Mean hy the External World 99 material world it is perhaps convenient to begin with a concrete and unambiguous experience. Here is the table before me, an object which I cannot but believe to exist as a part of the system of material things. I see it ; I can touch it ; it is hard ; it is ex- tended ; it is colored. It appears to be as real as it is possible for anything to be. It is, be it remembered, this table before me, the one in my experience, about which I am in the habit of making these state- ments. When I speak thus, I am not talking about a little copy of such a table in, or somehow connected with, my brain — a representative, which is unlike the real table, but which in some inconceivable way stands for it. As we have seen,^ both the plain man and the psychologist assume the existence of such a represen- tative and confine our knowledge to it; but neither takes his assumption quite seriously, for he also assumes that we have direct experience of the real table, and his system of reasonings, his whole theory of originals and representatives, and of the relations between them, rests upon this assumption. The real external table is, then, a something in our experience. It is given in consciousness. When we have said this, we have, to be sure, ruled out a possible source of error, but we have not said very much, for there are various ways in which things may be given in consciousness ; and many sources of error are open to the man who fails to distinguish between them. If we simply maintain that the table of which we are speaking is, since it exists in con- sciousness, a state of consciousness or part of such a state, and rest content with that statement, we seem to obliterate completely the useful distinction between things and our ideas of things, a dis- tinction which, even though it may remain to most of us a suffi- ciently vague one, nevertheless appears to justify itself by the purposes it serves. That the plain man and the psychologist are not wholly wrong in insisting upon this distinction it is not difficult to show. They may point out that the actual experience of which one is conscious, the sensation of color which we have when, as we say, we look at a table, may be made to disappear at once by the very simple ex- pedient of closing the eyes. There, at one moment, is the table, vivid, undeniable, an existent sensation or mass of sensations directly perceived ; and, presto ! it is gone, snuffed out, replaced 1 Chapter II. LflfC. 100 The External World by darkness and a memory not to be confounded with the sensation itself. Would any man in his senses declare that the real table ceased to exist when this phantasm dropped into nothingness ? Between perceiving a table and not perceiving a table there is cer- tainly a difference, but is it reasonable to assume that the fate of real things is bound up with these fluctuations in our perception of them? And yet, if the table we are conscious of is the real external table, if we are dealing here with one thing and not with two, how can the thing go on existing when we no longer perceive it? Can a thing exist and not exist at the same time? Must not the thing and the percept be somehow separated, if the one is to be taken and the other left? The justice of the distinction between our perceptions of things and the things themselves becomes clear when we examine with care what we mean by the expression " a real thing " ; and at the same time it becomes clear that we are not forced to double the number of things perceived and banish half of them, the real half, to a world unknown and unperceived, a world beyond and outside of our experience as a whole. In other words, it becomes clear that the psychologist is partly right ; that he has recognized dis- tinctions that it is important to recognize, but that he has not grasped clearly the whole significance of these distinctions. He has distinguished between things and our ideas of things ; but he has left incomplete his analysis of the former conception. If he will complete it, he will find that he may hold to the distinction without on that account being forced to say what is inconsistent, or to dogmatize on the nature of entities for the existence of which he can furnish no unequivocal proof. We may begin our investigation of the elements which enter into our conception of a real table by marking the following points : — 1. The real table is evidently more to us than this one experience of color-sensations ; a very little reflection is suiflcient to establish that. It is quite true that I say, " I see the real table," and refer to this experience of colors ; but when I examine my thought a little more narrowly, I admit at once that this one experience does not constitute for me the table of which I am speaking. It would be a monstrosity, a phantom table, no table at all, that could be summed up in a single visual experience. It could not be seen from a nearer or a farther point, from this angle ' ( What toe Mean hy the External World 101 or that, under a good light or in semi-obscurity. Moreover, it could not be touched, and recognized as hard, smooth, furnished with sharp corners and rounded edges, a thing to knock up against, to sit upon, to give forth sounds when drummed upon with the fingers. AH these elements enter into our conception of a real table, and although at any given moment some one experience may be more prominently in mind than the others, these others cannot be wholly lacking, or we are not thinking of a table at all. Thus tables, as they enter into our experience, are very complex things. Single experiences of sight or of touch may enter into these com- plexes, and help to make them what they are ; but they cannot be regarded as strictly identical with the wholes of which they are mere elements. 2. It should be observed, furthermore, that when I say, " I see the table," the various elements which constitute the conception are not all present in consciousness in the same way. One experi- ence of color presents itself in consciousness with a certain vivid- ness; it is, as we say, in the sense. But all the other experiences of color which enter into the conception must be present, not in the sense but in imagination. It is not possible for me to see all around a table at once, or to view it from different distances simul- taneously. And if I merely look at the table, and do not touch it, all those experiences of touch w^hich enter into the conception, and which supplement the experiences of sight, must be present, in so far as they are present, as imaginary elements, and not as sensa- tions. So it may be with any other experiences which contribute their quota to my notion of a real table. I may see a real table before me, and recognize on reflection that I actually see very little indeed, and that vastly the greater part of the total content for which the word stands is furnished by the imagination, not found in the sense. 3. It is possible to go even a step farther than this. We all believe in the existence of real tables at which we do not happen to be looking at any given moment. If this one before me is carried into the next room, I do not, on that account, cease to believe that it continues to exist. It is still for me a real table, but a real table for the time being unperceived. When I am thinking of it, every element in my thought is drawn from the region of imagination. It is, then, as it appears, possible for a real table to exist without being perceived at all ; it is merely conceived^ 102 The External World thought about, constructed in the imagination. It has its whole being in a region which we are accustomed to contrast with the real world of things, and to which we deny reality of the same kind as that which we attribute to these. If this be so, how can that which is in consciousness be the real thing ? Have we not come back to something very like the standpoint of the psychologist ? 4. The answer to this question we may defer for a few moments. It is important here to recognize that we do not regard an imaginary table, as such, as a real one. It is not enough to draw upon our past experience of tables, to put together such and such elements, construct for ourselves in thought a table of a given size and color and marked by certain arbitrarily chosen char- acteristics, and then give it an unperceived existence in this locality or that. I do not believe the table in the next room to exist merely because the conception of it is in my mind. It is not the part of good sense to embrace this belief for no better reason. I believe that the table in the next room exists, either because I saw it carried in there out of this room, or because some one else has seen it and has told me so ; or because, by some other method — perhaps a very indirect method indeed — I am enabled to connect the thought of the table with experiences of the class to which sensations belong, and to recognize that it may be regarded as a representative of a sensational content and, under appropriate circumstances, may even be replaced by such. My ultimate reference is always to sensation ; to sensations which have been experienced, or to sensations which may be experienced. I may lay my hand on the table before me and substitute for the idea of hardness the corresponding sensa- tion. If I am asked to prove that there is a table in the next room, I may either sit still and show from experiences had in the past that this particular conception must be placed among those which are legitimately regarded as representative of sense presentations ; or I may, instead, rise and open the door, thus sub- stituting a perception, an actual experience of color, for the thought of such. This reference to sense, implicit in all our affirmations of the reality of things, has been so often pointed out, that it may seem scarcely necessary to emphasize it. It is admitted by men of widely different schools of thought. What we Mean hy the External World 103 But what, after all, is meant by a reference to sensation ? How can a sensation be recognized as such ? This problem has been touched upon in an earlier chapter.^ It was there pointed out that sensations, the class of experiences which Hume called impressions, have as a class a degree of vivid- ness which serves to mark them out roughly from the class of experiences called ideas. But it was remarked, at the same time, that this difference in vividness is not always present to serve as a criterion, and that, consequently, some other mark must be sought, if we are to feel safe in relegating this experience or that to the one class or to the other. Ideas may in certain cases be very vivid and insistent; sensations may be extremely dim and shadowy. A man seen in a dim light is not to be regarded as less real than an actor in a dream, though the latter may stand out very strikingly on the background of his unreal surroundings. There must, then, be some other final court of appeal if the claims of sensations and ideas are to be determined with anything like an approach to justice. Such a court the psychologist tries to furnish us in distinguishing between mental experiences which are to be regarded as the result of " peripheral stimulation," that is, those which arise when the outworks, so to speak, of our nervous system are thrown into a state of activity ; and mental experiences which correspond to an independent activity of the " central " nervous system, those, in other words, which represent brain action which is not a direct response to a message conducted along a sensory nerve. This distinction appears at first glance to be a convenient one. Perhaps it will really be a very convenient one for some purposes, when we possess a more accurate knowledge than we now do of what takes place in the peripheral nervous system and in the central. But it must not be overlooked that the man who offers us this distinction as the criterion for deciding what experi- ences are sensations and what are ideas has placed himself upon the psychological standpoint, and has assumed that, in a certain field at least, he already has the knowledge to which his criterion is to help him. How does he know that the body, of whose central and peripheral nervous systems he discourses, is not an imaginary thing, a persistent hallucination ? How can he prove his experi- ences of the body, which are to form the touchstone for testing 1 Chapter IV. 104 The External World other experiences, to be of the class called sensational ? If he simply assumes them to be such — as he does — and then uses them as the test of other experiences, is he not guessing at half the distance to the sun, and then multiplying by two, to discover how far away the sun really is ? The procedure of the psychologist is not, however, as bad as it looks when set forth in this way. His criterion cannot be accepted as final by the metaphysician, but it may serve a useful purpose nevertheless. In advancing it, the psychologist remains upon the plane of the common understanding, and assumes that certain things may be safely assumed, even if they are not completely understood. We have seen that the distinction between our sensa- tions and our ideas is one recognized in common life, and that it would be extremely inconvenient were these two classes of experi- ence easily and frequently confounded.^ There is the broad dis- tinction, just mentioned, of a superior vividness, which characterizes our sensations as a class. But even where this characteristic is lacking, and where a mere inspection of the experience itself would leave the mind in doubt as to its proper place, it is possible to apply the only ultimate criterion, a recognition of the way in which the experience behaves^ of the place among our other experiences which it takes and maintains, and thus to decide upon the class to which it rightly belongs. This criterion is perfectly well recognized in common life, and it is the one applied in the more exact investigations which obtain in the sciences. It may be very well applied without a clear apprehension of its ultimate nature, and yet with a nice sense of whether given experiences meet its requirements or do not. In other words, it may be applied without being reflected upon. The child soon learns to recognize that the green lion which marches across the ceiling when the light has been carried off, and he has been left to the phantom terrors of a solitary crib, is not exactly like the lion which lives in a cage, and can be seen only by paying admission. The behavior of this lion is too inconsequent. He is real enough to inspire fear, but he is, nevertheless, not exactly real. The presence of the light is enough to exorcise him. And even the man who has no settled opinions touching the existence and nature of ghosts, is apt to think that a ghost capable of being photographed is more real a ghost than the one which can at best 1 Chapter IV. What ive Mean hy the External World 105 only make itself apparent to the terrified rustic at dead of night. We have all our lives been judging our experiences, and arranging them as a result of that judgment. What we see we try to touch ; and what we touch we perhaps try to taste and smell. No one approaches mature life without finding himself in a world of things pretty well known, and without settled habits of testing things to find whether they are real^ that is, whether they belong to that orderly class of experiences which have fallen into a regular sys- tem, or whether they defy such an arrangement and must be relegated to a class of a different kind. Hence it does not occur to the plain man to offer proof that his body is real. He knows that it is, even if he cannot define what he means by the word. He only busies himself with the reality of those things which are still in doubt. And the psycholo- gist, standing upon the same basis, but desiring more accurate knowledge and having forced upon his attention many problems which do not fall within the horizon of the plain man, makes more of a coil about the reality or the unreality of things, but he assumes the reality of his body and of an external world just as confidently as does the former. His proposed method of distin- guishing sensations from ideas is a convenient expedient for decid- ing doubtful cases, but it assumes that the distinction has already been drawn. As I have suggested above, it may sometime turn out to be a very useful expedient, and we have no right to condemn it because the man who uses it remains a psychologist and does not become an epistemologist. There is, then, but one ultimate method of deciding whether a given experience is to be classed as a sensation or not. We must discover whether it takes its place among those elements of our experience which so connect themselves together as to form what we recognize as the system of material things. ^ It has long been recognized that there is an orderliness in this system which appears to be lacking in our other experiences. For example, in my present perception of the table before me, I recognize a definite expanse of color, determined as to quantity and quality. I can vary this by changing my position or by chang- 1 1 beg the reader to regard the account of the external world and of sensation given in this chapter and in the next one as a provisional account, which should be supplemented by what is said in Chapters VIII and IX, and also by what is said in Chapters XXIII and XXIV. 106 The External World ing the position of the table. I can cause it to disappear by closing my eyes. But I cannot bring about any of these changes unless I adopt the appropriate means of effecting the particular result at which I am aiming. These changes in my experience follow upon certain other changes in my experience in a fixed and orderly way ; and I must acquaint myself with this order if I wish to control the experiences. What I have called ideas, on the other hand, do not take their place in this system. Whatever may be the laws which determine their appearances and disappearances, they are not the same laws which are found in the world of sensations. I can perform all sorts of arbitrary operations upon an imaginary table — turn it from black to white, increase or diminish its size, change its shape, annihilate it and recreate it — pretty much as I please ; I am free here as I am not free in dealing with sensations. Moreover, when I dismiss an imaginary table from my thought, it really seems to be gone, to be annihilated ; while a table that I have once seen and no longer see, I am yet forced to regard as holding some sort of place in the system in which I have accorded it a place. I may still explain certain of my experiences by referring to it, just as if I still saw it. Even if it be broken to pieces or destroyed by fire, I cannot think, when I have once arisen to the conception of a system of real things, that that system is now just what it would have been if that table had not held a place in it. The imaginary table appears to be mortal, and the table which presents itself to the sense seems to enjoy some sort of immortality. But here the objection may be raised, and with good show of reason, that in the above there is an unwarrantable transition from sensations to things. Have we not seen that, when we speak of seeing a real thing, there is usually but little in the sense, and that by far the greater portion of the elements which we conceive as constituting the thing exist, in so far as they exist in our expe- rience at all, not in the sense but in the imagination ? Why, then, speak of our sensations as connected together into a system and constituting an orderly world? Can anything be more irregular than the actual sense-experience which we have of things ? 1 see my table to-day and I do not see it again until day after to-morrow ; on some occasions I see it but do not touch it ; the under side of it I happen never to have seen at all. What sort of material is this of which to make a real table holding its place in a real world ? What we Mean hy the External World 107 That world appears before the windows of the senses only in fugi- tive glimpses, and we may piece these together as we will, but they still remain ridiculously inadequate to make such a world as we conceive the world to be. Is the life history of a table nothing more than a discontinuous series of flashes ? It is clear that we cannot take quite literally the statement that our sensations fall into an ordered system and constitute what we mean by a world of things. If, however, we understand the statement aright, there is no reason why we should not approve it. It is quite true that our sensations do not of themselves constitute our consciousness of a world of real things ; this world does not present itself to us immediately as a complex sensational content upon which we gaze. It is rather a something built up out of the materials furnished by sense, supplemented by elements which, while not themselves sen- sations, are made to represent such. Sensations, memories of sen- sations, and imaginary experiences which are not memories, though their elements have no independent source, all enter into its com- position. Our sensations, actual and remembered, are separated by gaps which must be filled before there emerges the system of experiences which we call the world of real things. The gradual emergence of such a system in an individual con- sciousness is described at length by the psychologist, and is termed by him the development of a consciousness of the external world. We may take such a description, clear away all reference to the psychological assumption of the existence of an external world beyond consciousness and not composed of consciousness-elements, and, taking our stand upon ground proper to the metaphysician, see in it a description of the elements which enter into our concep- tion of an external world when we speak of such without reference to this consciousness or that. It is merely a question of an analysis of conceptions ; the psychologist asks himself just what he means when he conceives of this man or that as being conscious of the external world ; the metaphysician asks himself just what is meant by the expression " the external world," and sees that he can answer this question independently. Still, he can use the analysis made by the psychologist ; it may be of no small help to him, if he will avoid being misled by the assumptions included in the reasoning which he is following. He may see clearly — a point of especial importance at this 108 The External World stage of my discussion — that the psychologist lays great stress upon the sensational elements in the consciousness of an external world, makes them, in fact, the basis and the justification of the whole construction. When he reflects upon his own consciousness of the world at any moment, he realizes that this is justified. He sees that the imaginary constituents of the world of real things which he finds in his experience do not take their place in that construction as imaginary elements^ but as representative of sensa- tional elements. It is their content, so to speak, which belongs to the construction, not the content with the added characteristic of belonging to the class called imaginary. There is, thus, a sense in which we may say that the external world is constituted by the sensational elements in our experience. These elements appear to belong to it in a way in which other elements do not. They constitute it, and elements remembered or imagined merely represent it. So important is the point here insisted upon that I may be per- mitted to delay upon it, even at the risk of a little repetition. I am sitting here in my room and I see my table before me. Every- one is willing to admit that this particular experience of color is a sensation. It appears strange to no one that I should see my desk under such circumstances. Beyond my room is a hall, and at the end of this a door. I say that I think of the door as there — that I imagine it, but do not see it. Both in the case of the desk and of the door I believe that I am concerned with real things in a real external world, but I unhesitatingly draw a distinction between seeing a thing and imagining it. The door imagined is not an arbitrary product of my imagina- tion ; it is not mere fancy. It has its definite place in my concep- tion of the external world. Hence it does not appear to be by any means so lawless a thing as a purely imaginary door, and what has been said of the distinction between sensational and imaginary elements in consciousness seems to be contradicted. Whether it appear in my consciousness as imaginary or not, I think of that door at the end of the hall as a real door, and I feel that I cannot by an act of will change its nature or annihilate it altogether. But the contradiction disappears when we bear in mind what has just been said above, namely, that the imaginary elements in our consciousness of the external world are not imaginary elements pure and simple, but are imaginary elements which are regarded What we Mean by the External World 109 as representative of sensational. They must be what they are, for their nature is determined by the content which they represent. We have here, not sensation, but, as I have expressed it a few pages back, a reference to sensation^ and this must be present in all our affirmations of the reality of things. That even these imaginary elements, which help to fill out our conception of the external world, do not themselves fall directly into the system of real things, we recognize when we call them imaginary. As I have said, it appears strange to no one that, sitting here, I should see my table and only imagine that door. What does this mean ? It means that the table as seen, this par- ticular visual sensation, is actually in the setting in which things must be if they are to constitute elements in the external world. The door which I imagine is not in such a setting. Were I stand- ing in the hall, i.e, were the setting other than it now is, I would see the door. Whether a given experience is or is not in the setting which guarantees it a sensation, men may know very well, as I have indicated, without knowing just how they know it, and without giving much conscious thought to the distinction between what is real and what is imaginary. We cannot, then, legitimately quarrel with the statement that sensations constitute the external world of things, and that the imaginary elements in our conception of such a world are merely representative of sensations. Thus we see that by the expression " the external world " we mean a construct in consciousness, and a construct in consciousness of a peculiar kind. We do not mean precisely what we do when we use such a phrase as " my consciousness of the external world at this time or at that." We have seen that, when we think of certain consciousness-contents as having their place in the con- struct which we call the external world, we abstract from the degree of vividness with which they may happen to appear in conscious- ness. Sensations are not necessarily vivid, and provided that we have some sort of proof that a certain experience belongs to this class, we do not refuse to accord it a place in the system of real things merely because it does not stand out prominently in con- sciousness. Such differences we describe as differences in our perception of things, not as differences in the reality of things. Of course, when one has arrived at the notion of an orderly system of things, and has learned to account for this or that peculiarity in one's experience by a reference to other parts of the system, one 110 The External World does not regard a difference in the vividness with which experiences present themselves as something inexplicable and independent of the system as a whole. Nevertheless, one recognizes that what we call the reality of a thing has little to do with the vividness with which it presents itself in consciousness. We have also seen that what I call " my consciousness of an external world " is a complex of sensational and imaginary elements, and yet we do not regard real things as composed of elements of the two classes. So little does it appear to be necessary to mark this distinction when one is discussing real things, that most persons experience an emotion of surprise when it is pointed out to them that their consciousness of things is largely made up of imaginary elements. They are interested in things^ not in their percepts as percepts ; and when we are concerned with things, the imaginary elements in our percept are representative of sensational ; they are important to us primarily on account of the function which they perform, and we pay no attention to the fact that they are in themselves to be differentiated from sensations. The qualities of things, as we call such elements of our experience as are conceived to have a place in the system under discussion, are not conceived as existing now in the sense and now in the imagination ; they are simply regarded as forming a constituent part of that system and as sharing its reality. This distinction between " the external world " and " my con- sciousness of the external world " — a distinction drawn equally by the plain man, the man of science, and the metaphysician — becomes clearer when we see in it an instance of the very common distinction between that which is symbolized or represented and the symbol which stands for the former. This distinction has been discussed at length in Chapter III, and what has there been said is of importance to a clear under- standing of the doctrine of the external world and our conscious- ness of it. What we call " a thing " is a complex construction, and we all believe that things are or may be much more comj)lex than the elements regarded as belonging to them that we actually find in our experience — more complex, in other words, than that of which we are intuitively conscious. When, for instance, T look at my table, I realize that even when I supplement the color-sensations which I experience by other What ive Mean hy the External World 111 color-sensations remembered or imagined, and by similar materials drawn from the province of the other senses, yet all the elements that are actually in my consciousness do not exhaust the sum total of the experiences which the words " my table " may be made to cover. I distinguish between all that is in my thought, and all that belongs to the thing. I regard the thing as more complex than my representation of it. And when I have to do, not with a single real thing like a table, but with the system of real things as a whole — when I talk about the external world — I am quite ready to admit, if the matter be brought to my attention, that what is in my consciousness is a very inadequate representation of the external world. The external world I conceive to be something indefinitely richer and more complex. I have said that this distinction between our experiences and the external things for which they are conceived to stand is by no means peculiar to the metaphysician. He merely tries to make clear what the distinction is, and to avoid the inconsistency into which others seem to fall. The plain man and the psychologist regard the real things for which our experiences stand as existing wholly outside of consciousness and as separated by an impassable gulf from our experiences as a whole. At the same time they tacitly assume that we directly perceive these same real things and are not cut off from them at all. The impossibility of accept- ing their doctrine as final has been pointed out, and it is not neces- sary to repeat what has been said. The metaphysician must retain the distinction which they have recognized, but he must so define it as to avoid self-contradiction. It is not possible at this stage in my discussion to exhibit the full significance of such expressions as " my consciousness " and " the consciousness of another man " ; but it is at least possible to recognize that the distinction between a thing as it is actually found in my experience and a thing as it is conceived to be in its own nature, becomes a comprehensible and by no means an absurd distinction when it is perceived to be a distinction between symbol and that which is symbolized. In the one case we are concerned with a given content in consciousness in itself considered, and in the other with a content in consciousness regarded as representative of some other complex of consciousness-elements. It is perfectly just to draw a distinction between symbol and thing symbolized, but in drawing this distinction we must not grow incoherent or 112 The External World unintelligible. We must remember what is meant by a symbol, and wliat is the true nature of symbolic knowledge. Within the limits of experience — within consciousness, in other words — one complex may symbolize or represent another ; but it is inconceiv- able that any experience should symbolize a something wholly beyond experience, a something so completely cut off from experi- ence as the external world is sometimes conceived to be. The external world of real things is, thus, a construct in con- sciousness. It is a system of elements related to each other in certain fixed ways. When we speak of this or that man as being conscious of this or that aspect of it, we are distinguishing between a more or less satisfactory representative of the system, and the system itself. That we can make this distinction does not imply that we have in mind an intuitive consciousness of both the repre- sentative in question and the system represented by it, and that we place them in thought side by side. Our procedure is just what it is in other cases in which we distinguish between the symbol and that which it stands for. We may regard one man as having a very inadequate notion of what is meant by a million units, and another as having a truer conception of that number, but we never dream of the latter as being intuitively conscious of a million as he may be of two or three individuals, nor do we arrogate to ourselves the power of thus knowing so large a number. And yet we can distinguish between the million, in itself considered, and the representative of it which is actually present in the consciousness of any individual at any moment. The latter is just this particular experience, definitely limited, and containing no overwhelming number of constituent elements ; the former is to us rather a way of looking at certain things than an individual thing, rather a formula than a fact, rather a rule for dealing with experiences than a given experience. It is an ideal, a construction which obtains its significance ultimately from that intuitive consciousness which we have of small numbers, and its justification from the fact that by means of it and other similar conceptions we take our departure from and return to such intuitive experiences in an orderly way, predicting and verifying our experiences as we could not without the aid of these concep- tions. When we are concerned, not with the elements we actually have in mind when we speak of a million, but with the conception What we Mean hy the External World 113 of a million in itself considered, we abstract from the fact that the units of which it is assumed to be composed are not present in con- sciousness as are the units which compose the number two, and we treat our million as though it were composed of the same materials. For the purposes of an arithmetical calculation, it is of no conse- quence whether our consciousness of the group of units with which we are dealing be intuitive or symbolic. If we reason well, the results at which we ultimately arrive are the same. And it is not nonsense for us to say that it is conceivable that to a consciousness of a different nature from our own a million units might be intui- tively present, might be recognized clearly and distinctly, as small groups of two or three units present themselves to us. We cannot picture such a state of affairs, but we can tldnk it ; that is, we can make a mental construction which will fairly represent it ; we can represent it to ourselves symbolically. We mean something when we say it, and our conviction that we do so cannot be shaken even by the lack of clearness in the metaphysician's attempt at an ex- position of what we mean. So it is with our conception of the external world. We may admit that some frame a better notion of it than others, and that we all have something actually in mind, when w^e speak of it, which but very imperfectly represents its indefinite complexity. Never- theless, even in thus speaking, we distinguish in some sort between the external world as it is and the ideas of it which this or that man may happen to cherish. We distinguish between the repre- sentatives of it in individual minds, and the ideal system of which they are supposed to be representative. As in the former instance, there is nothing to prevent us from conceiving of a consciousness in which vastly more of the real world is intuitively present than is the case with us. It is thus quite possible for the metaphysician to hold to the common psychological distinction between the conception of an external world which is built up in this mind or in that, and the original which this conception is supposed imperfectly to repre- sent. But it is necessary to bear in mind that it is quite impossible for the psychologist to recognize that his conception of the exter- nal world is but an indifferent representative of the external world itself, if this world be a something quite outside of consciousness. No man can compare two things, one of which in no way enters into his experience. He who is wholly shut up to his copy of 114 The External World a world cannot even know that it is a copy, and of course he can- not know that it is an imperfect copy. He must, in some sense of the word be conscious of both, if he is to mark the distinction between copy and original. But in what sense? For it seems pertinent, if he be conscious of both, to ask, of what use is the copy? and why if it exist at all, need it be imperfect? The diffi- cult}^ disappears when we realize that we are not dealing with original and copy in the sense in which the psychologist is tempted to believe that we are ; but that we are dealing with the distinction between symbol and thing symbolized. Evidently there is a sense in which both must exist in consciousness, for were there not, it would be impossible for the symbol to be recognized as a symbol. It is only when we are representing the distinction to ourselves diagram matically that we have the right to place the two side by side as though they were numerically distinct in all their elements. Original and copy are here distinguishably different ; nevertheless, we find that the one experience may have its place in the copy, and at the same time may form a part of that system of things which we call the real world. CHAPTER VII SENSATIONS AND "THINGS" We may sum up the conclusions so far arrived at as follows : (1) the real external world is a complex of consciousness-elements ; (2) when we speak of our consciousness of it, we recognize that what we actually have in mind is a compound of sensational and of imaginary elements, the latter largely predominating ; (3) but we do not think of imaginary elements, as such, as actually enter- ing into the composition of the real world — we see that the only elements which really fit into the system are the sensational ele- ments; (4) it seems to follow that the real world which we are discussing is a complex of sensational elements and of none other. Here there appears to stare us in the face something very like a contradiction, an antinomy. Have we not concluded that the external world cannot be external in such a sense as to be wholly beyond consciousness, since in that case it could mean to us nothing at all? On the other hand, has it not been pointed out that the actual experiences we have of things, our sensations, are something very scrappy and chaotic until they are supplemented by imaginary elements and built, together with them, into a single system ? If this system is not the real world, where is this world ? It cannot be out of consciousness ; and it does not seem to be in conscious- ness, for our consciousness of it is just this combination of sen- sory and imaginary elements which we have discovered that the real world cannot be. It appears, thus, that the sensational ele- ments which are found in consciousness will not suffice to make a world, and that the only things we have at hand, with which to supplement them, are incapable of entering into its composition. But the reader has probably seen at once that this antinomy is only an apparent one, and that what has been said, in the last chapter, of the distinction between symbol and thing symbolized, representative and that for which it stands, is sufficient to conjure it away. When we consider our consciousness of the external 115 116 The External World world, when we confine our attention to the symbol, we perceive, of course, that the elements composing it are partly real and partly imaginary. But the symbol, in itself considered, is not the external world. It is a representative of it and no more. By the external world we .mean that for which the symbol stands, the ideal system of experiences of which the symbol is admitted to be an inadequate representative. In thinking of this we are abstracting from the inadequacy of the symbol. In saying that this is constituted of sensational elements we are simply recog- nizing the fact that certain elements in the symbol fall directly into place in this system and that others do not, and also the fact that every element which is conceived as entering into it must enter into it in the way in which these are perceived to. In the real world there is no distinction between sensory and imaginary. Such distinctions have to do with the symbol, not with the system of experiences for which it stands. They must be abstracted from when we decide to occupy ourselves with the latter. If, however, we abstract from such distinctions, what right have we to go on using the word "sensation"? With what color of justice can we say that the system of real things is composed of sensa- tional elements ? Here, at least, we have a sound and solid ob- jection. I must frankly admit that these words contain a psycho- logical reference which should be abstracted from if we intend to turn away from the symbol and consider only that for which it stands. When we call a given experience a sensation, we do not merely think of it as having its place in the system of experiences which we call the real world. We mean something more than this. We think of it as having a certain kind of existence in a given consciousness, as being different from other elements in that consciousness. In other words, when we speak thus, we think, not merely of the real world, but of some one as perceiving that world. These two thoughts are not identical, and they should not be con- founded. Why, then, use expressions which appear to be mis- leading? To this question I must reply as follows : — 1. I use these expressions because I can find nothing better. Language was not framed to mark those distinctions which inter- est the few who devote themselves to reflective thought, and which pass unnoticed by the plain man. If, instead of using the expres- sion " sensational elements," I used the expression " elements of Sensations and " Things " 117 things," I should probably set my readers thinking about atoms or molecules, or something else about which I do not in the least wish them to think in this connection. Moreover, the statement that the world of real things is made up of " elements of things " ap- pears tautological and unfruitful. It carries with it no suggestion of how one is to get at these elements and examine them one by one. 2. The expression "sensational elements," faulty as it is, is not without its advantages. For one thing, it suggests, and rightly suggests, that, when we are discussing the nature and elements of the external world, we are, in the last analysis, deal- ing with consciousness, with experience, and not with an incom- prehensible something beyond it. 3. The expression furnishes us, furthermore, with a sugges- tion of the way in which experiences are to be analyzed. Both the plain man and the psychologist are familiar with a classification of the sensations, and, hence, with what has been called the " meta- physical division" of things. There is no reason why the meta- physician should not make use of the excellent work which has been done by the psychologist, and turn it to his purposes. All the elements which the latter succeeds in discovering in any ex- perienced content are there for the former as well ; and the fact that one man is studying them as partial constituents of a world of real things and another as experiences in a given consciousness, does not prevent their being just what they are — a complex of such and such elements in consciousness. 4. Finally, the expression "sensational elements" does bring in, after a fashion, the notion of the external world with which we are concerned. The psychologist refers sensations to the outer world, and he distinguishes between sensations and the copies of sensational elements which are furnished by memory and imagina- tion. To him the external world as it is reflected in sensation is as immediately known as the external world can he. It is upon sensation that he bases the whole construction which he calls the idea of the external world in a given consciousness. Imaginary elements enter into it only as representative of sensations. This characteristic of sensations, namely, their capability of entering directly -into this construction, the metaphysician may lay hold of, even while he abstracts from other suggestions which the word " sensation " has for the psychologist. What the latter regards as 118 The External World constitutive of the external world as known, the former may regard as constitutive of the external world, abstracting from the relation of knowledge as it is presented in the psychological doctrine of representative perception, and passing from symbol to thing signified. These considerations appear to justify the statement that the system of real things is composed of sensational elements. It is to be regretted that there seems to be no better form of expression for the truth here indicated, and the reader is expressly warned against the psychological associations which cling to the words. The sense in which they are meant to be used is explained in the pre- ceding pages, and I hope that no other sense will be read into them. There was a time when the philosopher spoke of reality as though it were a measurable something in things, and as though it could be present in this or that thing in varying quantities. God was the " ens realissimum,'" and finite things possessed reality in a minor degree. The search for the causes of given effects was guided by such maxims as that a cause must contain at least as much reality as is to be found in the effect which is referred to it. For example, Descartes argues that, since he found in his mind the idea of God, God must exist as the cause of that idea, for the idea in question contained too great a quantity of reality to be referred to any lesser cause, and it seemed self-evident that the greater could not come from the less nor the more perfect from the less perfect. The same error lies at the root of the quibble that finds God's " existence " (which here means real existence) to be contained in His '' essence." The existence is here treated as part of the total content — a something which may in general be added to or taken away from the other determinations of a thing, but which is in this case discovered to be so bound up with the other determinations that it cannot be so taken away. We rarely meet, at the present day, with arguments exactly like this, yet we often meet with arguments in which a misconception of the same general nature is present. We are exhorted to avoid "phenomenalism," to hold on to "reality"; and we are conjured not to forget that this thing or that — usually the ego — is not a mere bundle of states or activities, but is a "real thing." But what is a " real thing "? The expression as we find it used usually sugpfests thnt the Sensations and '^Things'' 119 writer admits to be real only the substance or substratum, itself unperceived, which was once universal^, and is still very commonly, supposed to underlie the qualities of things. But even those writers who expressly repudiate this hypothetical entity may go on using the phrase very much as do those who still cling to it. It is plain that, whatever else they may have in mind when they employ it, they at least have in mind the notion that a " real thing " somehow differs in content from other things in our experience. They believe that, in itself considered^ it means more. It is sometimes extremely difficult to gather from their pages just what they do mean by a real thing and its reality ; but they evi- dently regard reality as a something of the highest importance, and exhibit no little nervousness lest it should for some reason be allowed to slip away. I hope it has been made clear in the preceding chapter that reality or real existence is not a something added to the content of things. I hope, furthermore, that it has been made plain that it is not a something of such a nature that it must forever lurk in obscurity — a something to be named from time to time with respect, and yet never to be described. The reader has probably already remarked the fact that the word " existence " is ambigu- ous. It may be used (1) to cover any content of consciousness intuitively present, imaginary as well as real ; and (2) it may alone, or modified by the adjective " real," be used to discriminate between consciousness-contents. Thus, we often say that this thing or that does not exist, but it is a mere creature of the imagination. It is with the second sense of the word " existence " that we are concerned when we speak of the existence of external things. When we call a thing real, or say that it really exists, we mean that it takes its place in the system of experiences which has been discussed at such length in the preceding chapter. This is the sole ultimate criterion of its reality; indeed, this is its reality. The reality is not in any sense a part of its content ; it is its rela- tion to other experiences. This should be sufficiently clear to any one who will reflect upon our invariable method of proving the reality of anything. As we have seen, we try to discover how the thing behaves, where it belongs. We never dream of investi- gating whether it has a " substratum " underlying it, or of looking for the " reality " as a constituent in it. When we have discov- ered that this thing, this experience or complex of experiences, 120 The External World takes its place in the orderly and coherent system of experiences which we contrast with mere imaginings, we call it a real thing. Its reality means to us this, and nothing more. But here it is very necessar}^ to bear in mind the warning against misunderstanding the statement that the external world is composed of sensational elements. It may be argued that, if the real world is composed of sensational elements, it can only have an actual existence in so far as it is realized in some particular consciousness. In other words, what we have called the symbol, the individual mind's representative of the external world, is all that can actually exist. That for which the symbol stands, the external world in itself considered, can only be regarded as exist- ing " potentially " ; that is, it can only be regarded as capable of being realized to a greater or less extent in this consciousness or in that. It is a possibility, not an actuality. Can there be sensations at large ? Sensations which do not form part of some particular consciousness ? The world, then, in so far as it actually exists, must, if it be composed of sensational elements, exist in some indi- vidual consciousness or consciousnesses. And in so far as the world exists "potentially" it cannot really be said to exist at all. To say that it exists " potentially " is equivalent to saying that it will exist or may exist, not to saying that it exists. Does it not seem to follow that the doctrine that the real world is composed of sensational eleipents necessitates the inference that this world has no real existence except in so far as it happens to be perceived by some one ? in other words, in so far as it exists intuitively in some consciousness ? In all this there is evident the influence of the misapprehension against which the above warning was directed. It is a misappre- hension which makes very easy the confusion of the two senses of the word " existence," and the consequent denial of existence to the external world. If there is one source of error in philoso])hical reasonings more constant and insistent than any other, it is the fatal tendency to abstract from this or that and then go on tliink- ing and speaking as though one had not thus abstracted. In the present instance we pass from symbol to thing symbolized, from the individual's consciousness of the world to the world itself. We abstract from the limitations of the symbol. We discover that the word "existence" is ambiguous, and that it has a special meaning when we apply it to things in the real world. Then we Sensations and ^'Things'' 121 straightway forget what that meaning is, and insist that things in the real world must have existence, not in the second sense, but in the first, if they are to have any existence at all. Perhaps, in a fit of generosity, we allow them that dubious sort of existence we call potential, which is not existence, but a prophecy of such. No wonder the real world comes to seem unreal to those who treat it in this fashion. We have returned from the thing symbolized to the symbol, and reassumed the limitations we had transcended by abstraction. The real world is then regarded, either as having no existence save as it breaks out sporadically in this or that conscious- ness, like a passing cutaneous eruption, or as having an existence that only a philosopher can distinguish from actual non-existence, the existence called potential. In any case the real world loses. It must lose, because when we fall into this confusion, we deny distinctions which exist and have importance both in common thought and in science. We all recognize that it is one thing to think of this man or that as perceiving the real world, and another thing to think of the real world itself. It is quite true that the man who remains upon the plane of the common understanding misconceives this distinction, when he undertakes to make it clear to himself. He regards the real world as a something quite outside of conscious- ness, not composed of consciousness-elements, and cut off com- pletely from direct inspection. But although he misconceives the distinction, he is quite right in drawing it, and insisting upon its importance. It is one of no little moment both to common thought and to science. Moreover, we not only distinguish between the real world and this or that perception of it, but we all believe that the real world exists actually even when we do not happen to perceive it, and that it stretches beyond the limits of our perception. We believe that the table in the next room really exists. We do not think of it as existing potentially, as a mere prophecy or promise of existence. We believe that it exists now. And in this we are right. It exists now in the only sense of the word " exist " applicable to real things as real. It has its place in the system of experiences which make up the real world. But how can anj^thing have its place in a system of expe- riences, when it is not actually experienced? How can it exist actually when it is not intuitively present in any consciousness? 122 The External World The objection seems plausible, but it is the identical objection that I have been combating all along. The objection assumes that the word " existence " has but one meaning, and that if things do not exist in the first sense of the word they do not exist at all. And yet it is quite clear, to one who will examine the actual uses of the word, that it is constantly used in a double sense. The distinction recognized by the metaphysician is not his own creation. He merely makes explicit what is implicit in the thought of others. He endeavors to point out what "real existence " must mean, dimly and vaguely, even to the man who, unaccustomed to reflective analysis, is at first inclined to repudi- ate with energy his explanation of its meaning. A thing can have its place in a system of experiences without on that ac- count existing intuitively in consciousness. One who denies this wipes out the distinction between symbol and that which is symbolized ; he denies the possibility of symbolic knowledge in toto. Surely it is a rash man who will undertake to do this. It is worth while to delay for a moment over the distinction between actual existence and potential. It has been stated that it is not identical with the distinction between the intuitive existence in consciousness of the percept and the real existence of those experiences which we conceive as constituting the world of things. This becomes clear when we realize that we may distinguish between actual and potential existence within either of these classes. We may call experiences now intuitively present in consciousness actual ; and we may call those which we expect to be thus con- scious of, or may be thus conscious of, potential. Similarly, we may call an unperceived oak tree actually existent, and may call the oak tree which will spring from an actual acorn, potentially existent. In both instances, potential existence is a prophecy or promise of actuality. It is in each case, be it remarked, a prophecy of actuality of the appropriate kind : here, a promise of a perception ; there, a promise of the real existence appropriate to those things that belong to the real world. It is a manifest injus- tice to real things as a whole to ascribe to them only a potential existence, when in fact some of them exist actually, and those of them which exist potentially are not regarded as existing now at all. Such a use of language gratuitously discredits real things and makes them seem unreal. It should be remarked, furthermore — and this consideration Sensations and ''Things'' 123 should make, if possible, still clearer the justice of the position taken just above — it should be remarked, that there is nothing to prevent the same experience from having existence in both the first and the second senses of the word at the same time. Certain of the elements of the table now before me exist in the first sense of the word. That is to say, I am now intuitively conscious of them. But I recognize this experience as a percept, and I see that the sensational elements which it contains belong to the real world. In other words, the table exists in sense second, as well as in sense first. It has both kinds of actuality at once, and is in no sense potential. But an experience need not have both kinds of actuality to be really existent. The table in the other room, the one which I do not perceive, exists at this moment just as really as the one before me. The difference between that table and this is a significant difference when we are dealing with perceptions ; it is, however, a difference abstracted from when we are concerned with real things. It as little enters into the ques- tion of their reality as does the size of a triangle into the question of the relations between the angles and its sides. It will have been observed that the doctrine of the nature of the external world set forth in the last chapter and in this one suggests the doctrine which has been held with various modifica- tions by three philosophers very familiar to English readers, the philosophers Berkeley, Hume, and Stuart Mill. At the same time it will have been recognized by those who read with discrimination the writings of these men, that all three of them fall into what has been above treated as an error. They all hold more or less to the traditional psychological standpoint even while they criticise it; and, hence, the real world, when it has passed through their hands, does not seem to be such a very real world after all. The psychologist distinguishes between his consciousness of the real world and a real world which he assumes to lie beyond it. The representative of such a world in his consciousness he regards as a limited thing, which very imper- fectly mirrors the world as it really is. Now, the philosopher who sees the inconsistency of the psychologist's position, the assumption of a world beyond our experience and quite cut off from it, and who is moved by this insight to reject such a world, seems to be robbed of his real world altogether unless he can find somewhere and some- how in experience a real world which may take the place of the one 124 The External World which has been lost. If he simply throws the external world away as a gratuitous fiction, and draws no distinction between his ideas of things and the things themselves, he appears to be walking in a vain show, to be fed by mere appearances, to be unable to reach reality at all. No wonder that his words excite opposition and sometimes even irritation. When he attempts to persuade us of the truth of his doctrine, we feel that he is a would-be robber. We are accus- tomed to recognizing a distinction between ideas and things, and even when we cannot follow with complete comprehension the turns of a writer's thought, we refuse to have him palm off upon us as a satisfactory conclusion to his reflections upon the world, the statement that matter does not exist, or that the whole system of things is nothing but a concatenation of ideas. Of course, the popular objection to a philosopher's positions may, in some cases, be due to a mere misunderstanding of his words, or to a start of surprise at the novelty of his statements. But in other cases it may be justified. It may be that, in his endeavor to arrive at a clearer comprehension of things, the philosopher has been misled into denying distinctions which really obtain and are of significance in common thought and in science. This charge may not unjustly be brought against the three phi- losophers above mentioned. That the real world does not seem very real to one who reads them is not entirely due to misconception on the part of the reader. They do overlook distinctions which are of no- slight importance, and the world they offer us is not the real world to which we are accustomed, merely set in a clear light. It is something else, which we feel cannot properly be made to take its place. Those who are familiar with the " Principles of Human Knowl- edge" cannot fall into the vulgar error of believing that the Berkeleyan Idealism wholly obliterates the distinction between real things and imaginary. It is true that Berkeley calls all alik& "ideas," and the use of this word is in itself enough to inspire distrust in a majority of those who follow his discussions ; but he states explicitly that, by what he calls " ideas of sense," he means nothing more nor less than things — things as they enter into our experience, things perceived. He is careful to point out that his polemic against a material world is a polemic against something which never has been perceived by any one, and which cannot be- Sensations and "Things'' 125 proved to exist by any legitimate inference from what is experi- enced. It is, in substance, a polemic against the inconsistent real world of the psychologist who remains upon the psychological standpoint, and accepts it as final — an argument to show that the man in the cell ^ must really have some ground for asserting that things exist, and must mean something when he speaks of the man- ner of their existence, or his assertions will become mere gibberish. Thus the world which Berkeley means to reject is a hypotheti- cal world, beyond consciousness in the broad sense of that word. He has no intention of denying the existence of real things as they are revealed in our experience ; indeed, he points out with admirable clearness the criterion by which real things are to be recognized as such. He emphasizes, as he should, the truth that the orderly character of certain of our experiences puts them into a class by themselves, and he calls the regular ways in which they are connected together and precede and follow one another " laws of nature." Moreover, notwithstanding his repeated denials that it is possible for things to exist unperceived, he recognizes with some clearness the fact that the word " exist " is used in two senses, and remarks the fact that, in one of these senses, it is applicable to things unperceived : " The table I write on I say exists ; that is, I see and feel it ; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed — meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might per- ceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it." ^ Here we have the materials for a satisfactory correction, through reflective analysis, of the inconsistency which attaches to the psychological doctrine of ideas and things — we have a recog- nition of the fact that the attempt to transcend consciousness, in the broad sense of that word, is futile, and results in meaningless statements ; of the fact that, within consciousness, we can find a world of things ; and of the fact that we can distinguish between the presence in consciousness of a perception and the existence of a thing. We have here, I say, the materials for a satisfactory restatement, from the point of view of metaphysics, of the psycho- logical position. It is, however, manifest that Berkeley was not himself able to use these materials as he might have done. The distinctions he draws are not always clear to him, and he is conse- quently more or less inconsistent. He could not get far enough 1 See Chapter 11. 2 " A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge," § 3. 126 The External World away from the psychological standpoint to criticise it in a thorough- going way. That he never completely left it is evident from the following : — Although he explains that by ideas of sense he means things, he is unable wholly to free himself from the usual psychological suggestions of the word "idea." Men commonly think of their ideas as in, or in some obscure way connected with, their heads ; as being without extension ; as forming no part of the system of material things ; and as influencing external things, if at all, only indirectly, and through motions that they may set up in the human body. They are felt to be made of more unsubstantial stuff than enters into the composition of material objects. Now Berkeley treats external things, after calling them ideas of sense, somewhat as other persons treat ideas in general. That relation between occurrences in the external world which we are accustomed to rec- ognize as that of cause and effect, he regards as that of sign and thing signified. The autumn wind blows, and the dry leaf trem- bles and falls. To Berkeley the passing of the wind is not the cause of the fall of the leaf. It is but a sign of that occurrence, an indication that it is about to take place. The wind does noth- v ing at all. " All our ideas, sensations, notions, or the things which'"'^ we perceive, by whatsoever names they may be distinguished, are,'' he writes, " visibly inactive — there is nothing of power or agency included in them. So that one idea or object of thought cannot produce or make any alteration in another." ^ Where did our philosopher get such a notion of the passivity of ideas ? Evidently from the common meaning of the word, the meaning which sharply distinguishes between things and the ideas of things, relegating them to two distinct classes, in only one of which there obtain relations of physical causation. Do we not all know very well that the idea of a hammer cannot really drive the idea of a nail into the idea of a wall ? As well expect the shadow of a dog to rend with shadowy fangs the shadow of a hare. Various passages might be cited to show that when Berkeley discusses real things, he is unable to strip off the usual associa- tions which cluster around the word "idea." It will be enough to refer to one more, — the one which contains the amusing sugges- tion, brought forward in all seriousness by this earnest soul, that the heathen world might be converted from idolatry by the appli- 1 "A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge," § 25. Sensations and '' Thing s^^ 127 cation of the drastic remedy of universal immaterialism. It reads thus : " Did men but consider that the sun, moon, and stars, and every other object of the senses are only so many sensations in their minds, which have no other existence but barely being per- ceived, doubtless they would never fall down and worship their own ideas^ but rather address their homage to that Eternal, In- visible Mind which produces and sustains all things." i But why should a pagan have a lower opinion of the sun and the moon when he discovers them to be ideas ? Is it not admitted that they are ideas of sense ? Are not ideas of sense things for the Berkeleyan ? To this, one has to answer that they are and they are not. They are things in bad company, birds of a feather with ordinary "ideas," tarred with the same stick and partaking of the same reproach. Again, although it is plain from his attempt to make clear what is meant by the existence of his table, and from other passages,^ that Berkeley recognized the double sense of the word " exist" ; yet it is equally plain that he had no very distinct conception of the differ- ence between the two senses in which the word is used. His phrase- ology, even when he recognizes the distinction, shows that he does real existence the injustice of confounding it with a possibility of perception : " The table I write on I say exists, — that is, I see and feel it ; and if I were out of my study, I should say it existed — meaning thereby that if I was in my study, I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it." But existence as a possible perception, potential existence, seems to be such a mere shadow or semblance of existence, that Berkeley finds it impossible to rest in it, and is forced to conclude that, in the last analysis, there can be but one kind of existence after all. This comes out clearly in his attempt to answer the objection that, according to his principles, the objects we perceive by the senses must be annihilated and re-created at every moment, since these objects are our perceptions, and our perceptions are not con- tinuous but are intermittent. He denies that the doctrine of a continual annihilation and re-creation of things can be attributed to him. He has not maintained that things, to have existence, must be perceived by a particular mind. Things may be said to exist so long as they exist in any mind whatever. Our ideas of 1 " A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge," § 94. 2 See the " Third Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous." 128 The External World sense, i.e. real things, must have a continuous existence some- where. When not present to my mind, I may infer that tliey have existence in a Divine Mind, in which, as in a cupboard, ideas are preserved during the intervals of their existence in finite minds : " To me it is evident, for the reasons you allow of, that sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind or spirit. Whence I conclude, not that they have no real existence, but that, seeing they depend not on my thought, and have an existence dis- tinct from being perceived by me, there must he some other Mind wherein they exist. As sure, therefore, as the sensible world reall}'- exists, so sure is there an infinite omnipresent Spirit who contains and supports it." ^ This theistic argument has never, so far as I know, carried conviction to the mind of any one. It is felt to be fantastic. The error upon which it rests is manifest. In it Berkeley loses again the distinction which he has somewhat vaguely recognized be- tween the two senses of the word ''exist," and feels impelled to maintain that whatever exists must have an intuitive existence in consciousness. At the same time, he assumes it to be self-evident that real things have a continuous existence — an existence not to be summed up in the sporadic glimpses of things given in our per- ceptions. In this he is falling back, it is interesting to note, upon the distinction, recognized implicitly or explicitly by us all, be- tween real things and our perceptions of them. But he is trying to turn a real thing into a permanent perception, and he sees no better way of doing this than by piecing out the deficiencies of one consciousness with patches taken from another. Real things made up in this extraordinary fashion are not Avorthy to be called real things, and they cannot get themselves recognized as such. From the foregoing it is clear that Berkeley has said quite enough to justify the suspicion with which his doctrine has been regarded. He has taken away one real world, and he has not given us another in its place. He has substituted a misunder- standing for a misunderstanding, and many feel that the last state of the man whom he has undertaken to reform is worse than the first. Yet he comes, as we have seen, near to the truth. He fur- nishes the materials for a critical restatement of the psychological doctrine of knowledge and the real world. He does not succeed in making the restatement. 1 " Second Dialogue between Ilylas and Philonous" ; see also "Principles," § 48. Sensations and "Things'' 129 We may criticise Berkeley's acute successor Hume somewhat as we have criticised Berkeley. Hume, too, fails to distinguish as he should between the two senses of the word " exist," and it is, hence, impossible for him to do justice to the real world. He occupies the psychological standpoint even while he finds fault with it. But the error of the two men is the same with a difference, and the difference is a characteristic one. Berkeley dimly recog- nizes that there are two ways in which things can exist ; he does not fully comprehend the distinction he has drawn, and, after making it, he obliterates it by trying to turn the continuous exist- ence of real things into an uninterrupted perception. But it should be remarked that he never doubts the continuous existence of real things, however oddly he explains it, and in this he is at one with common sense and with science. Hume follows the lead <5f his own reasonings gayly ; he is not easily shocked himself, and he appears to enjoy startling his reader. Instead of going with Berkeley to the end of the road, he makes a sharp turn and con- cludes that, although Nature compels us to believe in the con- tinued existence of real things in the intervals of our perception of them, yet this belief can be in no way justified before the bar of the reason. He has no difi&culty in showing that our perceptions themselves are intermittent, and that it is only through a miscon- ception that we can attribute to them a continued existence. And he thinks he finds it possible to prove that real things cannot for any good reason be assumed to have an existence distinct from our perceptions. It seems to follow that real things can have no ex- istence other than the interrupted existence which manifestly belongs to our perceptions. ^ In his attempt to prove that real things have no existence distinct from perception Hume is the pupil of Berkeley, and he vigorously attacks the psychological doctrine of representative perception. But it should not be overlooked that the statement that the objects of our perceptions are not distinct from our per- ceptions themselves is an ambiguous one. It may be true or false, according to the sense in which it is understood. It is quite possi- ble to deny, as we have seen, that my perception of the table and the real table stand over against one another as the psychological doctrine would have us believe, and yet to make a distinction 1 "Treatise of Human Nature," Part IV, § 2. 130 The External World between them. Hume does not recognize the fact that an expe- rience looked at in two different ways, an experience regarded as standing now in this connection and now in that, may acquire a right to two names, and may justly be made the subject of widely diverse judgments. The reader w^ho has followed the analyses of the preceding chapters has seen, I hope, in what sense perceptions are identical with real things and in what sense they are not. If no distinction whatever could be made between the two, then, of course, nothing whatever could be predicated of real things that could not be predicated of perceptions, and Hume would be quite right in denying to the former any sort of existence not attributable to the latter. This is what he actually does. Since he cannot see that the same experience may be looked at in two ways, he cannot recognize the double sense of the word "exist." Hume cannot be accused of obliterating the distinction between sense-experiences and the copies of these in memory and imagina- tion. It is interesting to note, however, that when he is explicitly discussing the distinction between '^ impressions " and " ideas," he overlooks Berkeley's most important criterion for singling out real things from the other elements in our experience. " Impres- sions " are made to differ from " ideas " only in that they are more lively and forceful.^ And since, as we have seen, the reality of real things, their real existence, is but the fact of their having a place in the orderly system of our experiences, it is to be expected that Hume, more or less slighting this fact, should sin more deeply than Berkeley in what he says of the external world. Berkeley confuses perceptions and real things, but he nevertheless holds on to real things with a good deal of energy. His sense-ideas usually remain to him things ; and he insists that his doctrine does not lead him far away from the common opinion of mankind. But the real world of things which Berkeley finds in consciousness shrivels in the hands of Hume into a world of mere perceptions. He impresses his reader as assuming throughout, as does the man who remains upon the psychological standpoint, that a real world, if it is to be found at all, must be found beyond consciousness ; that the stuff of which " impressions " are made cannot possibly enter into its composition. He remains, in fact, a psychologist, and yet he sees clearly that the external world of the psychologist will not do 1 " Treatise of Human Nature," Book I, Part I, § 1 ; and "An Enquiry concern- ing the Human Understanding," § 2. Sensations and " Things " 131 at all for tbe philosopher. Hence he throws it away, and becomes a psychologist bereft. He is able to bear his bereavement philo- sophically, but it has caused much annoyance to those to whom his reasonings have seemed unanswerable. Mill goes back to Berkeley, and takes up again his distinction between the two senses of the word " exist." But, instead of correcting the error into which Berkeley falls, he, too, concludes that the existence of things unperceived must be a merely poten- tial one. Real things are to him no more than "permanent possi- bilities of sensation." "We have seen that it is doing real things an injustice to confound them with possibilities of any sort, and also that this reference to sensation indicates an incomplete ab- straction. The admirable clearness with which he develops his doctrine makes it unmistakably plain that Mill cannot get away from the perception of real things, and consider merely the real things themselves?- 1 See his chapter entitled, " The Psychological Theory of the Belief in an Ex- ternal World," "Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy." CHAPTER VIII THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN APPEARANCE AND REALITY From what has been said in the preceding chapters, does it not seem to follow that we must regard all sensations, of whatever description, as having a place in the real world of things ? What criterion of sensation is there save that which has been pointed out — a criterion which makes the very being of a sensation, as a sensation, to consist in the fact that it has a place in that fixed order of experiences that we call the real world ? The general reference of all sensations to a place in nature appears to be, moreover, not merely in harmony with the criterion of sensation which has been insisted upon, but also in harmony with the natural impulse of the plain man, who does not, unless forced to do so, discriminate between sensations of various classes, allowing to some a reality denied to others. It is safe to say that it is no less in harmony with the impulse of the man of science, when he is not specifically occupied with scientific theory, but is living the life common to us all in familiar intercourse with the real things that are perceived to surround him in his workaday world. He perceives the table before him to be extended, resisting, colored ; the lamp which he pushes away from him emits a sound ; the rose in the glass of water at his elbow smells sweet ; the swollen finger which he presses against his pen has a pain in it. The real world of things which he perceives about him is not made up of sensational elements of one or two classes exclusively. It contains things extended and resisting; but these things aie also colored and sonorous, and some of them may tingle with pain. What considerations can induce a man to conceive that real things, as they are, lack some of the properties which they seem to reveal themselves as possessing ? Why should a man give to certain sensations a preference over others, and, constructing for himself a paler copy of the rich and varied world of his actual experiences, 1 02 Distinction hetween Appearance and Reality 133 declare this to be the real world from which the veil of appearance has been torn away? There is here, it should be observed, no question of a distinction between sensations and experiences of the class called imaginary. The color seen, the sound heard, the pain felt, are really seen, heard, and felt. They are not merely imagined. They are sen- sations, and in so far they belong to the same order as sensations of touch and movement, the ones commonly left to the real world when it has been robbed of all others. On what pretence shall they be excluded from the real world to which they certainly seem to belong? That men do come to discriminate between different classes of sensational experiences, allowing to some a place in the world of real things and denying such a place to others, is a fact with which the reader is, of course, familiar. In this chapter I shall try to show what has led to the emergence of this distinction, and shall exhibit the form that it has taken in the hands of the common-sense philosopher and of the man of science. The question of the reality of what is given in perception was recognized to be a problem calling for solution very early in the history of reflective thought. It was discovered that there must be a distinction between things as they appear and things as they really are. Such men as Anaxagoras and Democritus came to the conclusion that the senses are imperfect instruments, and are by themselves unable to discern the true nature of the elements that enter into the structure of the real world of things. This function, they thought, can be performed only by the reason, which has the power of passing beyond the data furnished by sense, and of grasping the reality that lies behind the veil. It seems scarcely too much to say that, just as soon as philos- ophy grew to be something more than a crude attempt at laying the foundations of physical science, its great problem was felt to be the nearer definition of the reality which underlies the play of appearances and which is not distinguished from appearances by the unreflective. And as reflection upon this problem made it evident that it is by no means easy of solution, there were, as we might expect, those who stood ready to deny either that there was such a problem, or that it was one for which any conceivable solution could be found. Thus Protagoras and Pyrrho, finding it impossible to retain the naive confidence in the power of the reason to transcend the mere appearance, and to rest in a reality 134 The External World more satisfying, concluded that no truth — no such truth, at least, as has been the goal of the endeavors of earnest men from the dawn of reflective thought to the present day — is attainable by man. Of these worthies, the one seems to have maintained that every appearance is as real as every other ; while the other held that, although reality and appearance may theoretically be dis- tinguished, yet the mind is incapable of deciding between true and false appearances, and will, hence, do well to empty itself of all opinions whatever, to draw from appearances no conclusions of any sort, and to cultivate a vacuity in comparison with which the agnosticism of our day is dogmatism itself. Such a scepticism as this, it is, of course, impossible for a sane man to embrace, except in a professional capacity and for purposes of discussion. It is not difficult for us to see that Protagoras and Pyrrho, neither of whom was a madman, did really draw between appearance and reality the distinction of which their doctrine would rob them. Protagoras certainly recognized, in spite of himself, the distinction between real and apparent truth, for he conducted himself with propriety in the practical affairs in which he was involved, and he assumed in his discussions that he had truth to communicate, a truth in some sense common to himself and to his listener. As for Pyrrho, that ancient humbug is plainly betrayed by his gossiping biographer, Diogenes Laertius, who, after stating that Pyrrho's life corresponded to his principles and that he put no credence in the reports of his senses, goes on to tell us that he lived to a very advanced age, and that he never acted imprudently or did anything without due consideration I The sweeping denials of Protagoras and Pyrrho do not have their source in a clear perception of the fact that there is no differ- ence between appearance and reality, but may be taken as an expression of despair at the difficulty of knowing where to draw the line of demarcation. The helpless philosopher throws the handle after the hatchet, and denies what he is powerless to explain. He asks what is the real color of the neck of a dove, and the real weight of a stone. Shall he assume that these are just what they at a given moment seem to be ? Alas! the color changes at every instant as the bird turns its head; and the stone is found to have one weight in air and another in water. Which of the series of colors shall be regarded as the real one ? Is the stone really heavy and made light by water, or is it really light and Distinction between Appearance and Reality 135 made heavy by air ? These ancient sceptics had stumbled upon the principle of relativity, and were routed by it as many have been routed since. I have said that the plain man does not, unless something forces him to do so, feel impelled to distinguish between the appearance of things and the things themselves; and I have also said that even the man of science, when he is dealing with the familiar things just about him, is not conscious of such a distinction. Appearance and reality seem to be so nicely adjusted to each other that the distinction between them altogether slips out of mind. This par- ticular appearance — the color of the desk at which I am writino- — seems to belong to the reality if anything does, to be an element in or an aspect of the reality itself, not a mere appearance through which something else is known really to exist. As long as I con- fine my attention to appearances of this sort, I feel little inclina- tion to think of them as appearances at all. To me my desk is colored, my clock does tick, the smoke from my cigar is fragrant. This that I see is my desk, and this that I hear is my clock. In such appearances, not through them, I seem to grasp my reality, and to grasp it just as it is. But it is not in such appearances alone that I live, and a reflection stung into activity by appear- ances more or less similar to these, but apparently less trustworthy, awakens a doubt touching these also. When I turn and look out of my window, I see as a faint bluish patch upon the horizon the tree that I passed yesterday and saw as a large expanse of vivid green. I recall my past experi- ence of the fact that the colors of things vary with the distance from which the things are seen ; that they do not look the same in the morning and at high noon ; that the passing of a cloud, the rising of a mist, may produce a change sufficiently marked even while I am gazing upon the landscape. It is impossible for me not to ask myself whether any one of these objects seen under varying aspects has a real color of its own, a something which belongs to it as its private property, a something independent of the change of circumstance which causes such a series of changes in my perception. And when I recall also the fact that objects which seem to me to present startling contrasts of color may not appear to my neighbor to differ in color at all, I am impelled to raise the question whether my own eyes may not be as important a circumstance as any in determining 136 The External World whether the objects about me shall be seen as of this color or that. When, with all these considerations before me, I look again at my desk, I am forced to acknowledge that the reality which I seem to see before me has taken on a somewhat novel aspect. I catch myself wondering whether I can produce evidence that the desk really is more like the thing it seems, when seen at close quarters, than like that which it seems under other circumstances. The particular experience which appeared to be so indubitable and so satisfactory is seen to be one of a series which fade into each other by imperceptible degrees. It obeys all the laws of the series to which it belongs, it is in no sense a thing apart and inde- pendent. If I regard — as I undoubtedly do — certain of the members of the series as mere appearances, giving, it is true, some indication of the reality which they represent, but in no sense a constituent part of it, by what right shall I single out this particu- lar member of the series and insist that in it I grasp the reality at first hand ? How shall I justify the assumption that, although a tree at a distance looks blue, the tree really is green, and that this desk at which I write really is the color that it seems to be ? Must I not in consistency admit that this visual experience, so vivid, so insistent, so seemingly real, is nevertheless no true part of the real thing I call my desk, but is a mere appearance, nay, a delusive appearance, since, in spite of all my reflections, I find it hard to realize, while I look at it, that this particular expanse of color is not actually before me, as independent and as much outside of my body as anything belonging to the desk can be ? Perish the thought that I should be deceived in what seems so clearly and so immediately known as this! — and yet, how shall I answer the reflections that impel me along the steep descent which Pyrrho travelled before me? It is plain that if it is possible by reflection to rob external objects of their color, it can be no difficult task to relieve them of some of the other properties above mentioned. I perceive that the sounds emanating from my clock are loud or low as I approach the clock or recede from it. If I stop my ears with my fingers, they disappear altogether. I notice that as a series of sounds rises in pitch, there comes a point at which, to me, sound gives place to silence, while b}^ my neighbor it is still heard as sound. Can I, in the face of such facts as these, continue to Distinction hetiveen Appearance and Reality 137 believe that the sound I now hear so distinctly coming from the clock close in front of me is really the external and real thing it seems to be ? It is certainly my first impulse to think so ; but must I not correct this impulse and regard the sound heard as merely an effect of some sort upon my ears, an indication of some- thing itself not heard at all ? And the same conclusions force themselves upon me when I reflect upon my experiences of odors and of tastes. The odor of the rose, the taste of the apple, occasion all sorts of perplexities if I insist upon regarding them as really in the things in which they appear to be. Does the rose still smell sweet when I am suffering from a cold in the head? And is a sweet apple still in itself sweet, when the bodily change effected by an indigestion makes it to me bitter and offensive ? As to that wretched pain which throbs in every part of a swollen finger, that pain which seems so unmis- takably just where it is and nowhere else — this, too, it appears, must range itself among the things that are not what they seem, for the psychologist tells me that the seat of the pain is not the finger, but the brain, and he offers something like proof for this assertion. He points out that the swollen finger is not felt as painful if the nerve that serves as medium of communication with the brain be severed ; and then he relates various puzzling instances of pains that have been clearly felt as in a finger or in a toe, when the previous amputation of the member has put it beyond all doubt that the pain in question was a lying appearance, and was palming itself off for what it could not possibly be. When one ruminates upon all these things, it is impossible not to feel a certain sympathy with the Pyrrhonist. The most familiar objects take on an unfamiliar aspect. The plain man to whom such difficulties have been suggested, is no longer in the enjoyment of his primitive simplicity. He has begun to recast his world, to discriminate between appearances, and to reject some, which he never thought of doubting before, from the realm of reality. What- ever may be the result of his reflections, he is not likely to assert that there is no such thing as reality. That is not done in our day. But he may very well feel a good deal of perplexity in the endeavor to decide what he shall consider reality, and what he shall refuse to regard as such. It is well to remark the fact that even after the trail of the serpent of doubt has laid its blight upon every corner of his unreflective paradise, there are times when he has revulsions 138 The External World of feeling, and forgets that he has eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. When he gazes at the pen which he holds in his hand or scrutinizes the desk before him, he still feels that these particular appearances are real and belong to his real world. To him these things again are what they appear, and his previous reflections are forgotten. To bring these experiences once more in doubt, he must recall what has temporarily passed from his mind, and fall back upon a wider experience, the elements of which do not seem to be so completely in harmony. Perhaps no one has drawn the line between appearance and reality in a way more satisfactory to the plain man who has entered upon the path of reflection, but has not taken leave of common sense and plunged headlong into the shadowy realm of the metaphysician, than has John Locke in his immortal " Essay." We have seen that even the plain man distinguishes between his ideas and the things they are supposed to represent. Upon this distinction Locke takes his stand, and by its aid he smoothes away the difficulties presented in the preceding paragraphs. Real things exist outside of us, and they cause ideas in our minds. " The notice we have by our senses of the existing of things without us, though it be not altogether so certain as our intuitive knowledge, or the deductions of our reason, emplo3^ed about the clear abstract ideas of our own minds ; yet it is an assurance that deserves the name of knowledge. If we persuade ourselves that our faculties act and inform us right, concerning the existence of those objects that affect them, it cannot pass for an ill-grounded confidence : for I think nobody can, in earnest, be so sceptical as to be uncertain of the existence of those things which he sees and feels. At least, he that can doubt so far (whatever he may have with his own thoughts) will never have any controversy with me ; since he can never be sure that I say anything contrary to his own opinion. As to myself, I think God has given me assurance enough of the existence of things without me, since by their differ- ent application I can produce in myself both pleasure and pain, which is one great concernment of my present state. This is certain, the confidence that our faculties do not herein deceive us is the greatest assurance we are capable of, concerning the exist- ence of material things. For we cannot act anything but by our faculties ; nor talk of knowledge itself, but by the helps of those faculties which are fitted to apprehend even what knowledge is. Distinction between Appearance and Reality 139 But besides the assurance we have from our senses themselves, that they do not err in the information they give us, of the exist- ence of things without us, when they are affected by them, we are farther confirmed in this assurance by other concurrent reasons."^ These concurrent reasons are as follows : Perceptions must be produced in us by exterior causes affecting our senses, for those who lack the organs of a sense lack the appropriate sensations. The organs themselves do not produce them, for then the eyes of a man in the dark would produce colors, and his nose would smell roses in the winter. Again, I can recall and banish what memories I will, but when I look with open eyes at the sun, it is not in my power to reject the ideas the sun causes in me. Between ideas in the memory and genuine sensations there is no little difference, and the latter must be referred to the " brisk acting " of objects without me, and to nothing else. In the third place, the sensation of pain is one thing and imaginary pain another. It is absurd to put them upon the same level. Real pains are caused by real external things disturbing our bodies, and that is why they disturb us. Finally, our senses support one another's testimony. He that sees a fire may put his hand into it. Can he longer doubt ? All this is the very quintessence of the philosophy of common sense. There are external things and there are minds ; and the external things affect the minds, thus producing sensations which give knowledge of the things. And how neatly this explains how it is that things make themselves known through such a perplexing and apparently inconsistent variety of appearances. Our ideas, i,e. the appearances of which we are immediately conscious, are in the mind. In the external thing there are qualities, which are certain powers to produce ideas in us. Some of these qualities, which we may call original or primary, are inseparable from things, and exist in things as we perceive them. In other words, our ideas of them truly resemble them, and give us correct information as to what they are. These primary qualities of bodies are their solidity, extension, figure, motion, or rest, and number. But things can, by their primary qualities, produce in us many sensations which do not truly represent anything in the things themselves. Such effects upon us of the primary qualities are colors, sounds, tastes, odors, pains, etc. These must not be considered as outside of the mind. They are internal effects of the action of an external 1 "An Essay concerning Human Understanding," Book IV, Chapter XI, § 3. 140 The External World reality, and must not be projected outward. The bulk, number, figure, and motion of the parts of things are really in them whether we perceive them or not. But colors, tastes, sounds, and the rest, vanish, when the perceiving sense is withdrawn, into nothingness.^ When once this distinction is grasped, it is easy to see how there may be a varying appearance of an unvarying reality, and it is possible to distinguish the latter from the former. Thus I recognize the fact that the tree seen now as small, faint, and blue, and now as large, vivid, and unmistakably green, has no real color at all. The whole series of colors, and, I must add, the whole series of sizes given in vision, must be regarded as a series of effects produced upon my sense by an external thing that cannot be said to resemble any member in the series. If I am near the thing, it looks green and it looks large ; if I am far away from it, it looks blue and it looks small. This is as it should be. When things act upon me under varying circumstances, they should produce varying results. The shifting iridescence of the colors upon the turning neck of Pyrrho's dove need have occa- sioned him no anxiety, had he been shrewd enough to grasp the truth that the neck remained the same as to "bulk, figure, and motion of parts," and that the play of colors was just where it should be, in his own mind. He could have seized the reality through the appearance, and have saved himself from universal scepticism. There is, then, a real world of things external to my mind, and of this world I can form a just notion by exercising sufficient discretion in discriminating between appearances which really correspond to things and appearances which merely indicate what things are, under such and such circumstances, doing to me. If I fall into error, the fault is mine. In the above exposition of Locke's doctrine I have modified it in but one trifling particular, and in making this modification I have shown myself a better Lockian than he.^ At first sight the doctrine appears to be fairly consistent with itself, and to give a plausible explanation of the fact that we do find it possible to draw a distinction between things as they are and things as they 1 "An Essay concerning Human Understanding," Book II, Chapter VIII. 2 That is to say, I have argued about the series of sizes which seem to be given in vision as he has about the series of colors, in so far, at least, as to conclude that we cannot regard the "real" size of the thing to be given in any one of the visual experiences. Distinction hetiveen Appearance and Reality 141 appear to us. There is certainly something very taking about it to a man at a certain stage of his progress in reflection. It explains the real world, without wholly recasting it ; it explains it without abandoning the psychological standpoint of which so much has been said in this volume, the standpoint of common sense and of natural science. The real world is still there, robbed of its colors and certain other things, it is true ; but it is there as a photograph is there to represent a painting. One has at least an outline, and some other hints and indications which enable one at will to supply what is lacking. By keeping pretty constantly before one the reasonings out of which this real world has grown, one may come to make it appear, at times, very real. But even to the man who champions it, it seems often to fade away, and to give place to the less ethereal and more fleshly world of his familiar experiences. When one thinks of shifting colors, faint and distant objects, bitter tastes that normally should be sweet, sounds audible to some and not to others, et id omne genus, it grows, as I have said above, more or less substantial. But when one sits at one's desk, lays one's hand on the expanse of color, hears the cheerful ticking of the clock, which loudly reiterates its denial that it can by any conceivable right be banished to any world of phantoms — then this world of colors, sounds, and the rest asserts its right to be regarded as the real world, and the other fades away into the unreality of things merely thought of. The man who reflects seems to live in at least two real worlds, and to live in these alternately. If he always reflected, he might be able to stay permanently in one. The real world recognized by modern science is essentially the same with the real world of Locke. We are told that nothing exists in the physical universe save matter and energy. Matter occupies space, and may be made to change its position in space. Energy may be regarded as "a condition of matter in virtue of which any definite portion of it may be made to effect changes in other definite portions."^ Energy may be distinguished as energy of position and energy of motion, and these two are convertible with each other according to certain definite laws. No particle of 1 G. Y. Barker, " Physics," Chapter I. We sometimes meet, at the present day, with a much broader use of the word "energy." The extension of the term does not appear to me to be fruitful. See the account of Ostwald's doctrine in Chap- ter XXXI. 142 The External World matter can be created or destroyed ; and the sum of the potential and kinetic energy in the universe must always remain constant. The real world consists, then, of masses of matter distributed in space and moving in diverse ways. It is not to be conceived as a world of colors, sounds, tastes, odors, and the rest. This sub- jective world, the world of appearances, comes into being when a certain small mass of matter, a brain, is acted upon in certain defi- nite ways by masses of matter in motion. However important the differences between the real world as it was conceived by one who wrote before the days of Lavoisier and Joule, and the world as science now conceives it, the line between appearance and reality is still found where it was before. To the masses of matter which produce appearances we may not attribute more than " their solid- it}?-, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number." But modern science has much to say regarding the intimate composition of such bodies. Where Locke was unable to do more than to speak vaguely of the " insensible particles " of bodies that manifest their existence to the senses by the effects which they produce, we are in the possession of a mass of information very carefully worked over, based upon observation and painstaking experiment, and certainly as worthy of at least a guarded accept- ance as is much to which we yield credence, touching the minute parts of things. According to this doctrine the pen which I hold in my hand is not the continuously extended, motionless thing that it seems to be. It is composed of molecules in rapid motion and situated at considerable distances from each other. A molecule is the small- est portion of any substance which exhibits the properties of that substance. But the molecule itself must not be regarded, as I was at first inclined to regard the whole pen, as one continuous thing. It is composed of atoms, and these atoms may separate from one another and form new combinations with other atoms, which com- binations will possess new properties. Thus substances may be decomposed, and out of their elements new substances may be built up. In all such transformations nothing remains unchanged except the atom, which passes from molecule to molecule, enters now into this combination, now into tliat, is driven about from one end of the universe to the other, but everywhere retains its iden- tity and its peculiar character. There appears to be no little difference between a view of the Distinction hetween Appearance and Reality 143 real world which conceives it to be made up of extended things which actually exist as they are represented in our ideas, and this view which dissolves the physical universe into a whirl of atoms, the eddies in which make themselves perceptible to the senses in such ways as to give birth to the colorless phantoms which Locke left us when he robbed us of the secondary qualities of bodies. His real world was at least a something given in percep- tion. This world of atoms we cannot perceive at all. We conceive it with pain and labor, and everything that is in it has been wrung from nature by a laborious process of inference. What lies on the surface is always and everywhere to be recognized as appearance. The reality is hidden, and must be groped for. Even when found, it is not grasped directly ; we do not perceive it ; we only know that it must be there. But the modification of the Lockian doctrine offered us by the modern Atomism is, after all, only a modification, a development. The doctrine remains, as has been said, very much the same at bottom. There is still an external world of things, and this is not a world of colors, sounds, odors, tastes, etc., but a world of things extended, resisting, moving about in space. By their action upon us, such things cause us to see colors, hear sounds, and the rest. To such a world Locke gave some slight recognition in his asser- tion that the " insensible particles " of bodies produce effects upon our minds. But notwithstanding this admission of the fact that bodies are composed of minute particles, and that we cannot per- ceive these as they are, Locke held that we do truly perceive bodies as they are. In other words, he held that our ideas of them truly resemble them. This inconsistency modern science has remedied. It has transferred to the atom what Locke declared to be true of masses of matter as wholes. It does not maintain that we can perceive the atom, but it claims that we can, with some approach to accuracy, truly represent it. Atoms are extended, and occupy space; they exclude each other from the same portion of space at any instant ; they are capa- ble of changing their location and their relations to each other. In short, they are little bodies, endowed with primary qualities, and capable, under appropriate circumstances, of begetting appear- ances. That they are not immediately perceived is a matter of small importance, and need not in itself affect the question of their reality. We accept as real much that we do not immediately per- 144 The External World ceive. Even the masses of matter which Locke regards us as per- ceiving are not, on his own principles, immediately perceived. They are represented by ideas ; and there is no valid reason for affirming that atoms may not be as truly, though symbolically, represented, as bodies of a larger size. As to the general nature of the reasonings upon which the doc- trine of atoms and molecules rests, that is in no sense occult and beyond the comprehension of the unlearned. One reasons here as one reasons when dealing with things commonly believed to be open to direct inspection. We have abundant evidence that things which cannot, under given circumstances, be directly per- ceived to have parts, can be seen to have them when circumstances are changed. A mere diminution of the distance between the object in question and the observing eye may be sufficient to reveal the composite nature of what did not before seem to be composite. In the same way, things may turn out to be a mere group of sepa- rate things, an agglomeration of discontinuous parts, when they did not at first appear to be of this nature. One need only walk toward a distant clump of trees, or hold a loosely woven fabric between the eye and the light, to be made conscious of this fact. Things, furthermore, that we hastily assume to be at rest, are dis- covered to be in motion. No one doubts the motion of the minute hand of his watch merely because he does not see it move. Nor is there anything foreign to common experience in the notion of a new set of properties arising out of new groupings of atoms. We have too often put together to make a third thing, differing in its properties from any of its constituents, the sorts of things with which our senses seem to make us acquainted. All these experiences serve to make comprehensible to us the real world advocated by the man of science. It is still the real world in which we find ourselves when once we have made a dis- tinction between the primary and secondary qualities of matter. Our attention has passed from things to the "insensible particles'* of things and their groupings ; it concerns itself with very little things instead of with large ones. But we still think of the little things as we thought before of the larger ones of which we con- ceive these to be parts. It does not concern me here to describe in detail the reasonings which have resulted in this view of the physical universe, nor even to set forth that view except in the merest outline. I have spoken Distinction between Appearance and Reality 145 briefly of atoms and molecules, but have not even touched upon the speculations which have been hazarded regarding the possible structure of the atom, the explanation of certain of its properties, the nature of the ether, and other matters of the sort, concerning which the physicist speaks with a somewhat hesitating utterance. Whether atoms remain forever unchanged, or whether they may in the rush of the elemental forces be rent asunder; whether they are to be regarded as bits of matter that are rigid and immobile within their own skin, or whether they may be assumed to be centres of energy analogous to whirling rings of smoke ; whether the ether is corpuscular in structure, or whether it is continuous ; all these questions, and such as these, concern the physicist rather than the metaphysician. They are matters of detail, and may be passed over by one who desires only to discover where the scien- tist draws the line between appearance and reality. Even the truth of the atomic theory is not here of great importance. The doctrine may come to be modified, and will be modified or even rejected, if some other doctrine gets to be recognized as a better explanation of the facts of our experience. But it seems safe to predict that any new doctrine that takes its place will distinguish between appearance and reality after somewhat the same way as it does. The history of science reveals that science is in this respect consistently Lockian. There is good reason why this should be so, as I shall try to make plain soon. From the foregoing it appears evident that, before one can rise to the conception of the material world as it seems to be revealed to modern science, one must have made a distinction, not merely between sensations and things imaginary, but also between sensations of different classes. All sensations may have reality in a sense in which things imaginary have not. Its reference to an external world may still be regarded as guaranteeing a sen- sation to be a sensation, even after a man has become an unscien- tific or a scientific Lockian, and has come to regard as merely " subjective " the colors, odors, etc., which he formerly supposed to be qualities of external things. But within the realm of sensations the difference of classes appears to be an extremely important one, and the distinction between the external world as it appears and the external world as it really is, between appearance and reality, seems to be bound up with it. The significance of this distinction between classes of sensations I shall discuss in the next chapter. CHAPTER IX SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN APPEARANCE AND REALITY I HAVE said that the distinction between the physical universe of things existing in space and moving in space and the inner world of the effects, produced by such motions, within our con- sciousness, seems to present a convenient criterion for separating the real from the apparent. According to this doctrine, the morning stars may sing together as energetically as they please : they can produce no sound unless there be a listening ear and the appropri- ate medium for conducting vibrations to it. Without is matter in motion ; within are colors, sounds, tastes, odors, pains, and anything else that can come under the head of sensation. The physical world is one thing, and the circle of our sensations is another. The one is the realm of the real ; the other, the world of appearances. To be sure, the man who accepts literally the Lockian distinc- tion between ideas and things, occupies the psychological stand- point of which so much has been said earlier in this work. He distinguishes between ideas and the things they represent, places the former in consciousness and the latter outside of it, and, after burning every bridge that can lead from the one world to the other, assumes confidently that he is a citizen of both, and can pass freely between the two, describing in detail their resemblances and their differences. To Locke, as to every one else, bodies appeared to be, not merely extended, but also colored. He affirmed them to be really extended, but not really colored. On what ground did he thus discriminate between extension and color? One will search his writings in vain for a single scrap of real evidence adduced to prove that some ideas (those of the primary qualities of bodies) have their duplicates in an external world, while other ideas (those of the secondary qualities) are not thus duplicated in things. Locke attempts something like a proof, it is true, but it 14G Significance of the Distinction 147 is easy to see that his would-be proof consists in taking a given experienced content now for an idea and now for a thing. He contradicts himself flatly, as, indeed, he must. He cannot ride to a satisfactory conclusion, for he has from the outset been astride of a contradiction. And every modern Lockian, whether scientific or non-scientific, sticks in the same difficulty. If the sounds and colors that I per- ceive do not exist in a world beyond us, but come into being in me when my body is acted upon in certain ways, why may not the same be true of the resistance, the extension, the motion, that I seem to perceive in things ? Can I perceive bodies to be resisting, extended, or in motion, unless they act upon my body ? May not the resulting complex of sensations in this case, too, be whoU}^ dif- ferent from the external cause ? Perhaps the real world is not, then, the extended and imaginable thing that I have thought it. Perhaps it is only a name for the unknown, a something that I cannot more nearly define. The man of science usually does not, it is true, strip the real world quite so bare as this. He denies to it some of the qualities it appears to have, but permits it to retain others. His position seems, however, to be one very arbitrarily assumed. He stops where he does, when he seems to us to have a logical momentum which ought to carry him farther. The next stage in his progress would result in the unknowable, and the final stage would bring him to the repudiation of even that shadow. It is only necessary for me, in this connection, to remind my reader of the illustration of the prisoner in the cell, ^ and to insist that even an external Unknowable cannot be attained with the aid of the resources at his command. Watering the external world into utter indefinite- ness does not justify the assumption of its existence ; the reality of things is not a function of their vagueness. In so far, therefore, as the man of science distinguishes between appearance and reality by placing the former in consciousness and the latter without it, his position may be justly criticised by the metaphysician. Were no other reality than this attainable, he would be forced to get on without any reality at all. But we have seen that the body of truth presented us in the natural sciences is not to be repudiated merely because the scientist is not also a meta- physician. We may assume that what he has to tell us of the real 1 See Chapter II. 148 The External World world is not said of a world of which he knows nothing from direct observation, and which he arbitrarily creates. The distinction be- tween the " inner" and the " outer" worlds is a distinction within consciousness, taking that word in the broad sense. It ought to be possible, therefore, to restate what science tells us of the line which divides appearance from reality, in such a way as to elimi- nate the contradiction which seems to belong to the natural science point of view. To do this it is only necessary to examine carefully what is actually done by the Lockian and the student of modern science when they draw a distinction between tlie real physical world as it is in its nakedness and the variegated garb under which it presents itself to consciousness. That we are able to see clearly the true significance of this distinction we owe to the analytic genius of Berkeley, who in his " New Theory of Vision " first succeeded in turning the light upon what had been a very obscure corner in our experience. Berkeley's analysis has been so frequently repeated by others, and his doctrine, with somewhat insignificant modifica- tions and additions, has been so thoroughly incorporated into the psychology of our day, that I may assume the reader to be familiar with at least its general outline. I shall, hence, not dwell upon it in detail, but shall attempt, in general harmony with it, a brief explanation of the distinction with which we are here concerned. We have seen in a preceding chapter ^ that, when we ask our- selves what we mean by perceived objects, we discover that they are groups of sensational elements, and we conceive them to be highly complex groups. My table appears to me as hard, extended, colored, warm or cold, etc. We have seen, furthermore, that my table means to me much more than the particular group of actual sensations that I may be experiencing at any one moment. At this moment I be- lieve the table to have an under side which I do not see, and I regard that as just as truly existent as that wliich is now in the sense. In other words, I believe that a multitude of sensational elements belong to this group which are never at one time directly perceived to belong to it. But this is not all. My table is a thing with a history: it has a past, and it will have a future. That is to say, it is not merely a group of sensations conceived of as existing in the present mo- 1 Chapter VI. Significance of the Distinction 149 ment. This group is continuous with an indefinite number of sensational elements belonging to the past, and will give place to sensational elements belonging to the future. This amounts merely to saying that I conceive my table, not merely as existing, but as having existed, and as being about to exist in time to come. It is of great importance to note that, although my table is, in one sense, a unit, it is, nevertheless, a vastly complex group of different elements. This is a truth we are in no small danger of overlooking, and such an oversight can only result in confusion. We habitually speak of seeing the same table that we touch, and we declare a table seen to-day to be the same with one seen yester- day. What can the word " same " mean when used in such a con- nection? Can the sense of sight give us anything but colors, or the sense of touch anything but tactual sensations ? Is yesterday's experience, either remembered or imagined, strictly identical with the experience of to-day ? It was the imperfect recognition of the complex character of the objects of perception, and the misconcep- tion of the true nature of their unity, that occasioned Pyrrho's per- plexity regarding the apple. The apple appears to the sight to be yellow, to the taste to be sweet, and to the smell to be fragrant. What is the real nature of the apple ? How can one thing be all of these ? The difficulty vanishes when we recognize that by one " thing " we mean one group of interrelated elements, of elements so con- nected that any one may stand for the whole group and give information regarding it. When I say I see the table I do not mean merely that I am conscious of certain color-sensations. When I say that I feel it, I do not mean merely that I am con- scious of certain sensations of touch and resistance. When I say that I see and touch the same thing, I evidently do not mean that what is immediately present in the sense in the one case is identical with what is immediately present in the other. It would be mere nonsense to affirm this. By affirming that I see and touch the same thing, I can only mean that the two experiences in question belong to the same group, and that either may be taken as repre- sentative of the group as a whole. But it should be remarked that in such a group of interrelated sensational elements all the elements have not equal values. It was maintained by Berkeley, and his position has, under much 150 The External World criticism, remained unshaken, that our experiences of touch and movement form a nucleus of such importance in the whole com- plex which we call an object, that, when we come to distinguish between real and apparent objects at all, it is to this nucleus that we refer when we speak of the real object. All our judgments of distance, of magnitude, of position, have reference to the tactual thing, not to the visual, to the auditory, or to any other. Where is the faint blue patch of color which means to me a tree at a distiince? Is it half a mile away? When I walk half a mile it is hopelessly lost ; it began to change when I first moved, and has been succeeded by an indefinite series of visual sensations no two of which are precisely alike. To regain it, I must go back again to the point from which I started. What is it, then, that is half a mile distant? The tactual core of the whole series of experiences which constitute my experience of a tree. And what is meant by saying that anything is half a mile away ? In terms of what must distance be ultimately interpreted? In sensations of movement. As Berkeley has expressed it, the visual element in a thing stands related to the tactual as sign to thing signified. It is the latter in which our thought rests even when it appears to be occupied with the former. The distinction between sign and thing signified, between such sensations as those of sound or of hearing, and the tactual things of which they give us information, is one rather forced upon us in cases where the sign is not wholly satisfactory, or where reflection faces the task of trying to pick out from a whole series of signs the one which shall be regarded as in a special sense belonging to the object. This we saw in the last chapter. We saw also that, in certain cases, it is exceedingly difficult to realize that we must still draw the distinction. It is not very hard to distinguish between a faint blue patch of color and the real tree; but as I sit at my desk, lay my hand upon it, and explore its surface with my eyes, it is hard, indeed, to realize that what I see and what I touch are not strictly the same, that they are not identical, but are merely diverse elements in the one complex group of sensations. The thing seen seems to correspond so exactly to the thing touched, to share so absolutely its extension and position, that it appears impossible to divorce them. The sign is so satisfactory that it has fused completely with the thing signified, and I can no longer distinc^uish between them. I am forced to exclaim: Is not this Significance of the Distinction 151 expanse of color really extended, and seen to be extended? Does not the color occupy the same place as the thing touched? How, then, can one maintain that all our judgments of distance, magnitude, and position refer ultimately only to the world of things tactual? How hold that these conceptions have no other content than that which is furnished by sensations of touch and movement ? Those who have grasped but imperfectly the significance of Berkeley's analysis are inclined to maintain that these conceptions may have another content. Sensations of all classes, it is claimed, have the quality of voluminousness, they have an " extensity " which is, in embryo, the notion of space. This is the primary intuition of space, which may be furnished by any sense ; and the question arises how these various spaces, tactual and motor, visual, auditory, and the rest, are joined together into the one space of our developed and interrelated experience. But those who reason thus have fallen into error through over- looking a distinction of fundamental importance. They have con- fused " extensity," the primary experience of voluminousness, with " extension " ; they have confounded an experience assumed to be taken in its naked simplicity, with the same experience supple- mented by its interpretation in terms of a different kind. Undoubtedly the extensity of sensations of all classes is not without its significance. The retina of the eye is a surface, and the stimulation of a small part and that of a larger part would make themselves known in consciousness by some difference in the resulting sensation. It would be impossible to interpret visual sensations in tactual as we actually do ; it would be impossible to recognize one part of the visual experience as referring to one part of the tactual object and another part of the same experience as referring to another, were the visual experience itself not composite. But it is one thing to admit this, and another to maintain that the mere consciousness of the visual sensations as thus composite would give us a notion of extended things in any way comparable to that which we possess. Introspective analysis reveals that when we imagine a line, a surface, or a solid, we do more than merely to recall into consciousness a certain quantity of visual sensation. The imaginary line or surface is conceived as vaguely localized in space. It is out beyond us, looked at from some more 152 The External World or less definite point of view, and we measure it by moving an imaginary finger to it and along it. It is visual sensation as interpreted, not visual sensation pure and simple. The sign upon whicli we have elected to gaze has dragged in with it the thing signified. We are dealing with a real line, not with a merely visual experience. Had we never had sensations of touch and of movement, it would, of course, have been impossible for us thus to reduce otlier sensations to the subordinate position of signs. The extensity of the sensations allowed us might then have played an independent role of some importance. But as things are, we must recognize the fact that sensations other than those of touch and movement, notwithstanding the fact of their extensity, do not give us spaces or places at all ; they stand merely as the signs of such spaces or places, and such spaces or places are tactual. All space is tactual space. Colors do not occupy the same place as the tactual things to which they belong. They do not occupy space at all, nor do sounds or tastes or odore. Thus we see that the problem of join- ing together the chaotic mass of elementary spaces furnished by the different classes of sensations gives place to another. That problem is: How does it come that all other classes of sensations find their interpretation in sensations of touch and movement? Why do the latter constitute for us the real thing rather than the former? It is to be noted that the group of sensations we are now dis- cussing, the " real " core of a material object, is, as compared with sensations of other classes, relatively constant and unchanging. The visual sensations which make me aware of the presence of a real thing may vary within very wide limits. I may have a good look at a man, as I express it, and a very complex mass of color- sensations, giving much information regarding the tactual object, is present in consciousness. I may see him at a greater distance, and the visual sensations experienced are very different. I may see him still further away, and the visual object is reduced to a mere speck of faint color. " The visual object " does not mean in the one case what it does in the other. Neither quantitatively nor qualitatively does it remain unchanged. Yet I regard the real man as unchanged in size. I know that if I approach sufficiently near to pass my hand over him, I shall find that he feeh much the same at different times. The world of objects made known to me Significance of the Distinction 153. in sensations of touch and movement is not so fluctuating a world as that which reveals itself in vision. Nevertheless, as directly revealed in sensation, it is not an absolutely constant world. An object as known to the sensitive finger-tips, and the same object as measured in terms of the sensa- tions furnished by a less discriminating part of the body, are not felt to be strictly the same. A body lifted by a wearied arm feels heavier than the same body lifted by an arm which is fresh and vigorous. But a multitude of experiences has revealed to us the fact that the world of tactual things is one the objects of which can be accurately measured in terms of each other, and this fur- nishes us with a system of quantitative relations relatively inde- pendent of the immediate consciousness of quantity given in particular experiences. No one judges that a stick is exactly a metre long by simply passing his hand over it. The stick is compared with a standard, and this standard is recognized as holding definite and constant relations to the things which make up the tactual world. The immediate experience, as such, is overlooked ; or perhaps I would better say, is referred to, and is judged in the light of, the whole system of relations which obtain among tactual things. A heavy basket, carried for half a mile, seems to increase in weight, but no one dreams of judging that the weight has really increased with the length of the journey. If there is any doubt about the matter, there are the scales. It was pointed out by Berkeley that tactual things are more important to us than visual, since it is chiefly through their tactual qualities that objects affect us for good or ill. This has frequently been emphasized since as helping to account for the fact that our other sensations fall into the place of signs and our sensations of touch and movement acquire a certain primacy. It cannot be denied that sensations which are for any reason important to us tend to stand out from the others, and those which are less im- portant tend to be regarded as marks of the former. This is true of other classes of sensations than those of touch and movement. But the most important element in the prominence given to our sensations of touch and movement appears to be their susceptibility of accurate measurement. They fall into an interrelated system which is capable of accurate description, and through their rela- tions to which sensations of other classes may be given that orderly \ 154 The External World arrangement which constitutes the difference between a chaos and a world. We explain the variations in the visual object, the changes in the loudness of a given sound, by a reference to things tactual, by the introduction of the notion of distance. It is, per- haps, an interesting speculation whether a consciousness without such a " core " as I have been discussing could contain a world — whether the other classes of sensations could, by direct relations to each other, form a system at least analogous to the one we know. But whatever may be our conclusions upon this point, we are forced to admit that in the system of our experiences the tactual world is the very foundation of the whole. It is what we mean by the ob- jective ; other elements of our experience are by contrast subjective. Such an objective world is recognized by the unreflective. It is the world in which I rest when I insist that I see the real desk before me as it is and reject the suggestion that I am deluded by an empty appearance. I confound sign with thing signified, it is true ; but this particular sign gives me the thing so satisfactorily that I rest in the thing without being forced to the recognition that I am grasping it, so to speak, at one remove. This is the external material world of Locke, the world of the primary qualities of matter, the world of "solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number." It is the physical world of matter and motion of which science treats. It has been intimated in the last chapter that the description, which science is in a position to give us, of the mechanism which it conceives the physical world to be, is extremely fragmentary and incomplete. The ether, the atom, the molecule, these are not characters with whose attributes and modes of life we are intimately acquainted, and to whom we may assign parts in our drama with an unshaken confidence that we are mirroring real life. The doc- trines of the eternity of matter and the conservation of energy are very broad generalizations made upon but a slender basis of observed fact. In the present state of our knowledge, the attempt to demonstrate to an unwilling mind that the notion of mechanism is not out of place, at least in the realm of the organic, must surely be a signal failure. That the world is the mechanism that science conceives it to be is rather a matter of faith than of certain knowl- edge. To overlook this fact is to misconceive the methods and re- sults of scientific research. But, on the other hand, it is well to remember that a dogmatic denial that science is right in its guesses Significance of the Distinction 155 at the truth cannot find its justification in the limitations of human knowledge. An appeal to our ignorance is not out of place as an argument against a hasty and inconsiderate assent or against over- confidence. It is out of place as an argument in favor of unquali- fied denial. In a later chapter I shall discuss the arguments usually urged against the scientific view of the mechanism of nature. The answer to them may be conveniently deferred until after we have seen more clearly w^hat that view is. But here I wish to take up and examine at some length a general objection against the reality of those things which science regards as the realities which make up the external world of things. The objection, when fully understood, may be seen to impugn the reality, not merely of the world of atoms and molecules actually vouched for by science, but also that of any such unseen world which the progress of scientific research may hereafter seem to justify us in assuming to exist. It is an objection to the validity of the con- clusions which may be arrived at by the science of the future, as well as an objection to the conclusions arrived at by the science of our day. It may be summed up as follows : The real world de- scribed by science is, after all, a mere product of the constructive imagination. It is not and cannot be a something actually given in sensation. Nobody has directly perceived either an atom or a molecule, and perhaps nobody ever will. Hence, to call such a world the reality, and to reduce to the rank of mere appearance the world of things actually given in our experience is absurd. It amounts to making the hypothetical and uncertain more real than the immediate and the certain. This objection seems, at first sight, to be rather plausible. But a little reflection makes it evident that it draws its whole force from a misconception of the meaning of the word "real." It has been pointed out that, when we recognize anything as real, we are never confining our attention to the thing itself, but are always keeping in view its relation to other elements in our ex- perience. This is true whether we are speaking, as ordinary mortals, about the things which concern us in common life, or, as men of science, about the realities to which science pins its faith. To the plain man the real is that which takes its place in a certain orderly system which he finds within his experience ; the unreal is that which defies such an arrangement. 156 Tlie External World Nor must the expression " which he finds within his expe- rience " be misunderstood. The system of experiences which constitutes the real world as conceived by the plain man is less complicated a construct than that which constitutes the real world of the scientist, but it is none the less a construct. It exists in large part in the imagination, as we have seen. When we say that he finds it, we can only mean that he is not conscious of having built it up for himself. What is actually in the sense at any moment can constitute but a very small portion of his total real world. When such a man first feels the prick of the Pyrrhonic doubt, he may hesitate to afBrm that this or that element really belongs to the perceived object in which he is interested, and yet he cannot but feel that certain members of the class of experiences he has come to doubt may seem to him more real than the others. For example, it seems to him more reasonable to affirm that a man really is as he looks when seen near at hand, than that he is as he looks when seen at a distance. The visual experience in question is not picked out from the series to which it belongs at mere hap- hazard. It is chosen because it is the most helpful in giving fur- ther information regarding the system of his experiences. When the Lockian distinguishes between the primary and the secondary qualities of bodies, he is drawing a distinction of much the same kind. He is separating out from the mass of his sensa- tional experiences a certain group which can be made to fall into a definite and measurable system, and which can serve as a means for relating and ordering sensations of every kind. And when the scientist passes from the physical world as it seems to be revealed to us in sensations of touch and movement to a world of atoms and molecules, why is he inclined to regard the latter as the real world and the former as the world of appearances? It is because the atoms and molecules which he conceives as constituting the masses of matter with which his senses seem to make him acquainted help to make more complete and comprehensible the mechanism which appears to him to be revealed, at least in outline, in his experience of things. Their incorporation into the scheme of the universe is supposed to explain what has lacked explanation, and to unite our experiences into a more perfect system. Their assumption is by no means an arbitrary one. It is an extension of our experience in thought, and is only justified if it be based upon what is actually given. The world of the scientist is the real world, just because Significance of the Distinction 157 it is the completest and the most satisfactory world which we have attained to up to the present. Thus we see that the word " real " is by no means synonymous with " intuitively present in consciousness." The plain man accepts as real much that is not immediately given. The Lockian does the same. The believer in the existence of ether, atoms, and mole- cules follows in their wake. To argue that these things cannot be real because they are not immediately given in the sense is absurd. What is immediately given in the sense is not sufficient to make any one of the real worlds that we have been discussing. It is sensations as supplemented by remembered and imagined sensations, and thus built into a system that constitute even the real world in which I find myself before I have fallen a victim to the Pyrrhonic doubt and have set about the task of critical reconstruc- tion. What I see of my desk at this moment is not in itself enough to constitute a desk, nor can it do so when combined with what I actually feel. The reality is always more than is given in the sense. It is absurd to say that we should turn our backs upon the abstractions of science and find the real world in a return to immediate experience. We know no such thing as immediate experience of a real world, if by immediate experience be meant an experience in which the fragmentary consciousness-contents actually in the sense are not supplemented by others and assigned a place in a system vastly more complex than they are themselves. The difference between the real external world as it stands revealed to the plain man and the physical world as it is conceived by science is by no means an absolute one. In neither case is a given object declared to be real simply because it is intuitively present in consciousness. In each case we are dealing with a construct, and objects are called real when it seems reasonable to assign them a place in that construct. In a consciousness too elementary to contain such a system there could be no distinction of real and unreal. The reasoning which would deny the real existence of the atom on the ground that it cannot be directly perceived should, in consistency, deny that the moon has more than one side — nay, it should go farther than that, and should maintain the existence of no more than the scrap of color-sensation which is in the sense when the eyes are directed toward the moon. It was because Berkeley inconsistently fell into this error and misconceived the true significance of real existence, 158 The Extmial World that lie was forced to save the continuous existence of real things by assigning to them an actual existence in a Divine mind between the intervals of their perception in Unite minds. But if, in view of all this, we maintain that science is justified in regarding the world of atoms and molecules as the real world, and in reducing to the rank of appearance what is directly given in sensation, does it not seem to follow that the only reality left us is a hypothetical and uncertain reality which may conceivably have no existence at all? Science does not pretend to be infal- lible. Its account of the constitution of the ph3'sical world may turn out to be — not merely incomplete, for it is admittedly that — but fundamentally incorrect. Should this be the case, would we be left with no reality ? To this I answer: By no means. We have seen that our sensations as a whole constitute an interconnected system. A sensation is recognized as such because it holds a place in such a system. As holding such a place it is real. When, within such a system, we distinguish a nucleus which is peculiarly ser- viceable in definitely ordering and arranging the whole, certain of our sensations take the place of signs and others come to hold the more dignified position of thing signified. Here we have the distinction between appearance and reality. But the application to any given complex of sensations of the term " appearance " does not in the least do away with the reality to wliich it may lay claim, in that it is a complex of sensations. If it did not belong to one system with the thing signified, it could not serve as a sign. And when, from tactual things as they seem to the Lock- ian to be directly given in the sense, science passes to tactual things as they are conceived to be, there is a new distinction be- tween sign and thing signified, and a new distinction between appearance and reality. Things as they are conceived to be, furnish a better explanation of the system of things as a whole, and hence they are regarded as more real. If now it be discov- ered that science has fallen into error, and that tactual things as it conceived them to be, do not render more complete and consist- ent the system of our experiences as a whole, the reality of these tactual things will have to be repudiated. They must be cast out of the S3^stem, and their real existence denied. But in that case we are left with the reality we had before we put our faith in these things. The system of our experiences remains, to be Significance of the Distinction 159 sure, a very imperfect system, but then we are at liberty to make new efforts to render it more complete. The goal towards which all such efforts are directed is the attainment of a complete and wholly harmonious system. Such a system is what we mean by ultimate reality. But here we are confronted with a very significant problem. Is it within the bounds of possibility that science should attain to — not reality, for reality in some sense is attainable even by the unscientific — but ultimate reality, a reality which cannot, in its turn, be relegated to the subordinate place of appearance ? The world is spread out in space. It exists in time. Both space and time we conceive to be infinitely divisible, which means that we conceive that no portion of either is so small that it is not com- posed of portions still smaller. If, then, science rests, let us say, in the atom, and takes this for its ultimate unit in the explanation of the mechanism of nature, it rests in what cannot be regarded as ultimate in any absolute sense of that word. The size of an atom appears to be as legitimate an object of investigation as the size of a planet. It is not apparent why an investigation into the intimate structure of matter, which results in the atom, should not be continued as an investigation into the intimate structure of the atom itself. How shall we account for the properties of the atom, and explain its ability to play the r61e assigned to it in the mechanism of nature? That the need for such an exten- sion of our knowledge has been felt by students of physical science has of late years been made sufficiently evident. Again : the description of the changes which take place in the physical world we conceive as a description of occurrences in time. If time be infinitely divisible, there can theoretically be no limit to the degree of minuteness with which such occurrences may be described. We may, it is true, describe a series of occur- rences roughly by indicating a few of the most striking or of the most interesting stages in the process in question. This we do when we relate a tale of adventure, or give an account of the passing of a procession. But such a description resembles a de- scription of the solar system which stops with the sun, the planets, and their satellites. It is only the gross anatomy of the machine that has been given. The occurrences which we loosely indicate we conceive to be made up of, and interconnected by, other occur- rences, which in their turn may be analyzed, etc. How can we 160 The External World regard the description at any given stage as ultimate, and as giv- ing us a final account of what has really taken place ? Space and time are the warp and woof of that "invisible net" in which we conceive the real world to have its being. I shall, hence, turn to an examination of these, and shall make no apology for discussing them at considerable length. But before I bring this chapter to a close, it seems necessary for me to take up again and to modify, in the light of the fore- going, the provisional statement, that a sensation is known to be such from the fact that it takes its place among those elements of our experience which so connect themselves together as to form what we recognize as the system of material things. ^ Has it not been shown that a man may recognize a multitude of experiences to be sensations, without being compelled to regard them as constituents of the external world at all? And has it not been shown that he may believe in an external world which can never be given as sensation — the unperceived world of atoms and molecules? It is clear, then, that the statement should be modified. How shall we modify it? We must remember that all our scientific constructions are based, in the end, on the common experience of things with which we are familiar. From this we must set out in every attempt to increase our knowledge and to render it more accurate. In common life, the things about us are the real things, i.e. the real things are constituted by sensational experiences. When the plain man distinguished between the faint patch of color, as ap- pearance, and the house seen from a nearer point, as reality, both appearance and reality are — each in its turn — to be accepted as experiences of an external world, and to be regarded as constituted by sensational elements. Now, when, with the scientist, we come to regard colors, odors, tastes, etc., as subjective, and accept a real external world, not immediately perceived at all, to which such elements are denied, we have passed beyond the relatively simple construction with which we stop in common life. But it should be remarked that all the elements which enter into this more elaborate construction, subjective elements as well as those which represent the supposed external reality, hold the same sort of relations to each other that 1 Chapter VI. Significance of the Distinction 161 are held by the elements that constitute the world as perceived by the plain man. Let us, then, modify the above-mentioned statement by saying that a sensation, to be recognized as such, must belong to the one system with the elements in which the world of material things is revealed. Even this statement does some injustice to the word "sensation," as the reader will see when he comes to Chapter XXIII ; but he will then see also, I hope, that I have had good reason for using the word " sensation " as I have done in this and the three preceding chapters. There seemed to be no better word to use. And with this I must leave the subject for the present. CHAPTER X THE KANTIAN DOCTRINE OF SPACE The plain man is apt to think of space as a real something be- yond consciousness, in which the material things which he sees and feels exist and move. A little questioning reveals clearly that, concerning the nature of this something, he has the vaguest ideas. It is not matter, and it is not like matter ; but it undoubtedly exists, and it is plainly indispensable to the existence of material things. He hesitates to afBrm that it may properly be called a '• thing " at all ; but, " thing" or not, he is sure that it exists, and believes that it would continue to exist even if every material thing were anni- hilated. Touching some of the properties of this perplexing something, however, he regards himself as having very definite bits of infor- mation. Space is three-dimensional ; it is homogeneous in all its parts ; it is infinite in extent ; every portion of it is infinitely divis- ible. It is, in other words, an infinite continuum^ which must be granted real existence if the world of matter is to be allowed any reality at all, and is not to be reduced to a mere semblance of a world, an unreal dream. We shall see later that there is much truth, as well as some mis- conception, in the plain man's views touching the nature of space. One thing we may object to at the outset, and that is the assump- tion that space is a something quite beyond consciousness, and hence, quite cut off, as reflection shows that all such things must be, from the sphere of our knowledge. We would do the geometer little good by granting him, as the sphere in which he is to exercise his activity, an unknowable, unredeemed by even the gleams of meaning which are usually involuntarily allotted to unknowables. The plain man stands, as I liave in earlier papers pointed out, upon the psychological standpoint, assuming an external world wholly cut off from his knowledge, and yet somehow known to him. He 1G2 The Kantian Doctrine of Space 163 has grasped dimly the distinction of subjective and objective, and he expresses himself inconsistently. He must not be taken wholly at his word. But so much has been said on the absurdity of assum- ing a world wholly beyond consciousness and not made of " con- sciousness-stuff," that I shall assume that I need not discuss this in approaching the subject of space and time. I propose to examine, as briefly as I may, the two leading forms of doctrine which have been advanced in modern times touching the nature of space and time, and which to this day dispute the field between them. These I shall call the Kantian and the Berke- leian, using these appellations in rather a broad sense to indicate types of doctrine, and without meaning to make either philosopher responsible for later additions to, or alterations in, the structure which he reared upon the foundations that he himself laid down. Neither doctrine quite falls into the vulgar error of making space and time " things," and neither regards them as " external " in the peculiar sense of the word to which I have alluded above. In both doctrines space and time are treated as " form " and not as "matter," i.e. as the arrangement, the system of relations, which obtains between certain contents of consciousness, and not as those contents themselves. The two doctrines have a good deal in com- mon, but they are, nevertheless, marked by differences of no small importance ; and the one which has had the more general acceptance precipitates its adherents into difficulties so great and so hopeless that it seems surprising that they have not incited to a more wide- spread disaffection and a final revolt. This doctrine is the Kantian, and to it we will now turn our attention. We will first take up Space. According to the Kantian doc- trine, our knowledge of space is not a something at which we arrive as the result of an elaboration of our experiences. Space is not a construct for which our original experiences merely furnish the data. It is the necessary " form " of the intuitions of the external sense, and is given complete in every such intuition. Kant held that : (1) Space is a necessary " form " of thought, and, hence, we cannot conceive the possibility of the non-existence of space, although we can easily conceive of the non-existence of ob- jects in space; (2) we can represent to ourselves but one space, of which all spaces are parts ; from which it follows that space cannot be conceived as limited ; (3) all space is composed of spaces ; that is, space is infinitely divisible, and that which fills 164 The External World space, the " thing " given in sense-intuition, must be infinitely divisible, too.^ In criticising the Kantian doctrine, it is necessary to distin- guish clearly between what may be implied in regarding space simply as the " form " of certain intuitive experiences — as the '•' formal " element which, in union with the " material " element, constitutes these experiences — and what may be supposed to fol- low from the assumption that space is a neceasary ''form " of thouglit, of such a nature that we are compelled to think space as infinite, infinitely divisible, and incapable of being thought as non-existent. To make this distinction clear, I will take a concrete instance. In looking at the table before me, I am conscious of a complex of color-sensations. This Kant would have called a "manifold of sense." In this complex I can distinguish between "form" and " matter," i.e. between sensational elements and their arrangement. I may regard the " form " in my complex as something equally original with the "matter," and, if I choose, may attempt to account for it by saying that it is due to the nature of the mind — that in this way and in no other must the mind arrange its sensa- tions of color. Bearing in mind what psychologists tell us about the importance of sensations of touch and movement, and the way in which other sensations come to stand as signs of these, we may amend the above by remarking that we are really concerned with a tactual thing for which the visual complex under discussion stands as a sign ; but that will not affect the distinction which has been drawn between "form" and "matter." We still have to do with a complex in which the two elements are distinguishable, and we should not forget just what we mean by "form" when we are drawing the distinction. It is nothing occult or mysterious. It is a certain element in a given experienced content, and nothing else. In the given instance, it is the arrangement of the tactual sensa- tions which we have in mind when we say that we see the table .^ 1 "Critique of Pure Reason," Transcendental ^Esthetic, §§ 2, 3, and 4 ; Anti- nomies I and II, and Observations. 2 It will be seen that I treat " form " and " matter" as irreducible elements, as does the Kantian. The best argument for the opposite view that I know is con- tained in Professor James's " Psychology " (Chapter XX, pp. 149-152), but I do not find it wholly convincing. I wish, however, to point out that the argument con- tained in these papers in no wise hinges upon the decision given to this question. Whether "form" be ultimately distinct from, or identical with, sensation, is something one may leave undecided while following ray argument. The Kantian Doctrine of Space 165 But the space given us in such an intuition is limited. It is -coextensive with the "matter" of which it is the "form," and is not a something which extends beyond it. It is limited because the whole complex is limited, and, judging from this experience alone, there appears to be no more reason for assuming the formal element to be infinitely extended than for assuming the material to be so. If I were intuitively conscious of an infinite extent of color (or tactual) sensation, I should have an intuition of infinite space (the formal element in this experience), for both "form" and *' matter " would be limitless. Or if, failing this, I were conscious of a certain limited amount of color-sensation, and were, further, immediately conscious of a boundless space extending from the limits of the bit of space filled by the sensation (assuming that one may be conscious of pure space), then, too, I should have an intui- tion of infinite space. But to extract an intuition of infinite space from the patch of sensation with which I started out is an impos- sibility. I can succeed in doing so only by juggling with the word "intuition." The statement that infinite space is given in in- tuition is palpably absurd when the word " intuition " is taken in its strict sense. It does not mean that we have reason to believe that space is infinite, nor that we are forced to think that space is infi- nite. It means that we are immediately conscious of every part of space, as I am conscious of the bit of space within the limits of this patch of sensation. Can any one seriously maintain so absurd a doctrine ? It may, however, be maintained that we have an intuitive knowledge of infinite space in a somewhat different sense of the word " intuitive." That is, it may be held that we know intuitively that space is infinite. This does not mean that we are immediately conscious of infinite space, but merely that we know space to be infinite, and know it without being compelled to prove it in any way. It is a "necessity of thought." An interesting chapter might be written on what have commended themselves to the phi- losophers of past ages as necessities of thought, revelations of the inner light, etc. But I leave this tempting subject, and con- tent myself with pointing out that it is a counsel of prudence to be oracular regarding necessities of thought, and to advance them without attempting to prove that they must be accepted as such. Those who have attempted to prove that we must accept the infinity of space as a necessity of thought, or as an intuition in 16G The External World the second sense of the word, have offered highly defective evi- dence of the fact. " We are," says Hamilton, " altogether unable to conceive space as bounded — as finite : that is, as a whole beyond which there is no further space." ^ " We find ourselves," echoes Mr. Herbert Spencer, " totally unable to imagine bounds beyond which there is no space." ^ It is inferred from this that we must think of space as infinite. But what is it that these philosophers have invited us to attempt? When scrutinized, Hamilton's argument is seen to be nothing more nor less than this : We are altogether unable to con- ceive space as bounded — as finite; that is, as a whole in the space beyond which there is no further space. The word " beyond " in his argument has no meaning whatever except as it refers to space beyond, and Hamilton has simply set up a contradiction for us to tilt at. He asks us to imagine a limit, with a space beyond it, and at the same time no space beyond it. When we have had a "go " at this, and feel low-spirited over the result, he tells us with an air of mystery that we are in the clutches of a " necessity of thought." Whatever may be said for or against the necessity of thinking space as infinite, it is clear that this demonstration is a mere quibble. It has been, however, a very popular quibble. The doctrine that space is a necessity of thought in such a sense that, although we can annihilate in thought all objects in space, we cannot conceive the non-existence of space itself — this doctrine rests upon a similar misconception. There seems no reason at all why, if by space given in intuition we mean only the formal element in a given sensational experience, we should not be able to think away the space with the " matter " of which it is the "form." But we must not set ourselves a contradictory task, and erect a theory over our failure to accomplish it. " We can never represent to ourselves the non-existence of space," says Kant, "although we can easily conceive that there are no objects in space." 2 But what does one do when one tries to imagine the non-existence of space ? One first clears space of objects, and then one tries to clear space of space in somewhat the same way. We try to " think space away " as we express it, which does not mean 1 » Lectures on Metaphysics," XXXVIII. 2 u First Principles," III, § 15. ' ''Critique of Pure Reason," Transcendental Esthetic, § 2 : " Man kann sich niemals eine Vorstellung davon machen, dass kein Raum sei, ob man sich gleich ganz wohl denken kann, dass keine Gegenstande darin angetroffen werden." 1 The Kantian Doctrine of Space 167 that we turn all thought of space out of our mind, but that we try to think it away as we have thought objects away, by clearing it away from something, and having that something left. The attempt must, of course, fail; but then it is foolish to make the attempt. That this is what is commonly attempted I think certain. It is what I did, with a good deal of satisfaction to myself, during the years when Kant's position seemed to me well taken, and it is what I have an impulse to do now when I read the above-cited sentence from the " Critique. " So far as I can learn from their own accounts of their experience, it is what others try to do when they find it impossible to think space as non-existent. They try to annihilate space, and yet keep in mind, so to speak, the place where it was. They try to make a Vorstellung of the non- existence of space, i.e. to keep before the mind some intuition of the external sense, and yet annihilate its " form," which is mani- festly self-contradictory. We have here one of the countless instances of what may be called " the philosophic fallacy " par excellence. It is the special weakness of the philosopher to say " I go," and then not go ; to set about abstracting from something, and then not abstract from it ; to offer to clear the ground, and then to leave an array of stumps which must trip up the feet of the unwary. The deductions which have been made from these supposed necessities of thought are rather startling, and should in them- selves, I think, be sufficient to arouse a suspicion of the founda- tions upon which they rest. In the proof of the Antithesis of his famous First Antinomy, Kant offers an a priori demonstration that the sensible world must be conceived of as unlimited in ex- tent. To be sure, he also offers what he regards as an equally satisfactory proof of the contradictory proposition ; but as readers of Kant know, this does not mean that he believes his argument to be defective. The argument for the infinitude of the sensible world, which he brings forward as logically unexceptionable, is as follows : — Space is infinite ; hence the sensible world, if it be limited, must lie in the infinite void. But space is not an object; it is only the " form " of possible objects. Hence space may be limited by phenomena, but phenomena cannot be limited by an empty space beyond them. It is, therefore, impossible that a void space should project beyond the limits of a finite world of sense. The 168 The External World space beyond any given limit must, then, be filled space, and we must conceive of the sensible world as infinite in extent. It is clear that in this argument Kant plays fast and loose with the reality of space. He seems to make it a thing, or something like a thing, and yet not precisely a thing. We have seen that he regards it as real enough to persist in remaining wlien we think away all objects in it. Here we see that he regards it as real enough to be limited by phenomena, if it be a space within the world of sense, but not as real enough to limit phenomena by extending beyond. His argument is, in effect: Space is infinite (assumed as an intuition in the second sense of the word) ; it is not enough of a thing to exist by itself ; it must, then, be filled in with something ; this something must be infinite as space is ; ergo^ the world is unlimited. These are scholastic subtleties, and it seems odd to me, at least, that they should have been advanced by so acute a thinker as Kant ; and yet these reasonings seem to appeal to some vigorous minds even in our day. It is always safe to be on one's guard against so-called neces- sities of thought and the deductions which are drawn from them. Those who have elected to regard space as a " necessary form " of external intuition, or as a " necessity of thought," may easily be misled by these phrases into accepting as self-evident what is not merely not self-evident, but is even founded upon very question- able reasonings. There is, to be sure, no doubt that the statement that space is infinite seems to be a reasonable one even to the man who regards it as by no means certain that the universe of matter is infinite. What we mean by the statement that space is infinite, and why it commends itself as a reasonable one, I shall try to make clear later. We shall see that, to explain this general readi- ness to regard space as infinite, we are not forced to fall back upon such doubtful arguments as the impossibility of thinking a space beyond which there is no space, or the impossibility of imagining the non-existence of space. So much for our intuitive knowledge of space as infinite and "indestructible." Intuitions of this kind are no better than the fateful horse which brought ruin to Troy. They may be had as a gift, and they are big with disaster to those who receive them. But if we confine ourselves to intuitions in the first sense of the word, may we not escape such difficulties ? In the table which I perceive before me, I distinguish " matter " and " form." The I The Kantian Doctrine of Space 169 " form " — the system of relations — is as immediately given as the "matter." In holding that some space, at least, is directly given in intuition we do not, hence, seem to be juggling with the word or using it in an ambiguous sense. But when we examine more narrowly what is implied in such an intuition of space, we are at once confronted with certain vener- able difficulties that have exercised the ingenuity of mankind almost from the beginning of reflective thought. Space we regard as infinitely divisible. Every space, however small, must, then, be made up of spaces, never of points. It follows that what fills space must also be infinitely divisible. Thus every " intuition of the external sense " must be infinitely divisible. It cannot be denied that when we divide up into its parts any given sense-experience, we speedily come to what appears to be no longer composite. A line perceived by sight, for example, does not appear to be composed of an infinite number of line- portions. Subdivision seems to result in visual points not composed of parts. The minimum sensibile, as it has been called, is not di- rectly perceived to have part out of part. So much is admitted even by those who maintain that we have an intuition of space as infinitely divisible. The minimum sensible does not present itself in consciousness as " a manifold with its parts external to each other." But, says Kant, "since we cannot reason from the non-consciousness of such a manifold to the absolute impossibility of its existence in any intuition of an object, and since it is the latter that is necessary to absolute simplicity, it follows that this cannot be inferred from any perception what- ever." ^ Here Kant has evidently fallen back upon the second sense of the word "intuition," even while discussing intuition in the first sense. We are not directly conscious of an experience as infinitely divisible, but it is assumed that we have an intuition of the fact that it is so. As in the case of the infinite extent of space, so in the case of its infinite divisibility, the statement that something is given in intuition amounts only to saying that we know this or that about something. We may well pause before accepting as an in- dubitable deliverance of consciousness such a supposed bit of knowledge ; we certainly seem justified in asking how we know that our experiences of extension are thus infinitely divisible. If 1 Op cit.t Second Antinomy, Antithesis. 170 The External World we do not immediately perceive them to be infinitely divisible, does not our conviction rest upon an inference of some sort? How shall such an inference be justified? Of course, something may be said for Kant's statement that we cannot reason from the non-consciousness of a " manifold " to the impossibility of its existence in a given intuition, provided that his words be understood with a certain limitation. Some things exist in consciousness clearly and definitely, and of some we are very indefinitely conscious. It is quite conceivable that a given content of consciousness may be composite, and yet may not be recognized as such. But it is one thing to affirm that an experience in which we do not seem to be able to perceive part out of part may really consist of parts ; and it is quite another thing to affirm that it must consist of such parts, and that the parts of which it consists must in their turn be composite, and so on, ad infinitum. The last statement is an exceedingly bold one, and should not be allowed to pass without a demand for proof of some sort. Shall we accept it as true merely because we are told that it is a " neces- sity of thought " ? That Kant did not appeal to intuition, in the first sense of the word, he has himself made evident. " Against the principle of the infinite divisibility of matter," he writes,^ " whose ground of proof is purely mathematical, the monadists bring objections, which lay themselves open to suspicion from the mere fact that they do not admit the clearest mathematical proofs as giving an insight into the constitution of space, in so far as this is really the formal con- dition of the possibility of all matter. ... If we listen to them, we shall have to conceive, not merely the mathematical point — which, though simple, is not a part, but only the limit of a space — but also physical points, which are likewise simple, but have the advantage, as parts of space, of filling space by their mere aggre- gation. I shall not here repeat the common and clear refutations of this absurdity, which exist in plenty ; for it is wholly in vain to try to quibble away the evidence of mathematics by means of merely discursive conceptions. I will only remark, that if philos- ophy here falls into chicanery in dealing with mathematics, it is because he forgets that in this question one is concerned only with phenomena and their conditions. It is not enough to find for the pure conception of the composite the conception of the simple; 1 Op. cit., Second Antinomy, ObseiTations on the Antithesis. The Kantian Doctrine of Space 171 for the intuition of the composite (matter) one must find the intui- tion of the simple. This is by the laws of our sensibility, and, hence, in the case of objects of our senses, wholly impossible." Here Kant takes a double position, if I may so express it. In the closing words of the extract he falls back upon the assertion that the "laws of our sensibility" make it impossible that the absolutely simple should be given in intuition. That is, he simply invokes the magic of an " intuition " in the second sense of the word. But he has admitted, as we have seen, that the simple may apparently be given in intuition. He accepts the minimum seusibile recognized by Berkeley and Hume before him, merely arguing that mathematics furnishes proof that this is a false and deceitful minimum, a composite masquerading in the attire of simplicity. Kant thus maintains : (1) That what is given in intuition must be composite, for, by the law of our sensibility, nothing can be given in intuition that is not composite — which statement, if we accept it as true, ought to close the whole ques- tion; and (2) he argues that it is subversive of mathematics to deny the infinite divisibility of what is given in intuition. These positions may be met by maintaining: (1) That the statement that it is a law of our sensibility that the simple cannot be given in intuition is either a baseless assumption, or it is based upon the mathematical reasonings to which Kant refers ; and (2) that the opposing doctrine is seen to be by no means subversive of mathe- matical reasonings, when their significance is clearly understood. What may be said upon these points will be considered later. Before passing on to this I wish to make clear the difficulties above alluded to, which attach to the Kantian doctrine, and which should be honestly faced by those who elect to become its adhe- rents. It will not do to give them a perfunctory glance, call them logical puzzles, and straightway forget them. As we shall see, they are deserving of most serious consideration. CHAPTER XI DIFFICULTIES CONNECTED WITH THE KANTIAN DOCTRINE OF SPACE More than two thousand years ago, it was argued by Zeno of Elea that motion is impossible, on the ground that, since space is infinitely divisible, no space, however small, can be passed over by a moving body. To go from one place to another, a body would have to pass through an unlimited number of intermediate spaces. That is, it would have to reach the last term of an unlimited series, which is absurd. The more clearly this problem is stated, the more evident it seems to become that the difficulty is insurmountable. It appears to arise out of the very notion of space and of motion in space as continuous. "The idea expressed by that word 'continuous,'" says Professor Clifford,^ " is one of extreme importance ; it is the foundation of all exact science of things; and yet it is so very simple and elementary that it must have been almost the first clear idea that we got into our heads. It is only this : I cannot move this thing from one position to another, without making it go through an infinite number of intermediate positions. In- finite ; it is a dreadful word, I know, until you find out that you are familiar with the thing which it expresses. In this place it means that between any two positions there is some intermediate position ; between that and either of the others, again, there is some other intermediate ; and so on without any end. Infinite means without any end. If you went on with that work of count- ing forever, you would never get any further than the beginning of it. At last you would only have two positions very close together, but not the same ; and the whole process might be gone over again, beginning with those as many times as you like.'' In this extract Professor C'lifPord plays directly into the hand of Zeno, although it is no part of his purpose to support the con- 1 *' Seeing and Thinking," p. 134. 172 Kantian Difficulties 173 tention of that philosopher. He is merely trying to make quite clear what we mean by calling space continuous ; and is it not generally admitted that space is continuous? But, then, how can anything move through space ? The difficulties that beset a moving point Clifford has himself admirably exhibited, and again without the slightest intention of unduly emphasizing these diffi- culties or of denying the possibility of motion. He writes : ^ — " When a point moves, it moves along some line ; and you may say that it traces out or describes the line. To look at some- thing definite, let us take the point where this boundary of red on paper is cut by the surface of water. I move all about together. Now you know that between any two positions of the point there is an infinite number of intermediate positions. Where are they all ? Why, clearly, in the line along which the point moved. That line is the place where all such points are to be found." " . . .It seems a very natural thing to say that space is made up of points. I want you to examine very carefully what this means, and how far it is true. And let us first take the simplest case, and consider whether we may safely say that a line is made up of points. If you think of a very large number — say, a million — of points all in a row, the end ones being an inch apart, then this string of points is altogether a different thing from a line an inch long. For if you single out two points which are next one another, then there is no point of the series between them ; but if you take two points on a line, however close together they may be, there is an infinite number of points between them. The two things are different in kind, not in degree."'^ "... When a point moves along a line, we know that between any two positions of it there is an infinite number (in this new sense ^) of intermediate positions. That is because the motion is continuous. Each of those positions is where the point was at some instant or other. Between the two end positions on the line, the point where the motion began and the point where it stopped, there is no point of the line which does not belong to that series. We have thus an infinite series of successive positions of a continu- ously moving point, and* in that series are included all the points 1 Op. cit., pp. 143-144. 2 jj)ict., pp. 146-147. ^ Professor Clifford has used the word " number" in two senses, a quantitative and a qualitative. By number in the latter sense he means simply ' ' unlimited units." 174 The External World of a certain piece of line-room. May we say, then, that the line is made up of that infinite series of points ? " Yes ; if we mean no more than that the series makes up the points of the line. But ?io, if we mean that the line is made up of those points in the same way that it is made up of a great many very small pieces of line. A point is not to be regarded as a part of a line, in any sense whatever. It is the boundary between two parts." 1 Surely Zeno would have welcomed all this as directly estab- lishing his position. " When a point moves along a line, wc know that between any two positions of it there is an infinite number . . . of intermediate positions." "Infinite means without any end." The positions with which we are dealing are "the succes- sive positions of a continuously moving point." Hence, to com- plete its motion over any given line whatever, the moving point must pass, one by one, an endless series of positions, and must finish with the end position. If the moral of this is not that a point can- not raove along a line, there is no validity in human reasonings. Again : The moving point must take, one by one, the " suc- cessive positions " in the series. Even the (conscious or uncon- scious) Kantian has his preference in absurdities, and rejects some rather than others. Clifford does not conceive the point as in two positions at once, or as making some ingenious flank movement by means of which it can " scoop in " a whole stretch of line simul- taneously. It must move along the line, from end to end, taking one position at a time, and taking them in their order. It cannot make jumps, and are not the positions "successive"? Its path seems clearly marked out for it — a smooth road, and without turn- ings. Alas ! the line is " continuous." The point cannot take successive positions, for have we not seen that no position can immediately succeed any other on a continuous line ? " Between any two positions there is some intermediate position ; between that and either of the others, again, there is some other interme- diate; and so on icithout any end^ Can any living soul conceive the gait that must be adopted by a point, which must move contin- uously (without jumps ?) over a line, and yet is debarred from passing from any one position to the next in the series? It cannot pass first to some position which is not the next, and then get around to the next after a while. That is palpably absurd. And 1 Op. clL, pp. 149-150. Kantian Difficulties 175 it cannot pass to the next at once, for there is no next. I can imagine the shade of Zeno rubbing its hands over this development of his doctrine. " The way for a point to get on," says Clifford, "is for it never to take the next step." " Of course that means," adds Zeno, with ghostly laughter, "that a point cannot get on at all." And what shall we say to the statement that, although " all the points of a certain piece of line-room" are included in the "in- finite series of successive (^sic) positions of a continuously moving point," yet the line is not made up of these points, but is made up " of a great many very small pieces of line " ? What are these small pieces of line, which are to be distinguished from the whole series of points ? They are not material things, for we are not now discussing a bit of string or a chalk-mark, but we are dis- cussing a geometrical line, an aspect of space. What lies between any two points on the line ? More points for one thing. What else? Bits of line. But what are bits of line? When a point has moved over a line, has it done anything but pass through a series of successive positions ? It seems reasonable, at first sight, to assume that such a series of positions is what we mean by a line. We are informed, however, that a point is not to be re- garded as part of a line in any sense whatever. It is " the boun- dary between two parts." Does the assumption of these bits of line, which are not positions, but lie between positions, make more comprehensible the motion of a point over a line ? Manifestly not. If the bits of line could be supposed to take up some of the line-room in such a way as to reduce the number of points, they might be of some help, but no one supposes them to do this. Bits of line or no bits of line, the moving point must occupy successively all the positions in an infinite series. And if we turn our attention from the points, and confine it to the bits of line, we are no better off. If the number of points is endless, so is the number of bits of line, for these separate the points, which are only their boundaries, and we are forced to ask our- selves how an endless series of bits of line can come to an end in a last bit which completes the line. It is not a whit easier to conceive of a given finite line as composed of bits of line, than it is to conceive of it as composed of points, if we once admit that the line in question is infinitely divisible. We have only added a new element of mystification. What do we mean by these mys- 176 The External World terious bits of line ? Has the point which is passing over a series of positions anything whatever to do with them? Do they really separate the positions, so that they must be jumped in getting along the series, or does the point, after all, meet nothing but positions^ never that which separates them? The attempt is sometimes made to avoid the difficulty of as- suming that a point moving over a line can progressively exhaust an infinite series, by laying much emphasis upon the fact that the members of the series are exceedingly small, and can be passed over with great rapidity. Infinitesimal spaces, it is argued, are passed over in infinitesimal times, and all these infinitesimals are included in the finite space and time of the motion. But it must be evident to any one capable of the least clearness of thought that dwelling upon the size of the members of the series, in the case either of space or of time, is wholly wide of the mark. Whether things are big or little, if the supply of them be truly- endless, one can never get to the end of the supply. The rapidity with which the terms of the series are exhausted has obviously no effect in facilitating an approach to that which cannot, by hypothesis, exist, i.e. to a final term. The proposed solution of the problem rests upon the implicit assumption that, provided only things are small enough, it is legitimate to reason about them in an incoherent way, and to make self-contradictory state- ments. I know of no way in which this assumption can be de- fended, unless it be by claiming that it is an " intuition." If, then, in order to move a body, I must reach the end of an endless series, I may reasonably conclude that I cannot move a body. This is as clear as it is possible for anything to be. No exception can be taken to Zeno's argument, if the assumption upon which it rests be once granted. One is not at liberty to admit that there are difficulties connected with the statement that a point can move along an infinitely divisible line, and to hold that, in spite of these difficulties, the statement should be ap- proved as being the least objectionable that can be made touching the subject. One should bear in mind that this amounts to saying that what is flatly self-contradictory and, hence, intrinsically- absurd, is at least less objectionable, as an article of faith, than is something else. I wish to emphasize the fact that no opposing doctrine, try as it may, can possibly be worse. At best it can only succeed in being as bad. Kantian Difficulties 177 The difficulties arising out of the doctrine of the infinite divisi- bility of finite spaces have been so long before the philosophic public that it is tired of them, and its sense has grown deadened to their significance. They are recognized ; they arouse a fugitive interest ; they are made to yield a favorable occasion for a pleas- ing exercise of the ingenuity, and then they are put back again into their box and their existence is ignored. They are not taken seriously, and the serious interest with which the ancients ap- proached them is even characterized as pathologic. But whether we face them or not, the difficulties are there just the same. They do not become non-existent merely because they are over- looked ; and it is surely a crying disgrace to human reason that a theory of the nature of space should complacently be accepted as truth, which admittedly runs into unresolved self-contradic- tions. So important is it that the reader should clearly realize what is implied in the Kantian doctrine, that I will beg his indul- gence while I set forth a rather interesting bit of reasoning, the sole defect in which is that it rests upon the assumption contained in that doctrine. It is, in all other respects, beyond criticism. Let us suppose a point A moving uniformly over a finite line he, at such a rate that it will complete the distance in one second. })A . 1 1 1 \c Since the motion is uniform, the point will pass over one-half of the line in half a second ; it will pass over one-half of the re- mainder, or one-fourth of the line, in a quarter of a second, etc. When the point has passed over the whole line, it will have com- pleted the descending series : |^, ^, J, Jg . . . 0. We may set aside for the present purpose the " difficulties " connected with the point's getting a start along an infinitely divisible line, and with the completion of an endless series in general. We will accept it as a fact that the line is infinitely divisible and can be passed over, in an infinitely divisible second, by a point moving at a uniform rate. All these are good Kantian assumptions. It seems to follow rigorously that both the line and the second are exhausted as our descending series indicates, and that both come to an end only when the series is terminated. The motion can be completed ; the second can be completed ; the series can be completed. In fact, all three are completed simul- 178 The External World taneously. In the case, then, of a point moving uniformly over a finite line, we have evidence of the fact that an infinite descend- ing series, such as J, i? i? ^e • • • ^' ^^" ^^» ^"^ ^^' completed. Now let us suppose a circular disk set revolving around its centre, in the plane of this paper, in such a manner that, at the first revolution, a point P on its circumference is carried around to the place at which it was before in half a second, at the second revolution, in a quarter of a second, at the third, in an eighth of a second, etc. It is clear that at the end of one second from the beginning of the motion the disk will be revolving with infinite rapidity, or, in other words, the time of P's revolution will be reduced from half a second to zero. We have here a descending series of exactly the same kind as the one we had above ; the times taken up by the successive revolutions are J, |, ^, ^^g ... 0. Thus, when the disk is revolving with infinite rapidity, there is no time at all between P's leaving the place at which it was and coming back to it again ; which means, if it means anything, that P is always at the same place. But, since similar reasoning will apply to any other position through which P is supposed to pass in each of its revolutions (for the interval between its leaving that position and returning to it again is reduced to zero by the com- pletion of the series), we can prove just as cogently that P is in the whole series of positions all the time. We can prove, in other words, that when the disk revolves with infinite rapidity, P is always all around the disk at once. I suggest this argument to those who incline to the at present rather unfashionable scholastic notion that the whole soul is simul- taneously in all parts of the body — tota in toto et tota in utraque parte. It may be used as a new weapon of defence, and has the advantage of being based upon principles admitted by their antagonists. If there be any truth in the Kantian doctrine of the infinite divisibility of space and time, why should not the soul be thus ubiquitous ? It has only to move fast enough and it may succeed in being everywhere at once. The trick is simple — let it reduce to zero the time between its setting out from a given spot and its getting around to it again. It will, then, never be away from that spot, and it will also always be at every other spot in the line of its vibration. To those who find repugnant the thought of this midge's dance Kantian Difficulties 179 of the soul through all parts of the body, I suggest that there is nothing in this doctrine to prevent one from believing that through it all the soul retains the quiet seat in the pineal gland assigned it by Descartes. There it remains, like a spider at the centre of its web ; and one can rest one's mind by thus conceiving it. On the other hand, in those heroic moods in which the philosopher loves to emphasize the magic powers which distinguish mind from matter, independence of space and what not, one can reflect upon the storm and stress of its inconceivable motion, — a motion which appears to resemble rest, and yet is its extremest opposite ; a motion which consists in being at rest in every place and in no place simulta- neously. Then one can proudly maintain that, though the soul be in the pineal gland, it is not imprisoned there, like an impotent lump of matter, hemmed in by the walls of its cell, and unable to break through them. It is there, as it is everywhere, by its own tireless energy — there and not there, there and everywhere, a standing miracle, a living contradiction. The topic is one upon which an enthusiast might dilate ; but even enthusiasm should not be allowed to run into injustice, and the mention of matter reminds me that, for the Kantian, matter, too, may have its magical properties. We began with a revolving disk, and found that a point upon its circumference may be, under certain conditions, all around the disk at once. But if this be so, it must be possible for a material particle in the tire of a revolving wheel to be all around the wheel at once, when the wheel is revolving with infinite rapidity, and, thus, to occupy the same space with all the other particles in its path. Is this a new insight into the constitution of matter? Shall we say that every particle of matter excludes from the space it occupies every other particle when, and only when, its motion is not too rapid? Or shall we say that, although it is conceivable that an infinite series may be completed by a point moving along a line, yet it is not conceivable that an infinite series can be completed by the revo- lutions of a disk ? Is it an " intuition " that there is this difference between moving points and revolving disks ? But, it is objected, all this is sheer nonsense ; no point can possibly be in more than one position at one time, nor is it possi- ble that a point should move so rapidly as always to remain in the same spot. I answer : Of course it is sheer nonsense ; but I insist that the whole nonsensical edifice rests upon the one nonsensical 180 The External World aifsumption that an endless series can he compltted hij a progress which results in the attainment of a final term. This is the as- sumption to which his peculiar views of the infinite divisibility of space and time force the Kantian. Grant this assumption and the rest follows of itself. The reasoning contains no other error. Its steps, briefly stated, are as follows : — 1. If finite spaces and times are infinitely divisible, a point moving uniformly over a finite line, must be able to pass through an endless series of positions and arrive at the very end. 2. The total space and time of the motion may be so divided as to be truly represented by the descending series, |^, |^, ^, Jg- . ..0. 3. If it is possible for one such series to be completed, there is absolutely no reason for affirming that another series of exactly the same kind may not be. 4. Hence, if it is conceivable that a disk may complete one revolution upon its centre in half a second, the next in a quarter of a second, etc., there is no reason for affirming that it is theo- retically impossible for it to attain such a rate of speed that the time of its revolution will be reduced to zero. 5. When it is thus reduced to zero, it is clear that there is no time whatever during which a point upon the circumference of the disk is away from the position in which it was at the begin- ning of the motion, etc. I beg the reader to remark that there is absolutely no ground for discriminating against the disk in the mere fact that it is impossible to define intelligibly the last term in the series of its revolutions. It is important to grasp this clearl}^, for the super- ficial thinker is apt to delude himself with the reflection : We can, at least, know where the point that has exhausted the line is at the close of the second ; but no man can make clear what the point on the disk is doing at the close of the second. It is, however, easy to show that the final term is not a whit more difficult of definition in the one case than in the other, and that our partiality for the line is due to a mere blunder. In the one case we ask ivhere the point is^ a question which is answered, not by an appeal to our infinite series, but by a recourse to the tape measure ; a question which may be answered perfectly well by the opponent of the Kantian, who repudiates the infinite divisi- bility of finite lines. In the other case we ask ivhat the nature Kantian Difficulties 181 of the final term is, a question which cannot but be highly embar- rassing to the Kantian, in view of the fact that he cannot admit that there is a final term, and yet cannot get on without one. Let us in each case ask the same question. This is simple justice, for it is my whole contention that the behavior of the point on the disk is in no respect more reprehensible than that of the point on the line. We will, then, inquire into the nature of the final term in each series ; what is happening in the last fraction of the second in the one case and in the other ? " My dear man," insists the Kantian, " there is no final term, and there is no last fraction of the second ; space and time are continuous.''^ To this I must answer: Has not the point passed over the whole line? Did it do it all at once, or bit by bit? No two bits, small or great, can be disposed of at once. And is not the second past ? Did it pass as a unit, or bit by bit ? Can two points in time be simultaneous ? There was a beginning of the motion and an end ; there was a beginning and an end of the second. Something must have come last. We will talk about that something. Now, what is the point on the disk doing at the very close of the second ? It cannot be describing a circle, in the usual sense of the words, for we are considering the last term in the series, the last fraction of the second. The last fraction cannot be composed of parts, or it would not be the last ; there would be one half as big after it. To describe a circle a point must be in successive positions in successive instants, and here we have not successive instants. On the other hand, the point cannot be at rest, as the words are commonly understood. Is it not the law of the series that, with each succeeding term, the point will double the rapidity of its motion ? Is there anything in the nature of space and time to warrant us in assuming that, at a given instant, doubling the rapidity of a point's motion will bring the point to rest ? But what is the other point doing in the same final fraction of the second ? Is it moving ? There is no time to move in, for this fraction has no parts. Is the point exhausting the final bit of line ? Surely not that ; it cannot be concerned with a bit of line, in any proper sense of the words, for every bit of line must, by hypothesis, be composed of parts, and so long as we have before us a some- thing with parts we are not occupying ourselves with a final term ; there is still room for a term half as big. Is our point, then, " exhausting " a mere point ? We are told that a point cannot 182 The External World in any way contribute to the length of a line ; and, if this be so, our final term forms no part of the point's path — it does not add what was lacking. Besides, our final term must be half the size of the term preceding, and what sort of a bit of line is it that is made up of two mathematical points ? We cannot, therefore, admit the right of the Kantian to repudi- ate the timeless motion of that depressing disk on the mere ground that it is in its nature an absurdity. The Kantian accepts, as we have seen, many absurdities. The disk is in the last fraction of the second as sensibly occupied as is the point that moves along a line. In each case we are contemplating what is absurd and inconceiv- able, and there is not the toss of a copper between them. The conclusions of these reasonings will doubtless seem to many persons highly unpalatable. There is, however, but one way to avoid them, and that is to repudiate the foundations upon which they rest. Perhaps I should amend this statement by saying there is only one logical way to avoid them. Practically, of course, we can avoid them by turning our minds from the whole subject, and this is what is commonly done. The unpleasant conse- quences of philosophic reasonings may be put to rout by an enemy who has not borrowed his arms from Aristotle or from his succes- sors. "I dine," writes Hume,^ "I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends ; and when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find it in my heart to enter into them any further." In such a mood logical difficulties are not taken seriously, and the mind drifts upon the stream of its habitual associations. It is worthy of remark that such moods are by no means ex- clusively the result of relaxation and conviviality. An attachment to the doctrines of this or of that school of thought, doctrines to which we have grown accustomed, and which seem to place at least some sort of ground under our feet; the agreeable sense that we belong to a party, and are not groping our way alone in the maze of speculations which confronts the philosopher ; these things, and such as these, may disincline us to take seriously even the most serious of difficulties. We choose to jolt our way along upon the old road, even over an occasional self-contradiction. It seems better than to seek a smoother track, which is little fre- 1 "Treatise of Human Nature," Book I, Part IV, § 7. I Kantian Difficulties 183 quented, and which may, for all we know, lead anywhere or no- where. Accordingly, we take up an exposition of the inconsistencies which arise out of the Kantian doctrine, read it through, indulgently compliment the author upon his " acuteness," and, feeling unable to point out any actual flaw in his argument, we take our stand upon what may be called the platform of the liberal-conservative in philosophy, saying: "There are undoubtedly difficulties con- nected with the doctrine of the infinite divisibility of finite spaces, but the way to avoid these difficulties is not to repudiate what is undoubted truth, and to take refuge in a shallow empiricism," etc. Although the occasioning cause may be different, our attitude of mind is distinctly Humian. Before closing this discussion of the Kantian doctrine of space, I must comment briefly upon one attempt to avoid the enormities we have been passing in review, which does not repudiate the doctrine of the infinite divisibility of finite spaces, and which yet does not simply avert its eyes from the painful consequences of the doctrine. This attempt consists in maintaining that we are not bound to hold that every finite space consists of an infinite number of finite spaces, for space is infinitely divisible not infinitely divided. This quibble — for although it has a venerable history, it is nothing more — need not detain us very long. We have only to ask how it helps us in the case of the moving point. The line over which the point has moved is infinitely divisible. What does this mean ? We call a line divisible, because we believe that it can be divided ; and we believe that it can be divided (theoreti- cally of course), because it is composed of parts. If we did not believe it to be composed of parts, we should not regard it as divisible. By saying that the line is infinitely divisible, we mean simply that it is composed, not of a limited, but of an unlimited number of parts ; and by saying that the motion of a point over it is continuous, we mean that the point must take successively an infinite series of positions. Now our point has completed its progress; it is at the end of the line. Has it, or has it not, passed over every part of the line ? Has it, or has it not, been successively in an endless series of positions? It is trivial to raise the question whether the parts of the line, the positions along it, have been counted or not. If the line is infinitely divis- ible, and if the point moves along it, it evidently comes to the end of an endless series at every step of its progress. CHAPTER XII THE BERKELEIAN DOCTRINE OF SPACE It is clear from what was said in my last paper that the Kan- tian doctrine is a house divided against itself, and that, unless we elect to embrace the motto : credo quia absurdum est — a motto not now in fashion in most departments of human knowledge — we are under obligations either to modify it or to repudiate it altogether. What shall we do? Shall we maintain that space is not infi- nitely divisible ? If we have the temerity to do this, we shall find drawn up against us, not merely the philosophers, but with them a formidable array of those who, like Clifford, care not a doit for philosophers, but hold very definite notions regarding points, lines, surfaces, and solids, and express these opinions with much em- phasis. The mathematician usually takes little interest in such distinctions as that between " intuition " and " conception " ; but he insists strenuously that it is absurd to maintain that a surface may be so narrow that, when split longitudinally, it is divided into two lines; or a line so short that, when bisected, it yields only a brace of points. Mathematics, he affirms, can recognize no such lines or surfaces. And in this the mathematician is entirely in the right. The space with which he is concerned is infinitely divisible ; his solids do not split up into surfaces, his surfaces into lines, and his lines into points. But, then, he is not dealing with a space immediately given in intuition ; he is dealing with real space. He has passed from sign to thing signified, without remarking the distinction be- tween them, and though this distinction may not greatly concern him when he remains on his own ground, it is one of the utmost moment to the metaphysician. Indeed, it is just the failure to recognize it that has introduced into the Kantian doctrine the in- consistencies previously discussed. That doctrine is so near to the ti'uth that it needs but a little modification to make it quite satis- ''"•fory. This I must try to make clear. 184 The Berkeleian Doctrine of Space 185 We have seen that Kant held that every object of intuitioa must consist of part out of part, whether we can prove it to be so constituted or not. " All intuitions," he maintains elsewhere in the "Critique,"^ "are extensive quantities." "By an extensive quantity," he explains, " I mean one in which the representation of the parts makes possible the representation of the whole (and hence, necessarily antecedes this). I cannot represent to myself any line, however small, without drawing it in thought, i.e, from a point generating all its parts successively, and thus alone pro- ducing the intuition. So it is also in the case of every, even the smallest, portion of time. In it I represent to myself only the successive progress from moment to moment, and this, by the addition of all the bits of time QZeittheile)^ finally begets a deter- minate quantity of time. Since the pure intuition in all phenom- ena is either of space or of time, every phenomenon, as intuition, is an extensive quantity, for it can only be cognized in apprehen- sion through the addition of part to part. Hence all phenomena are intuited as aggregates, as consisting of a multiplicity of previ- ously given parts. This is not the case with quantities of every description, but only with those that are represented and appre- hended by us as in their nature extensive quantities." The reader of the preceding chapter will find in this passage a good deal to object to. To represent to myself any line, however small, I must produce it bit by bit ; I must successively add all its parts. How many of these parts are there ? An endless number. And are these bits of line ready to hand, or must they be pro- duced " from a point " ? And what is meant by a " successive prog- ress from moment to moment " ? Are moments indivisible, or are they bits of time ? Evidently the latter. They, in turn, then, are a problem, and must be obtained as the result of an endless addition of parts. The successive addition of portions of space and of time seems simple only when one forgets for the moment that one is a Kantian. That is what Kant has done here ; he makes space and time out of spaces and times, but he leaves us wholly in the dark as to how those bits of space and time that we are to piece together come into being. There is a leap from a point — and they somehow appear; the rest is simple. But we must not ask how we " drew " the first bit of line, or how we " begat " a moment. Moreover, if all phenomena 1 " Critique of Pure Reason," Transcendental Logic, Axioms of Intuition. 186 The External World are "cognized in apprehension through the addition of part to part," or " intuited as aggregates," how about the minimum sensi- hile^ which is inferred to have parts, although we cannot perceive it to be composed of such? Do we "intuit" this as an aggregate, even wliile it seems to us to be simple? But I must not dwell upon these inconsistencies, for they have been sufficiently discussed already. In the division of the " Critique " from which I have just been quoting, Kant again makes it evident that he is led to take the unfortunate position that he does take, by the supposed necessity of avoiding a clash with mathematical doc- trine. " Empirical intuition," he writes, " is only made possible by pure intuition — that of space and time. Hence what geometry says of the latter will indisputably apply to the former. Such evasions as the statement that objects of sense do not conform to the rules of construction in space (to the principle of the infinite divisi- bility of lines and angles, for example) must fall to the ground. For such evasions deny to space, and with space to mathematics as a whole, objective validity ; and one no longer knows why and to what extent the mathematics can be applied to phenomena." Here we have the very nerve of the dispute. Are we to repudi- ate mathematical reasonings, or, what seems as bad, to deny their applicability to the things of which the senses give us information ? Surely not. But are we, then, to accept the infinite divisibility of what is given in intuition, and must we, to avoid giving offence to the mathematician, shut our eyes and bolt the inevitable conse- quences of such an admission ? It is pathetic to hear those who feel within them the pangs of the antinomial colic murmur with resignation : " There are, indeed, difficulties," etc. It is a relief to find that we are not, in fact, shut up to these al- ternatives. Kant himself has recognized a distinction which, when its significance is clearly seen, enables us to avoid disaster in either direction. The passage in the " Critique," which I have in mind in saying this, is so interesting that I shall quote it at length : ^ — " We are accustomed to distinguish in phenomena what be- longs essentially to the intuition of them, and is valid for every human sense-faculty, from what belongs to them only accidentally, inasmuch as it is not valid in relation to the faculty of sense taken generally, but only in relation to a particular disposition or organi- zation of this or that sense. Knowledge of the first sort gives us, 1 *' Critique of Pure Reason," General Remarks on Transcendental ^Esthetic. The Berkeleian Doctrine of Space 187 we say, the object as it is in itself ; knowledge of the second gives us only the object as it appears. But this distinction is merely empirical. If we adhere to this position (as is commonly done), and do not regard the former empirical intuition (as one should) as, in its turn, mere phenomenon, in which nothing that belongs to the thing-in-itself is to be found, we lose our transcendental distinction, and we believe that we are cognizing things in them- selves ; whereas, on the contrary, everywhere in the world of sense, even in our profoundest investigations into the objects which belong to that world, we are dealing with nothing but phenomena. " Thus we call the rainbow a mere appearance or phenomenon in a sunny shower, and we call the rain the thing-in-itself. This is right enough, if we take those words in a mere physical sense, and mean by the thing-in-itself that which, in universal experience, and in all its various relations to the senses, is constituted in intuition in just this way and in no other. But if we take this empirical expe- rience generally, and, without inquiring into its harmony with the faculty of sense of every human being, ask whether this represents an object in itself (not the raindrops, for they, as phenomena, are evidently empirical objects) — if we do this, we find that the ques- tion of the relation of the representative to its object is a transcen- dental one, and that not only are the drops mere phenomena, but even their globular form, nay, the very space through which they fall, all are nothing in themselves, but are mere modifications or fundamental dispositions of our sensuous intuition. The transcen- dental object remains unknown to us." This "transcendental object" is, of course, the "external reality " which has so often been assumed to exist beyond con- sciousness, and with which I am not concerned in these chapters. In this passage of the "Critique," as in many others, Kant comes near to repudiating it altogether. He sees that the distinction we all draw between appearance and reality does not necessitate any reference to such a thing as this, but is a distinction within our experience, and has to do only with phenomena, in the broad sense of that word. One experience (the rainbow) is taken as the sign of another (the falling drops) ; the sign is recognized as appear- ance, while the thing signified takes on the dignity of the reality. This is quite in harmony with the doctrine coming to be accepted, I think, by an increasing number of philosophers, namely, that when we are contrasting in our experience appearance and reality. 188 The External World the reality always means to us that upon which we lay the duty of ordering and explaining our experiences as a whole. Unhappily, Kant did not see the full significance of this dis- tinction. He might, after showing in what sense the rainbow is not the reality, but only the sign of it, have gone on to show that each raindrop, as visual-appearance, is sign of a reality known to us in terms of touch and motion. Having arrived at this pointy he might have indicated that this reality, in its turn, is relatively and not absolutely real ; i.e, that what is actually given in sense or imagination (the intuition) may in its turn become sign or appearance of something else, which thus becomes, relatively to it, the reality. As it is, he assumes that there is given in intuition a last " appearance," which is the reality, not in a relative, but in an absolute and final sense, and to which the " rules of construction in space " directly apply in all their rigor. He fails to see that here, as before, he is dealing with a symbol, and out of his confusion of symbol and thing symbolized spring the difficulties exhibited above. The doctrine which I have called the Berkeleian avoids these difficulties, without, I think, giving up anything that the Kantian need care to retain. It merely distinguishes more carefully between symbol and thing symbolized, and refuses to be led into needless perplexities by the assumption of " necessary forms " of intuition and supposed inferences from them. Its argument may be set forth briefly as follows : — 1. In a given experience of which I am intuitively conscious — say, an expanse of color-sensation — I can distinguish between " matter " and " form," between the stuff of my experience and its arrangement. 2. I perceive the expanse of color to be composite, and to be divisible into parts, but I do not perceive it to be composed of an infinite number of parts, i.e. to be infinitely divisible ; so much Kant has himself admitted. 3. It is important to bear in mind, however, that no such single experience constitutes what we mean by a " real thing," nor is its "form" what we mean by "real space." We have here only the raw materials out of which real things and real space are built up. Our experiences fall together into an orderly system, and single experiences serve as signs of other experiences or of whole groups of such. Thus the little patch of color-sensation that represents a tree seen at a distance, and the larger patch that represents a tree The Berkeleian Doctrine of Space 189 seen near at hand, are recognized as belonging to the same group, and are regarded as different experiences of the same thing ^ i.e. the one can stand for the other, and each serves as a sign of the "tactual" tree in which the mind rests as the real thing of which each is an appearance. 4. But a little reflection makes it apparent that it is a mistake to suppose that this real thing, of which the whole series of visual appearances are signs, is a single intuitive experience of any sort. The tactual thing, as it exists in the sense or the imagination, is the temporary resting-place of our thought, not its permanent goal. Science conceives the tree to be made up of atoms and molecules, imperceptible to the sense, and yet really existing and furnishing an explanation of what is given in the sense. Of this " reality " the tree over which I pass my hand becomes an "appearance." And if we are justified in thus passing from what is given in the senses, to what science compels us to accept as furnishing its explanation, a path is opened up to us to which we cannot arbi- trarily set a limit. The real thing, in any but a relative sense, be- comes to us a possibility of substitutions according to a definite prin- ciple ; it is not a single intuitive experience of any sort whatever. 5. If we will hold this clearly in mind, we may avoid anti- nomial pitfalls without either tilting against mathematics, or shock- ing the common sense of mankind by denying that space, and lines and angles in space, are infinitely divisible. Berkeley pointed out long ago that we cannot continue to subdivide a given finite line (the line, that is, as given in a single intuition) indefinitely. We soon come to what appears to the sense to be a mere point, and to have no part out of part. He rightly indicated that when we talk of subdividing that which seems to the eye a mere point we are in imagination substituting for that a line, which is, of course, composed of parts, and we are continuing our subdivision upon this substitute. When we realize that this system of substitutions is typical of our whole experience of the real world, which reveals itself in con- sciousness as a system of interrelated experiences, we can under- stand why the infinite divisibility of extended things should be so earnestly insisted upon. The point which appears to result from the subdivision of a line can be approached to the eye, and it is seen as a short line. When a further subdivision has taken place, and no change of position will reveal it as a line, we can place a microscope over it. 100 The External World 111 all this we conceive ourselves to be dealing with the same thing, and so we are, in a very important sense of the word same. But it is a very unfortunate error to suppose that any one of the experiences which represents to us the real thing is the same with any other in a quite different sense of the word — to suppose, namely, that they are strictly identical. Unless we happen to be psychologists, we are not concerned with any one of the experi- ences in itself considered. We are concerned with the real thing, of which any single experience is a mere symbol. It is quite pos- sible for the psychologist to maintain that any single experience is probably ultimately divisible into a limited number of sensational elements not themselves further divisible ; and yet to maintain stoutly that the real thing is to be conceived as infinitely divisible. He has only to distinguish carefully symbol from thing symbolized. 6. Thus we see that, although the geometer finds his raw materials in intuition, he uses these raw materials only as his point of departure. If lines and angles were not given in intuition, and if we could not subdivide these in individual experiences, the geo- metrical refinements which have grown out of such experiences would be impossible. But these refinements have, be it remem- bered, grown out of the experiences ; they are not identical with the experiences themselves. For example, a fine line upon the paper before my eye seems to me to have length, but no breadth. I can divide it in such a way that the two resulting portions seem to me to be exactly equal to each other. I can form an angle out of two such lines, and can draw a third line in such a way that it seems to bisect the angle exactly. But the mathematician informs me that no line can be drawn, by any instrument, which has not breadth as well as length ; and that the chances are infinitely against the exact equality of the parts of the divided line and of the divided angle. " The line may seem to you without breadth," he explains, "and the line and the angle may seem exactly bisected ; but this is mere seeming. If your senses were more discriminating, you would discover your mistake." This simply means that, in the series of substitutions we have been considering, the line will not remain a line, but will turn into a surface, and the halves will no longer remain halves, but will be seen to be unequal. The geometer gets his first crude notion of a line and of bisection in just such intuitive experiences as I have The BerJceleian Doctrifie of Sj)ace 191 mentioned. But he does not rest in the intuition ; he turns it into a conception. The geometrical line he conceives as one which, under all circumstances, is to remain a line ; the geometrical point must not, when narrowly inspected, spread out into a spot; the bisected angle must remain bisected. That lines which appear to be true lines are seen on closer inspection to be narrow surfaces, and that visible points turn into small bits of territory, is matter of constant experience. The geometrical line and point must not do this under any circumstances whatever. They are abstractions, not concrete things. 7. From the above it seems to be clear that real space is neither a hopeless mystery nor the mother of unavoidable self-contradic- tions. Real space is the " form " of the real thing, and just as the real thing (in any but a relative sense of the word) is not given in any intuition, so real space (in any but a relative sense) is not given in any intuition. When, in any given instance, I pass in thought from appearance to reality — for example, when I pass from the visual appearance to the tactual thing of which it is the sign — I may regard the " form " of the latter as more real than that of the former. It is that in which the mind rests for the time being. But, as we have seen, any such thing may, in its turn, become appearance in rela- tion to a reality more ultimate ; and we recognize that, however far we may carry our investigations, there is no reason to believe that we shall meet with an absolute limit. Every reality in which we may rest at any time is, thus, a relative reality, and its space is relatively real. The absolute object and its absolute space are not an object (intuitive) and a space (the "form" of an intuition), but rather an indefinite series of substitutions gathered up and hypostatized into an individual. It is to this absolute object and its absolute space that the mathematical conceptions apply in all their rigor. They apply to these without self-contradiction, because we are here not dealing with an individual experience at all. And it should be noted that, just as we do not think of the several appearances as so many different objects, but call them manifold appearances of the one object; so we do not regard the "form" of each appearance, the space it occupies, as a distinct and separate space. When we walk toward the tree which we see at a distance, we recognize that we are conscious of a succession of appearances, and 192 The External World a little attention to them reveals the fact that they differ from each other both in '' matter " and in " form " ; in other words, the patch of color of which we are conscious undergoes both qualitative and quantitative changes. Yet we maintain that we have been look- ing all along at the one tree, and we regard that one tree as occupying one real space, which does not grow larger, but remains always the same. This means that both " matter " and " form " in the successive appearances have been reduced to the rank of mere signs of a something beyond them. So much for the Berkeleian doctrine. As it makes any par- ticular finite line in consciousness to consist of a limited number of simple parts, it is not open to the objection that it makes motion along such a line a wholly inconceivable thing. It does not force upon a moving point the absurd task of exhausting an endless series. The descending series discussed in the last paper results after a limited number of terms in the simple, and there the series is broken, for the simple does not consist of parts. In all this there is, at least, no contradiction. In an earlier work I have discussed the objections commonly brought against it, and at the risk of a little repetition I shall quote what I have there said : ^ — " It may be argued, first, as it often is argued, that it is impos- sible to conceive of any part of a line as not itself extended and having parts. It may be admitted that the small parts arrived at do not seem to have part out of part, that these sub-parts are not observed in them ; but still it is said that one who thinks about them cannot but think of them as really having such parts. I ask one who puts forward this objection to look into his own mind and see whether he does not mean by "thinking about them," bringing them in imagination nearer to the eye, or by some means substituting for them what can be seen to have part out of part. That one can do this no one would think of denying, but this does not prove the original parts to be extended. " It may be objected, again, that extension can never be built up out of the non-extended — that if one element of a given kind has, taken alone, no extension at all, two or more such elements together cannot have any extension either. I answer that a straight line has no angularity at all, and yet two straight lines may obviously make an angle ; that one man is not in the least a crowd, but that one hundred men may be ; that no single tree 1 '* On Sameness and Identity," pp. 150-152. The Berkeleian Doctrine of Space 193 is a forest, but that many trees together do make a forest ; that a uniform expanse of color is in no sense a variegated surface, but that several such together do make a variegated surface. It may be that extension is simply the name we give to several simple sense-elements of a particular kind taken together. One cannot say offhand that it is not. " Should one object, finally, that, if a given line in conscious- ness be composed of a limited number of indivisible elements of sensation, consciousness ought to distinguish these single elements and testify as to their number ; I answer that what is in conscious- ness is not necessarily in a clear analytical consciousness, nor well distinguished from other elements. For example, I am at present conscious of a stream of sensations which I connect with the hand that holds my pen. The single elements in this complex I cannot distinguish from each other, nor can I give their number. It does not follow that I am to assume the number to be infinite. Much less should I be impelled to make this assumption, if it necessitated my accepting as true what I see to be flatly self-contradictory, as in the case under discussion. It was because of this vagueness and lack of discrimination in the testimony of consciousness that I said, some distance back, that consciousness seems to testify that any finite line in it is composed of simple parts. If the testimony were quite clear, the matter would be settled at once. As it is not quite clear, the matter has to be settled on a deductive basis. The most reasonable solution appears to be the Berkeleian." Surely the Berkeleian doctrine is preferable to the Kantian, and should replace it. But it is desirable not to overlook the fact that the latter doctrine emphasizes a very important truth — it insists strenuously upon the validity of the application of mathematical reasonings to phenomena. In this it is wholly in the right, for here it is recognizing the system of relations which obtains within our experience as a whole. Its only error — that is, its only funda- mental error — lies in supposing that in dealing with any single intuition it is dealing with " real " space and " real " things. If the Berkeleian will admit that " real " space is infinitely divisible (as it may be), and if the Kantian will admit that " real " space is not given in any intuition (as it certainly is not), there need be no quarrel between them. We shall now turn our attention to the problem of the nature of time. CHAPTER XIII OF TIME The seeming self-contradictions which have so often raised their menacing heads in the pathway of the philosopher who has had the temerity to discuss the nature of space, are reinforced by an ally of peculiarly truculent aspect, when it is a question, not of space, but of time. When we occupy ourselves with the infinity and infinite divisibility of time, we meet the same problems that con- front us when we consider the infinity and infinite divisibility of space. But when we think of time as consisting of parts which are not simultaneous but successive, as made up of past, present, and future, the very ground on which we stand seems to sink beneath us and to leave us suspended in the void. We are dis- cussing time, as though we meant something by the word ; and yet, has the word really a meaning ? Can there be such a thing as a consciousness of time ? The problem is not a new one. It has been stated with such admirable lucidity by Augustine, that I can- not do better than to refer to certain passages in the " Confessions " : " What, then, is time ? If no one asks me, I know ; if I try to explain it to one who asks, I do not know ; yet I say with con- fidence that I know. But if nothing passed away, there would be no past time ; if nothing were to come, there would be no future time ; if nothing were, there would be no present time. Yet those two times, past and future, how can they be, when the past is not now, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present, and did not pass over into the past, it would not be time but eternity." ^ Yet, says Augustine, we talk of a long time and a short time, though only in dealing with time past or future. But how can that which 18 not be long or short? We cannot, then, say of the past or the future, is long ; but we must say of the one, was long, and of the other will be long. While present, the past had exist- 1 Book XI, Chapters 14 and 15. 194 Of Time 195 ence, and so might have been long. But no ! the past did not then exist ; it was the present alone that existed. The present is the only existent, and, hence, if anything can be long, it must be the present. We are, then, absolutely shut up to present time. Can this be long? We speak of the present century, year, month, or day, but evidently in a loose sense of the word "present." "Even a single hour passes in fleeting moments; as much of it as has taken flight is past, what remains is future. If we can comprehend any time that is divisible into no parts at all, or per- haps into the minutest parts of moments, this alone let us call present ; yet this speeds so hurriedly from the future to the past that it does not endure even for a little space. If it has duration, it is divided into a past and a future; but the present has no duration. "Where, then, is the time that we may call long? Is it future? We do not say of the future: it ^s long; for as yet there exists nothing to be long. We say: it will he long. But when ? If while yet future, it will not be long, for nothing will yet exist to be long. And if it will be long, when, from a future as yet non-existent, it has become a present, and has begun to be, that it may be something that is long ; then present time cries out in the words of the preceding paragraph that it cannot be long." So much for the unreasonable nature of time as consisting of past, present, and future. The pass really seems to be rather a bad one. Past time is not now, future time is not yet, and present time has no duration. We are reduced to a limiting point be- tween two non-existents, and all our apparatus of years, months, days, hours — the quart-pots and pint-pots which we have pre- pared to measure our commodity — must, it appears, remain empty for lack of something to fill them. From the persecutions of such metaphj^sical reflections there remains, of course, the refuge of common-sense fact : " Yet, Lord, we do perceive periods of time, and compare them with one another, and call some longer, others shorter." ^ "What then, is time ? if no one asks me, I know ; if I try to explain it to one who asks, I do not know; yet, I say with confidence that I know." The position is well taken, but it is clear that, when 1 Op. cit, Chapter 16. 196 The External World one rests in this, the flight is from bad metaphysics to no meta- physics at all, from an unlucky attempt at analysis to a contented acceptance of unanalj-zed experience. It is thus that the plain man rejects with disgust attempted proofs of the non-existence of an external world, or turns a deaf ear to the plausibilities of the solipsist. He does not see what is wrong, but he feels blindly that something must be wrong, and he elects to follow his instinctive feeling. A reflective man cannot, however, contentedly abandon all metaphysical analysis. It is not enough to feel sure that we are somehow conscious of time as past, present, and future, notwith- standing the fact that the past and future are not, and the present is the only real existent. The question inevitably arises : What does all this mean ? and the question presses insistently for an answer. An answer that is either too vague to convey any defi- nite meaning, or too inconsistent to command the respect of the logician, is no answer at all. It should be rejected in the interests of a new investigation, whatever the array of authorities that may be drawn up behind it. Augustine is too much of a philosopher to be content with a mere appeal to common sense. He tries seriously to meet the difficulty that stares him in the face. But the solution which he offers us consists in simply transferring the problem from the field of metaphysics to that of psychology. In the mind we find expectation, apprehension of the present, and memory. It is memory and expectation that we measure, and not time. Future time is not long, for it as yet is not ; but a '' long future " is " a long expectation of the future." Nor is past time long, for it is not ; but a long past is " a long memory of the past." For example, Augustine is about to repeat a Psalm that he knows. Before he begins, his expectation extends over the Avhole. A little later, a portion of the Psalm is *' extended along " his memory. Finally, all the expectation is exhausted, and memory covers the complete field. Through the apprehension of the present, expectation passes over into memory, and memory and expectation can be measured, for they are not non-existent as are past and future. Thus we do not, strictly speaking, meas- ure time, but we do measure memory and expectation, so that what we call measures of time are not without their significance.^ 1 Op. cit., Chapters 27, 28. Of Time 197 This strikes one as rather ingenious, but it is not difficult to see that the problem is made no whit easier of solution by being transplanted to a new field. Expectation gives place to memory, as the future runs over into the past — the one diminishes, the other grows. But can changes take place in an indivisible instant? Are not at least two instants essential to change of any sort? Can the two instants exist simultaneously? If not, then, while the one is, the other is not ; and we can at no time be conscious of succession or change, for we can only be conscious of what is exist- ent. We may have, then, at a given instant, what I may call a " variegated " consciousness, but it can hardly be a consciousness of past, present, and future, for past and future do not mean to us merely such and such elements in the consciousness of the present moment. The past means that which haB been present. But when? At the present moment? No, at some past moment. But what is a past moment? Can we be conscious of it in the present, the only existent? It is clear that Augustine seems to himself to have solved his problem merely because he has carried it into a somewhat obscure region in which it no longer stands out as a problem. He unconsciously gathers up the past into memory, and the future into expectation, and makes both in a sense present, without letting them lose quite all their significance as past and future. Obscurity is a great reconciler of contradictions, and Augustine, like many another philosopher, believes that he has seen most clearly where the field of vision has been most faintly illuminated. Thus Augustine has left the problem as he found it. How can we be conscious of time as past, present, and future ? Can we be conscious of what does not exist? Can the consciousness of a punctual present be called a consciousness of time ? Surely the problem cries out for an answer. That a satisfactory answer can be found, and that we are not forced to accept as insoluble any of the antinomies that have been supposed to arise out of the nature of time, I think is reasonably clear. In treating of time I shall not be forced to enter so fully into detail as I should, had I not already discussed the nature of space. I shall first briefly criticise the Kantian doctrine ; I shall then give in outline the opposing doctrine, which I have called the Berkeleian; finally, I shall try to answer the objections which may be urged against the latter, discussing, among other 198 The External World things, the problem upon which I have dwelt in the pages pre- ceding. The Kantian doctrine of time as a "necessary form" of intui- tion is open to the same objections as the Kantian doctrine of space. It is palpably absurd to say that infinite time is given in an original intuition,^ and it is only by playing upon the ambiguity of that word that the statement can be given the least plausibility. We are no more intuitively conscious of infinite time than we are of infinite space. The pretended proof that the assumption of the infinity of time is a necessity of thought, is the identical quibble which is used to prove space necessarily infinite ; we cannot, it is said, conceive a time before which there was no time.^ This means, of course, that we cannot conceive a time in the time before which there ivas no time. Manifestly we cannot, just as we cannot con- ceive a number the number before which was not a number; but it is foolish to attempt a foolish task, and foolish to find a profound significance in the failure to accomplish it. And the argument that the world must have existed through infinite past time because void time is not enough of a thing to limit the world's existence, is the creation of information out of nothing already criticised in the case of space. When we turn from the consideration of time as infinitel}^ extended to that of time as infinitely divisible, we do not find the Kantian doctrine more satisfactory. The difficulties met with in discussing the doctrine of space, all present themselves once more. Are we directly conscious of time as infinitely divisible? Does a period of ten seconds seem to us to be composed of an endless number of lesser divisions of time ? Do we perceive the succession of these constituent parts of the whole? And if not, what does it mean to say that the infinite divisibility of time is matter of intuition ? Surely the word covers some ambiguity. Furthermore, if time is infinitely divisible in such a sense that those ten seconds, of which I am conscious as they pass, are infinitely divisible into lesser divisions of time, how is it con- ceivable that any division of time whatever should come to an end? 1 "Critique of Pure Keason," Transcendental TF^sthetic ; Metaphysical Expo- sition of the Conception of Time. 2 Hamilton, " Metaph.," XXXVIII ; Spencer, "First Principles," Chapter III. Of Time 199 We have seen that Kant passes very lightly over this diffi- culty: "I cannot represent to myself any line, however small, without drawing it in thought, i.e. from a point generating all its parts successively, and thus alone producing the intuition. So it is also in the case of every, even the smallest, portion of time. In it I represent to myself only the successive progress from moment to moment, and this, by the addition of all the bits of time, finally begets a determinate quantity of time." That maddening " suc- cessive progress from moment to moment " ! How is it accom- plished? It seems so easy; and yet, to the Kantian, it is so hopelessly impossible. Has a moment parts ? Yes, it is a " bit of time " (^Zeittheil)^ and must not only contain parts, but even an infinite number of parts — " all phenomena are intuited as aggregates, as consisting of a multiplicity of previously given parts" — so that we cannot conceive any fraction of a moment which is not as much of a problem as the moment itself, or, for that matter, as a year or a century. How, then, does time pass ? By the successive addition of moments ? As well say, by the suc- cessive addition of centuries. In giving such an answer one has said nothing at all. No self-respecting Kantian can represent to himself "the successive progress from moment to moment," for the Kantian moment, which can only be completed by the suc- cessive addition of an endless number of parts, will never come to an end. " But," says the Kantian, " it does come to an end, and there is a successive progress from moment to moment." This can only mean that no moment is a Kantian moment. The infer- ence is unavoidable. I have said that, in writing the above description of our method of begetting a determinate quantity of time, Kant evidently for- got for the moment that he was a Kantian. ^ That he was capable of this lapse is made very clear by another passage in the " Critique." He writes: "If we leave out of consideration the succession of many sensations, apprehension through mere sensation fills but one moment. As something in the phenomenon the apprehension of which is not a successive synthesis proceeding from parts to the whole presentation, it has, hence, no extensive magnitude ; thus the absence of sensation in this moment would present it as empty, and, therefore, as = 0." ^ 1 See the preceding chapter. 2 " Critique of Pure Keason," Anticipations of Perception. 200 The External World The moment of which Kant is speaking I am tempted to call a Berkeleian moment. It has no parts ; it is not extended : yet it is not a mere nonentity, notwithstanding the fact that, deprived of its " filling," it is equated with zero. It is given in intuition ; it is a unit, not an aggregate ; and it may be " filled." This differ- entiates it from the mathematical point, which is conceived to be the limit of two spaces, and itself incapable of receiving any " fill- ing " whatever. A moment filled with sensation is not the theo- retical limit of two times — a mere mathematical point in the line which represents time. It is an element in our intuitive experi- ence of duration ; and is the ultimate element. Given such ele- ments in intuition, and the addition of them is not an inconceivable thing. But, then, there is no room for such in the Kantian philos- ophy. Our philosopher has lapsed into a truth which strict con- sistency would have denied him. Thus the Kantian doctrine of a time given in intuition as infinite in extent and infinitely divisible is plainly untenable. It <;annot be set forth in clear and simple language, stripped of verbal ambiguities, without revealing this fact. Since the doctrine runs out into palpable self-contradictions, we may be sure that no opposing doctrine can be more unsatisfactory. Hence, if we are wise, we will abandon the Kantian position without reluctance ; setting out upon our voyage of discovery, not as unwilling exiles, facing the unknown with foreboding, but as cheerful emigrants, full of confidence that the extremest rigors of the possible future cannot exceed the hardships experienced in the past. For, indeed, than the Kantian doctrine, taken as it stands, it is quite evident that nothing can be worse. Can anything be more contrary to experienced fact than the statement that infinite space and infinite time are immediately given in intuition ? Are a round square, a triangular parallelogram, dry moisture or wooden iron, more repel- lent to the intelligence than an endless series that ends ? than the moving point on the Kantian line ? than the flight of Kantian moments ? But here, as in the case of space, it is well to remember that the error in the Kantian doctrine can readily be eliminated by emphasizing an obvious distinction — the distinction between the crude intuition of duration given in a single experience, and the conceptual time which is built up out of such materials. The dis- tinction is that between appearance and reality^ and it is quite as li Of Time 201 important to lay stress upon it when treating of time, as it is when treating of space. If the Kantian will but bear in mind that the time which he may consider as infinitely divisible — the time of the movement of the mathematical point over the mathematical line — is " real " time, and something quite different from the duration experienced in any intuition, he may lay the utmost emphasis upon the validity of the application of mathematics to phenomena, without involving himself in inconsistencies. The doctrine which I shall take the liberty of calling the Berkeleian does take cognizance of this distinction, and avoids the pitfalls into which those who fail to recognize it are precipitated. It does not require us to believe any such startling statement as that we are immediately conscious of infinite space and infinite time, when we know very well that even the distance to the neigh- boring town, and the past three years of our lives, can be repre- sented in our consciousness only by means of the symbol, a skeleton representative never to be confounded with that for which it stands. It does not try to persuade us that the ten seconds during which we are listening to the tick of the clock are given in intuition as composed of an infinite number of lesser bits of time, and that these come to an end notwithstanding the fact that they are end- less. It recognizes the distinction between appearance and reality ; and emphasizes the truth that our experiences fall into a system, that any single experience gains its significance from its place in that system, and that, when we speak of the " real " in any but a relative sense, we are not resting in a single intuition as such, but are thinking of something more. The doctrine may be set forth as follows : — 1. As there is a crude experience of extension which is not to be confounded with "real" space, but furnishes its "raw mate- rial," so there is a crude intuition of duration which is the founda- tion of our notion of "real" time. We may, if we please, call this a " form " of our intuition ; it is an element in our experience. 2. We are, thus, intuitively conscious of time past, present, and future. 3. The time of which we are thus intuitively conscious is not infinite. We mean something, it is true, when we speak of infi- nite time, just as we mean something when we speak of an infinite universe; but in neither case are we intuitively conscious of the infinity of that whereof we speak. 202 The External World 4. Nor is the time given in a single intuition composed of an infinite number of bits of time. We are not directly conscious of these subdivisions, and it is not reasonable to infer their existence. It is as absurd to assume it as it is to assume that a particular finite line, given in a single intuitive experience, is composed of an endless number of bits of line. 5. But it is of the utmost importance to remember that no such single experience of duration constitutes what we mean by " real " time. " Real " time, the time with which science deals, is the time occupied by the changes in "real" things, and it is, of course, as remote from our immediate intuitive experience as are the "real" things themselves. Even in common life, although we never think of raising the question of what is contained in pure intuition and what is only symbolically known, we distinguish between " real " time and apparent ; and we say that half an hour spent in listening to a prosy sermon seems long, just as we say that the moon seen at the horizon seems large. The " real " size of the moon, and the "real" half-hour are standards arrived at only after the comparison with each other of a vast number of individual experiences, and an observation of the relations to each other into which these fall. It is this "real" time, the time occupied by the change in " real " things, that we may conceive as infinitely divisible. Just as the space occupied by an atom is something for science, although it lies far beyond the limits of the most discriminating sense-per- ception, so the time occupied by the vibration of an atom may be something for science, a something to be expressed by figures, a duration that may be halved or doubled, that may stand in all sorts of exact relations to the durations of which consciousness takes cognizance, yet it is not a something of which we may be directly conscious as duration. In the complex of experiences which is for us the real world, the symbol which stands for such periods of time is not without its significance. Indeed, the real world in time would be a thing very imperfectly ordered and explained, were processes in it not assumed to be divisible after this fashion. There is a close parallel between our cognition of spaces and of times. " Real " space and " real " time are something quite distinct from the crude extension and duration given in intuition. One may perfectly well hold them to be infinitely divisible, and Of Time 203 yet maintain that the recognition of part out of part in any intui- tion can proceed only up to a given point, whether we are concerned with spatial or with temporal extension. It is only necessary to remember that the particular intuition with which one may be dealing is not, in itself, infinitely divisible, but that this experience may be made to stand as representative of a multi- tude of others. The moment given in intuition, the moment of which Kant has spoken as " filled " with sensation, may thus be converted into the " real " moment, which must never turn out to be a " real " time, however short, but must remain an ideal limit between two times. This has its parallel in the mathematical point. To the above doctrine touching the nature of " crude " and " real " time, there may be raised several objections : — 1. It may be argued that it is impossible to conceive of a part of time that is not itself time, i.e. a something composed of parts. It may be admitted that, when we see a flash of lightning, we are conscious only of a blinding streak upon a background of leaden sky, and we are not conscious of the " generation " of the parts of this wonder "from a point." As the direction of the bolt remains problematic, and it is impossible to distinguish between beginning and end, it is clear that the production of the path cannot be per- ceived to occupy time. Still, it may be insisted, whether the phe- nomenon 8eem to occupy time or not, one cannot think of it as not occupying time. It will be seen that this objection has already been answered in discussing space. Thinhing about the experi- ence means nothing more nor less than passing from appearance to reality, from the intuition to that for which it stands. Of course, one must think of the "real" time represented by an intuited moment as extended and divisible, but that has nothing to do with the point in dispute. 2. It may be argued, again, that one can never manufacture time by simply putting together elements each of which has no duration at all — by the addition of the mere moments that Kant inconsistently recognized. This objection, too, has virtually been answered. I may remark, in passing, that is not an objection over which it is prudent for the Kantian to linger. For if a moment itself has duration, he cannot compass, as we have seen, his " suc- cessive progress from moment to moment " ; and if it has no dura- tion, he cannot by such progress hope to "beget " time. In either case he is reduced to " marking time " on the same spot. But the 204 The External World fact is, that it is pure dogmatism to assert that moments without parts cannot, when added together, constitute time. The impulse to this error — a very natural one — lies in confusing moments given in intuition with the -'real " moments which we conceive as mere limits to periods of time, and which have their parallel, not in the minimum sensibile, but in the mathematical point. 3. In the third place, one may object that, if the duration of which we are conscious in a single intuition be not infinitely divis- ible, but divisible only into a finite number of ultimate elements, consciousness ousrht to be able to distinoruish these elements and give some account of their number. This third objection may be answered as I have answered the similar objection brought against the Berkeleian doctrine of space. What is in consciousness is not necessarily in a clear analytical consciousness, nor well distin- guished from other mental elements. Were it possible, with the aid of direct introspection, to describe offhand all that is to be found in consciousness, the psychologist and the epistemologist would have an easy task. When we bear in mind, moreover, that our crude intuitive experiences of duration hold much the same relation to "real" time that our \-isual signs of distance and magnitude hold to " real " space, we need not find it surprising that our immediate intuition of duration is rather a thing to be guessed at than a thing revealed to clear vision. Time intuited is a sign of time thought, and the mind does not rest in signs, but hurries on to something beyond. 4. Finally we come to a more serious objection. How can time — even *• crude" time — be given in intuition, when time is composed of moments no one of which can alone constitute time, and no two of which can exist simultaneously ? This is the diffi- culty so acutely urged by Augustine. The past is not now; the future is not yet ; the present is a mere point, and not enough, in itself, to constitute time. How can we, then, be conscious of time at all ? Can we be conscious of what is not now, or of what is not yet? The single present moment which sums up our actual consciousness can give us no inkling of duration. If we admit that the past erists. it is not yet past^ and if we maintain that it does not exists it surely, as non-existent, is incapahle of being given with the present moment in a single intuition. How can there be, under the circumstances, even the crudest intuition of duration? It is safe to assume that there must be some way of escape Of Time 205 from this difficulty, for we surely mean something by past and future. We are conscious of duration in time as certainly as we are conscious of extension in space. The question before us is only one of analysis, and though our attempts at analysis may seem to lead us into strange paths, we need not despair of the ultimate solution of the problem. We have seen that other anti- nomies have arisen, not out of the very nature of things, but out of the infirmities of philosophers, and it is reasonable to believe that such must be the case here also. Two things appear indubitable : first, that we really mean some- thing when we speak of periods of time ; and second, that we could not represent these even symbolically, were not something given in intuition that could furnish a content for our symbol. Something we must have to start with, or the symbol is a word in an unknown tongue ; it means nothing. A short line may represent a long one, for both have extension ; but a mathematical point can- not represent a line as extended. Even so, if no duration is given in any intuition, what is in mind when we say a month, a year, a century, cannot be duration. It would be quite impossible to represent symbolically the changes in a " real " world were there no immediate consciousness of change. The psychologists have described with some minuteness the rise in a consciousness of the notion of time. A sensation is present ; it fades gradually into a faint image of itself : an idea is present ; it develops the life and vigor of a sensation. In such experiences we have the discrimination of memory and expecta- tion from actual sensation, and from such beginnings grows the consciousness of a world of things in time. With the analysis of the psychologists we can have no quarrel ; but it is of much im- portance to emphasize the truth pointed out earlier in this paper, namely, that no instantaneous photograph of a consciousness, whatever the elements it may contain, can yield the intuition of duration. This cannot consist in the mere presence in conscious- ness at any given instant of sensation and ideas. The past is not merely a mass of consciousness-elements fainter than sen- sations ; it is what has been sensation. Consciousness of the past as past implies consciousness of change, and consciousness of change cannot be given in an indivisible instant. The span of consciousness, if I may so speak, must include more than an in- stant, or there can be no consciousness of time. 206 The External World But how can the span of consciousness be thus extended? Is it possible for a past and a future, however brief, which are, nevertheless, past and future, and hence do 7iot esnst, to form part of one intuition with present sensation ? Can the non- existent be given in intuition? What seems the most natural answer to this question is the ancient one. Past and future do not exist, but they are present through their representative — the thought of them is present. It is plain from what has been said above, that this answer cannot be regarded as satisfactory. Nothing can truly symbolize change but change, nothing duration but duration. There can be no thought of time to a creature to whom no intuition of time is possible. If a consciousness embraces only the present, not the conventional present of common discourse — this day, this week, this year — but the timeless present of a moment, it can contain no possible com- plex of elements that can truly be called the thought of the past or the future. A consciousness that is to think time must embrace time, must cover more than a single instant. And the question thrusts itself upon one : Must not a state of consciousness, in order to do this, be an absurd compound of existent and non-existent elements? This sounds like nonsense. With all due respect to some famous thinkers who have attacked the problem before, I venture to maintain that it is not insoluble, and at the same time, that its solution does not necessitate a re- course to those mystical speculations that solve one problem by sinking it in another. The difficulty is, I think, of our own making. When we say : How can you be conscious of the past and future which do not exist ? Can one be conscious of the non- existent? what we really mean is: How can you, at the present instant, be conscious of the past and future, which, at this present instant, do not exist? Can one, at this moment, be conscious of what does not exist at this moment? To the question, as thus stated, there can evidently be but one answer. The past can certainly not be given in the present moment, or it would not be past. The present moment can contain only the present. But it should be observed that the question simply assumes that con- sciousness is limited to a single instant, and that the present one. If this position be denied, its force is quite lost. I can be conscious of a past and future, which do not now exist, if the span of my consciousness covers more than a "now." The past and the future Of Time 207 are non-existent, /rom the point of view of the present; but then the present must be regarded as non-existent from the point of view of past or future. To speak of the intuitive consciousness of dura- tion as '* a compound of existent and non-existent elements " is unreasonable, because the words suggest that the whole conscious- ness ought to be now existent — which is impossible, if it is to be consciousness of duration — and lead to the conclusion that, since it cannot all be now existent, it must be a compound of something and nothing, an absurdity over which you may weep or make merry according to your humor. It will be observed that in the foregoing I have had no recourse to the deus ex machina of a timeless self, timelessly present at all times, and collecting the fleeting moments upon the impalpable thread of its own "immovable activity." How can I, asked Augustine, be conscious of a past that does not exist ? Can I be conscious of the non-existent? The difficulty that presented itself to his mind lay in the fact that the very notion of the conscious- ness of duration seemed to be self-contradictory. As we have seen, there is a hidden pitfall in his question, and when this is discovered, it can be avoided. It is only necessary to take one's stand upon the fact that we really are conscious of duration, and to keep clearly in view what this implies. When we do this we find that there is no absurdity in the notion of a consciousness of duration. The apparent contradiction has arisen from the fact that such a consciousness has been affirmed and denied in one breath. It is, thus, a sufficient answer to the Augustinian problem to show that there is nothing inconceivable in the fact of a conscious- ness of duration. In the foregoing, I have simply accepted the fact as a fact, and have made no effort to explain how it is possible that there can be such a consciousness. This latter task does not appear to me to fall within the legitimate province of explanation. We "explain " certain experiences by referring them to others, as we determine " where " a thing is by ascertaining its relations to other things in space ; but to ask how it happens that there is a consciousness at all, or that it is constituted as it is, seems about as sensible as to ask : Where is all space ? It is well to recog- nize that a " how " and a " where '* may be so used as to lose all significance. Nevertheless, certain philosophers have thought it necessary, 208 The External World not merely to accept the fact of a consciousness of duration, but to go further and to explain how such a consciousness is made possible. An incomprehensible something was (can I sayt^^asf) timelessly present (siV) with the past, and is (can I say is ?) time- lessly present (&•/iU, Art. 16. * Ibid., Art. 42. * See the preceding chapter. The Automaton Theory: Its Genesis 289 the machine that it is supposed to control. Yet Descartes had maintained that the essence of matter is extension and the essence of the soul is thought. He had by his definitions so separated the two that it became inconceivable that they should come together in such a way as to form one whole. The difficulty so impressed his successors that they were impelled to deny the direct interaction of soul and body. How can that which is not body either push or be pushed ? It remained to account for the apparent interaction of soul and body in some other way, and several ways were sug- gested. The Occasionalist maintained that, no direct interaction being possible, on occasion of this or that volition God calls forth the appropriate motion in matter; and in adopting this doctrine he took refuge in what Spinoza calls " the asylum of ignorance." The advocate of Predetermined Harmony held that mind and body are related as are two clocks, whose wheels revolve independently, but which have been so adjusted that their motions exactly correspond. Both of these suggestions were of the sort that might be expected to appeal more forcibly to the mediaeval mind than to the modern mind ; but the same cannot be said of the solution of the problem propounded by Spinoza, that strange genius who found it possible to combine a mediaeval metaphysic with a clear appre- ciation of the significance of the new mechanical philosophy. He thinks that we may comprehend clearly how it is that the body cannot determine the mind to think, nor the mind determine the body to motion and rest, if we will but consider that the mind and the body are one and the same thing viewed under two attributes, i.e. viewed, in the one case, under the attribute thought, and, in the other, under the attribute extension. Body may determine changes in body, and thought may determine changes in thought, but a thing cannot determine itself, and mind and body are one and the same thing. There is not interaction, but there is parallelism, and " the order of the things done and suffered by our body is by nature the same as the order of the actions and passions of the mind." 1 " These arguments," he continues, " leave no room for doubt, but nevertheless I scarcely think I can induce men to weigh them with an unprejudiced mind, unless I support the doctrine by an 1 " Ethics," III, 2, scholium. 290 Mind and Matter appeal to experience, so firmly are men persuaded that the body is set in motion and is brought to rest solely at the mind's good pleas- ure, and performs a multitude of actions which depend only on the mind's choice and ability to think. For as yet no one has determined of what the body is capable ; in other words, experience has as yet taught no one what the body can do according to the laws of nature, considered merely as corporeal nature, and what it cannot do unless it be determined by the mind. For no one has as yet a sufficiently accurate knowledge of the structure of the body to be able to explain all its functions ; to say nothing of the fact that we observe in brutes many actions that far surpass human sagacity, and that somnambulists do a great many things while asleep that they would not dare to do when awake ; which suffi- ciently proves that the body, in accordance with the laws of its own nature solely, can do much that its mind wonders at. " Again, no one knows how or by what means the mind moves the body, nor how many degrees of motion it can impart to the body, and how swiftly it can move it. Hence it follows that when men say that this or that action of the body has its source in the mind, which controls the body, they do not know what they are saying, and merely confess in high-sounding words that they are ignorant of the true cause of that action and do not wonder at it. " They will object that, whether they do or do not know by what means the mind moves the body, yet they know by experi- ence that if the human mind were not capable of thinking, the body would be motionless. Furthermore, that they know by ex- perience that it is within the power of the mind alone to speak or to remain silent, and to do many other things which, conse- quently, they believe to depend upon the mind's decree. " But, as regards the first point, I ask those who urge this objection, whether experience does not also show that if the body remains motionless, the mind is incapable of thinking ? For when the body comes to rest in sleep, the mind slumbers with it, and has not the power of thinking it has when awake. Again, I think every one knows by experience that the mind is not always equally capable of thinking about the same object ; but, according as the body is the better adapted to having the image of this or that object excited in it, the mind is the more capable of contemplat- ing this or that object. It will be objected that one cannot, from tlie laws of nature, when nature is regarded merely as corporeal, The Automaton Theory: Its Genesis 291 deduce the causes of buildings, paintings, and things of this sort, which are due solely to human skill, nor could the human body, unless it were determined and guided by the mind, build a temple. But I have already shown that those who reason thus do not know what the body can do, or what can be deduced from a mere contemplation of its nature, and that they do know by experience that a great many things take place merely according to the laws of nature that they never would have believed could take place except under the direction of the mind. Such are the acts per- formed by somnambulists during sleep — acts which they them- selves wonder at when awake. I would, moreover, call attention to the structure of the human body, which vastly surpasses in ingenuity anything constructed by human skill, to say nothing of the truth, proved above, that an infinity of things must follow from nature considered under any attribute whatever. "x\nd as regards the second point, surely the condition of human affairs would be much more satisfactory if it were as much within man's power to be silent as to speak. But experience gives sufficient and more than sufficient proof of the fact that there is nothing less under a man's control than his tongue, nor is there anything of which a man is less capable than of restraining his impulses. This is the reason that most persons believe that we are free only in doing those things to which we are impelled by slight desires, for the impulse to do such things can be easily checked by the memory of some other thing of which we often think; but that we are by no means free in doing those things to which we are impelled by strong emotion, which cannot be checked by the memory of some other thing. But had they not had expe- rience of the fact that we do many things which we afterward regret, and that we often, when we are harassed by conflicting emotions, see the better and follow the worse, nothing would pre- vent them from believing that we are always free in our actions. Thus the infant believes that it desires milk of its own free will ; the angry child that it is free in seeking revenge ; and the timid that it is free in taking to flight. Again, a drunken man believes that he says of his own free will things he afterward, when sober, wishes he had left unsaid ; so also an insane man, a garrulous ■woman, a child, and very many others of the sort believe they speak of their own free will, while, nevertheless, they are unable to control their impulse to talk. Thus experience itself shows, 292 Mind and Matter no less clearly than reason, that men think themselves free only because they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes which determine them. It shows, moreover, that the mind's decisions are nothing but its impulses, which vary with the vary- ing condition of the body. For every one regulates his actions as his emotions dictate ; and those who are harassed by conflicting emotions do not know what they want; while those who are not controlled by any emotion are driven hither and thither by the slightest motive. All this certainly shows clearly that the mind's decision, as well as its impulse and the determining of the body, all are by nature simultaneous, or rather all are one and the same thing, which, when it is considered under and expressed by the attribute thought, we call a decision, and when it is considered under the attribute extension, and deduced from the laws of motion and rest, we call a determining." The reader will see that, in passing from Descartes to Spinoza we make a long step in advance. By an ingenious suggestion, a place among existing things seems to be found for the human mind without turning it into a quasi-material something and inter- jecting it as a stop-gap between two motions in matter. Why the course of ideas should run parallel with the series of changes which take place in the body seems, at first blush, at least, to be explained by the fact that the ideas are but another side, so to speak, of such changes. And to one who has taken this step it is quite possible to accept all that Descartes says of the mechanism of the body and yet repudiate the Cartesian doctrine, shocking to the mind of the natural man, that the brutes are mere machines without conscious- ness. No man whose mind has not been perverted by philosophic theory can believe that his dog does not think and feel, if only in a humble way. If all the changes in the human body can be explained by a reference to matter in motion alone, and, neverthe- less, a man can be conscious, it follows that automatism does not necessarily imply unconsciousness. Of course, the distribution of minds in nature remains a question to be investigated, and one may well ask oneself where one may infer mind and where one may not. Spinoza himself regarded all nature as animated,^ and we may or may not elect to follow him in this, even if we accept his doctrine of parallelism in a general way. 1 "Ethics," II, 13, scholium. The Automaton Theory: Its Genesis 293 The problem of the distribution of minds, and that of the free- dom of the will touched upon in the above extract, will be dis- cussed in later chapters. It is enough here to recognize that a place seems to have been made for mind which is not a place in an offensive sense of the word, — a place which can be occupied only by a material thing, — and also that a peculiar and intimate rela- tion has been established between the human mind and the human body. One must add, however, as touching this last point, that Spinoza, although he was quite familiar with the results of Des- cartes' investigations, nevertheless uniformly dwells upon the rela- tion of mind and hody^ and not upon the relation of mind and brain} The beginnings of the science of cerebral physiology do not appear to have impressed him greatly, apparently because of his doctrine of the universal distribution of mind — not the first instance in which a prepossession in favor of some philosophical theory has blinded one to the significance of scientific discoveries. I have set forth at some length the argument of Descartes and the solution offered by Spinoza of the problem he raises, because the two appear in combination in the modern doctrine of the physi- cal automaton with parallel mental states, and because one can scarcely do full justice to both aspects of that doctrine until one knows how they came to take their place in the evolution of specu- lative thought. Some things to which Descartes pinned his faith have disap- peared from modern physiological theory. The animal spirits, which ran along the nerves from the periphery of the body to the brain, and from the brain to the muscles, have been deprived of their r61e. The pineal gland has lost its preeminent distinction as the soul's seat, and has sunk into an insignificance little better than that of a pimple. The cerebral cortex has assumed a new importance, and certain parts of it have been found to be more intimately concerned in certain sensory and motor functions than other parts. An array of facts has been marshalled, pathological and experimental, which has made the whole subject of the locali- zation of consciousness (may I be permitted the phrase?) more bewildering than it seemed to be at an earlier age, when the only mystery which remained to be fathomed appeared to be that of the interaction of the soul with " the little gland in the midst of the brain." The study of the hypnotic and other allied states has 1 "Ethics," II, passm. 294 Mind and Matter resulted in the emergence of the problem of conceiving of two or more mutually exclusive consciousnesses as connected with the one brain. Finally, the decapitated frog, with its seemingly pur- posive actions, and experiments performed upon other mutilated animals, as well as certain pathological phenomena observed in human beings, have suggested that, although the consciousness of consciousnesses, that one which we commonly have in mind when we speak of the consciousness of this or that animal, is to be referred to the cerebral cortex, yet there may be other conscious- nesses of a more or less rudimentary sort connected with lower nervous centres in the same animal. The whole subject has become vastly more complex than it was when Descartes wrote, and yet, barring the jump at a given point from brain to mind and from mind to brain, the modern doctrine differs only in detail from the Cartesian. The science of cerebral physiology has advanced, but it still rests upon the basis laid down for it by Descartes. Of some of these differences in detail it will be necessary to speak when I come to discuss the question of the distribution of minds in nature. Meanwhile, it is well to notice that not all of those who have followed the advance of science have clearly appreciated the significance of the Spinozistic suggestion of the parallelism of mind and body. They remain semi-Cartesian in their view of the relation of mind and body. This is evidently true of those somewhat unreflective material- ists who speak of consciousness as a " secretion " or as a " function " of the brain. For them the soul has been ejected from its place in the pineal gland, but it still holds a place in the world of matter and motion under an assumed name. And the same may be said of some who are not willing to call themselves materialists, and yet slip unconsciously into a similar error. Of these I cannot cite a better example than Professor Huxley, who has made a careful study of the Cartesian doctrine, and shows himself to be in much sympathy with it. He writes ; — " But though we may see reason to disagree with Descartes' hypothesis that brutes are unconscious machines, it does not follow that he was wrong in regarding them as automata ; and the view that they are such conscious machines is that which is implicitly, or explicitly, adopted by most persons. When we speak of the actions of the lower animals being guided by instinct and not by reason, what we really mean is that, though they feel as we do, The Automaton Theory: Its Genesis 295 yet their actions are the results of their physical organization. We believe, in short, that they are machines, one part of which (the nervous system) not only sets the rest in motion, and coordinates its movements in relation v^ith changes in surrounding bodies, but is provided vi^ith special apparatus, the function of which is the calling into existence of those states of consciousness which are termed sensations, emotions, and ideas. I believe that this gen- erally accepted view is the best expression of the facts at present known. " It is experimentally demonstrable — any one who cares to run a pin into himself may perform a sufficient demonstration of the fact — that a mode of motion of the nervous system is the immedi- ate antecedent of a state of consciousness. All but the adherents of ' Occasionalism,' or of the doctrine of ' Preestablished Har- mony ' (if any such now exist), must admit that we have as much reason for regarding the mode of motion of the nervous system as the cause of the state of consciousness, as we have for regarding any event as the cause of another. How the one phenomenon causes the other we know, as much or as little, as in any other case of causation ; but we have as much right to believe that the sensa- tion is an effect of the molecular change as we have to believe that motion is an effect of impact ; and there is as much propriety in saying that the brain evolves sensation as there is in saying that an iron rod, when hammered, evolves heat. " As I have endeavored to show, we are justified in supposing that something analogous to what happens in ourselves takes place in the brutes, and that the affections of their sensory nerves give rise to molecular changes in the brain, which again give rise to or evolve the corresponding states of consciousness. Nor can there be any reasonable doubt that the emotions of brutes, and such ideas as they possess, are similarly dependent upon molecular brain changes. Each sensory impression leaves behind a record in the structure of the brain — an ' ideagenous ' molecule, so to speak, which is competent, under certain conditions, to reproduce, in a fainter condition, the state of consciousness which corresponds with that sensory impression ; and it is these * ideagenous mole- cules ' which are the physical basis of memory. " It may be assumed, then, that molecular changes in the brain are the causes of all the states of consciousness of brutes. Is there any evidence that these states of consciousness may, conversely, 296 Mhid mid Matter cause those molecular changes which give rise to muscular motion ? I see no such evidence. The frog walks, hops, swims, and goes through his gymnastic performances quite as well without con- sciousness, and consequently without volition, as with it ; and if a frog, in his natural state, possesses anything corresponding with what we call volition, there is no reason to think tliat it is any- thino- but a concomitant of the molecular chancres in the brain o o which form part of the series involved in the production of motion. " The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its work- ing, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steam whistle, which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery. Their volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes. "... It is quite true that, to the best of my judgment, the argumentation which applies to brutes holds equally good of men ; and, therefore, that all states of consciousness in us, as in them, are immediately caused by molecular changes of the brain-substance. It seems to me that in men, as in brutes, there is no proof that any state of consciousness is the cause of change in the motion of the matter of the organism. If these positions are well based, it fol- lows that our mental conditions are simply the symbols in con- sciousness of the changes which take place automatically in the organism ; and that, to take an extreme illustration, the feeling we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of that act. AVe are conscious automata, endowed with free will in the only intelligible sense of that much-abused term, — inasmuch as in many respects we are able to do as we like, — but none the less parts of the great series of causes and effects which, in unbroken continuity, composes that which is, and has been, and shall be — the sum of existence."^ It is quite clear that the man who believes the human body or the body of the brute to be '' provided with special apparatus, the function of which is the calling into existence of those states of consciousness which are termed sensations, emotions, and ideas," and, furthermore, who regards such states of consciousness as 1 On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History, "Collected Essays," N.Y., 1002, Vol. I, pp. 237-244. 1 The Automaton Theory: Its Genesis 297 " collateral products " of the body's working, makes the relation of mind and brain much the same S,s that of the saliva and the salivary gland. He is no true parallelist, and he cannot escape the just criticism which may be brought against the materialist. He may differ from the interactionist in refusing to regard con- sciousness as a cause of bodily motions ; but he makes it an effect of physical changes, and thus assigns to it a place in the chain of causes and effects which make up the life history of the physical universe. The secretion of a gland, however, is not and cannot be a mere effect. When once produced, it does not simply disappear from the universe into which it has been ushered, and leave no trace behind. And if consciousness has such a place in the material world, it ought to be possible, with the growth of science, to lay it bare to direct inspection, to capture it or the products of its decomposition, and investigate such, as one might investigate the structure of a molecule. Practical difficulties there may be in such an investigation ; but theoretical difficulties there surely can- not be. Are we not dealing with a material product? and are not all material products open to direct inspection, except when they are hidden from our eyes by reason of their excessive minuteness, or by some barrier of the sort, which it is not absurd to dream of as becoming some day no longer a barrier? The true parallelist strongly objects to any doctrine which thus obliterates, even covertly, the distinction between mind and matter. To his doctrine, in its modern form, we will now turn. It is suffi- ciently important to be treated in separate chapters. CHAPTER XIX THE AUTOMATON THEORY: PARALLELISM In describing the modern doctrine of the physical automaton with parallel psychical states, I cannot do better than to follow tliat clearest of writers, Professor W. K. Clifford, who has set it forth in detail in his lecture on " Body and Mind." ^ Professor Clifford points out that there are sciences which have to do with material things, inorganic and organic, and he thinks that, the gulf between inorganic or organic bodies having at last been firmly bridged over, we may regard ourselves as having now one united science of physics, which has to do with matter in all its forms. With this science he contrasts the science of conscious- ness, which deals with the laws of mind, and he asks whether it is not possible to construct some bridge that will firmly unite the two. That this bridge may not break down like those which philoso- phers have made, he thinks that it is necessary to observe with great care the exact difference between the two classes of facts, material and mental. "If we confuse the two things together to begin with," he writes, "if we do not recognize the great difference between them, we shall not be likely to find any explanation which will reduce them to some common term. The first thing, therefore, that we have to do is to realize as clearly as possible how profound the gulf is between the facts which we call Physi- cal facts and the facts which we call Mental facts." Tlie distinc- tion has been one which has been observed from the earliest times, for even primitive man has ascribed to other men a consciousness like his own. But primitive man has connected this consciousness with the body seen in dreams, a body not physical in the ordinary sense, and not made of ordinary matter. Such a body he has called the soul. It is difficult to think that the gross material body can be conscious, but when one has come to believe that we possess another and a different body, of the nature of which we know 1 "Lectures and Essays," London, 1879, Vol. H. 298 The Automaton Theory: Parallelism 299 little, it is natural to make it responsible for the consciousness which we cannot help attributing to other men. Thus the soul which primitive man, and those who have followed him, have attributed to each man, is, after all, a material thing in disguise. What can science put in place of this early hypothesis of our savage ancestors? In developing his thought Clifford recognizes Descartes as the great discoverer of the truth that the nervous system is that part of the body which is related directly to the mind, and he quotes approvingly the series of propositions in which Professor Huxlej^ sums up Descartes' contribution to the doctrine of mind and brain, expounding them in the light of modern thought. As far as Des- cartes' argument goes, he is in substantial agreement with it : the brain is the organ of sensation, thought, and emotion ; the move- ments of animals are due to a change in the form of the muscles, and this is brought about by a message from the brain carried along a motor nerve ; the sensations of animals are due to messages brought along sensory nerves to the brain ; messages may be transmitted from the sensory nerves, through the brain, to the motor nerves, and thus cause movement of muscle, without, or even contrary to, volition; the motion of any portion of the brain, excited by the motion of a sensory nerve, leaves behind it a readiness to be moved in the same way in that part, and anything which resusci- tates the motion gives rise to the appropriate feeling, which is the physical mechanism of memory. In all this it is only neces- sary to change a word here and there ; but to this something should be added. It is this: — We must not fail to note that, not only is some change in the matter of the brain the invariable antecedent, but some other change is the invariable concomitant of sensation, thought, and emotion. Furthermore, not only does the motion of any portion of the brain, excited by the motion of a sensory nerve, leave behind it a readi- ness to be moved in the same way in that part, but two simul- taneous disturbances set up in the brain create, in some way or other, a link between them, so that, when one of these disturb- ances is set up afterward, the other one is also set up. Again. It should be remarked that there are two ways in which a stimulus coming, let us say, to the eye can be made to move the hand. In the following diagram let E be the eye, R and B the two masses of gray matter Ij^ing at the base of 300 Mind and Matter the brain and called, respectively, the optic thalami and the cor- pora striata^ H the hand, and CO the cerebral hemispheres. It is possible for the light impinging upon the eye to send a mes- sage along the optic nerve to the optic thalami, and that message may go almost direct to the hand, so as to make the hand move ; or else the message may go by a longer route, which takes more time. If an action takes place involuntarily, without any effort of the will, the message goes from the eye to the hand along the line ERBH. But if it is necessary to deliberate about the action, to call in the exercise of the will, the message goes around the \oo^-\me^ ERQCBH', i.e. from the eye to the optic thalami, from them to the cerebrum, thence to the corpora striata, and so through the medulla to the hand.^ Finally, besides this fact of a message going from one part of the body to the brain and coming out in the motion of some other part of the body, there is another thing that is going on continu- ally, and that is this : there is a faint reproduction of some excitement which has previously existed in the cerebral hemi- spheres, and which calls up all those that have become associated with it. It is continually sending down faint messages which do not actually tell the muscles to move, but which, as it were, begin to tell them to move. If a man is in a brown study, with his eyes shut, although he apparently sees and feels nothing at all, there is a certain action going on inside his brain which is not sensation, but is like it, because it is the transmission to the cerebral hemi- spheres of faint messages which are copies of previous sensations. This continuous action of the brain depends upon the blood supply. So much for the nervous system which we have to consider in connection with the mind. What may we say touching facts of consciousness ? We may say, in the first place, that if two feel- 1 It is scarcely necessary to point out that Clifford's account of the working of the, nervous mechanism is merely diagrammatic. It is, however, suflBcient for the purpose in hand. The Automaton Theory : Parallelism 301 ings have occurred together, and one of them afterward occurs again, it is very likely that the other will be called up by it. That is to say, two states of consciousness which have taken place at the same moment produce a link between them, so that a repeti- tion of the one calls up a repetition of the other. Again, we find a certain train of facts between our sensations and our exertions. Having seen a thing, we may go through a long process of delib- eration as to what we shall do with it. On the other hand, by seeing a thing, we may quite suddenly be forced into doing some- thing without any chance of deliberation at all. Thus, if a cab comes unexpectedly around the corner of the street, we jump out of the way, without stopping to think that it is a desirable thing to get out of the way of a cab. Still again, there is the fact that even when there is no actual sensation and no actual exertion, there may be, nevertheless, a long train of facts and sensations which hang together. There may be faint reproductions of sensa- tion which are less vivid than the sensations themselves, but which form a series of pictures of sensations which pass contin- ually before my mind. And there will be faint beginnings of action, which latter are what we call judgments. Having laid this foundation for the bridge which he proposes to build between physical facts and mental, Cliiford continues as follows : ^ — " We have described two classes of facts ; let us now notice the parallelism between them. First, we have these two parallel facts, that two actions of the brain which occur together form a link between themselves, so that the one being called up the other is called up ; and two states of consciousness which occur together form a link between them, so that when one is called up the other is called up. But also we find a train of facts between the physical fact of the stimulus of light going into the eye and the physical fact of the motion of the muscles. Corresponding to a part of that train, we have found a train of facts between sensation, the mental fact which corresponds to a message arriving from the eye, and exertion, the mental fact which corresponds to the motion of the hand by a message going out along the nerves. And we have found a correspondence between the continuous action of the brain and the continuous existence of consciousness apparently independent of sensation and exertion. 1 Op. cit., pp. 50 ff. 302 Mind and Matter " But let us look at this correspondence a little more closely ; we shall find that there are one or two things which can be estab- lished with practical certainty. In the first place, it is not the whole of the physical train of facts which corresponds to the mental train of facts. The beginning of the physical train con- sists of light going into the eye and exciting the retina, and then of that wave of excitation being carried along the optic nerve to the ganglion. For all we know, and it is a very probable thing, the mental fact begins here, at the ganglion. There is no sensa- tion till the message has got to the ganglion, for this reason, that if you press the optic nerve behind the eye you can produce the sensation of light. It is like tapping a telegraph, and sending a message which has not come from the station from which it ought to have come ; nobody at the other end can tell whether it has come from that station or not. The optic ganglion cannot tell whether this message which comes along the nerve has come from the eye or is the result of a tapping of the telegraph, whether it is produced by light or by pressure upon the nerve. It is a fact of immense importance that all these nerves are exactly of the same kind. The only thing which the nerve does is to transmit a message which has been given to it ; it does not transmit a mes- sage in any other way than the telegraph wire transmits a mes- sage — that is to say, it is excited at certain intervals, and the succession of these intervals determines what this message is, not the nature of the excitation which passes along the wire. So that, if we watched the nerve excited by pressure, the message going along to the ganglion would be exactly the same as if it were the actual sight of the eye. We may draw from this the conclusion that the mental fact does not begin anywhere before the optic ganglion. Again, a man who has had one of his legs cut off can try to move his toes, which he feels as if they were still there ; and that shows that the consciousness of the motor impulse which is sent out along the nerve does not go to the end to see whether it is obeyed or not. The only way in which we know whetlier our orders, given to any parts of our body, are obeyed, is by hav- ing a message sent back to say that they are obeyed. If I tell my hand to press against this blackboard, the only way in which I know that it does press, is by having a message sent back by my skin to say that it is j)ressed. But supposing there is no skin there, I can have the exertion that precedes the action without The Automaton Theory : Parallelism 303 actually performing it, because I can send out a message, and consciousness stops with the sending of the message, and does not know anything further. So that the mental fact is somewhere or other in the region BOOB of the diagram, and does not include the two ends. That is to say, it is not the whole of the bodily fact that the mental fact corresponds to, but only an intermediate part of it. If it just passes through the points BB^ without going round the loop from to (7, then we merely have the sensa- tion that something has taken place — we have no voice in the nature of it and no choice about it. If it has gone round from to (7, we have a much larger fact — we have that fact which we call choice, or the exercise of volition. We may conclude, then, — 1 am not able in so short a space as I have to give you the whole evidence which goes to an assertion of this kind; but there is evidence which is sufficient to satisfy any competent scientific man of this day, — that every fact of consciousness is parallel to some disturbance of nerve matter, although there are some ner- vous disturbances which have no parallel in consciousness, properly so called, that is to say, disturbances of my nerves may exist which have no parallel in my consciousness. "We have observed two classes of facts and the parallelism between them. Let us next observe what an enormous gulf there is between these two classes of facts. " The state of a man's brain and the actions which go along with it are things which every other man can perceive, observe, measure, and tabulate ; but the state of a man's own consciousness is known to him only, and not to any other person. Things which appear to us and which we can observe are called objects or phenomena. Facts in a man's consciousness are not objects or phenomena to any other man; they are capable of being obsers^ed only by him. We have no possible ground, therefore, for speaking of another man's consciousness as in any sense a part of the physical world of objects or phenomena. It is a thing entirely separate from it ; and all the evidence that we have goes to show that the physical world gets along entirely by itself, according to practically universal rules. That is to say, the laws which hold good in the physical world hold good everywhere in it — they hold good with practical universality, and there is no reason to suppose any- thing else but those laws in order to account for any physical fact ; there is no reason to suppose anything but the universal laws of 304 Mind and Matter mechanics in order to account for the motion of organic bodies. The train of physical facts between the stimulus sent into the eye, or to any one of our senses, and the exertion which follows it, and the train of physical facts which goes on in the brain, even when there is no stimulus and no exertion, — these are perfectly com- plete physical trains, and every step is fully accounted for by mechanical conditions. In order to show what is meant by that, I will endeavor to explain another supposition which might be made. When a stimulus comes into the eye there is a certain amount of energy transferred from the ether, which fills space, to this nerve ; and this energy travels along into the ganglion, and sets the ganglion into a state of disturbance which may use up some energy previously stored in it. The amount of energy is the same as before by the law of the conservation of energy. That energy is spread over a number of threads which go out to the brain, and it comes back again and is reflected from there. It may be supposed that a very small portion of energy is created in that process, and that while the stimulus is going around the loop- line it gets a little push somewhere, and then, when it comes back to the ganglion, it goes away to the muscle and sets loose a store of energy in the muscle so that it moves the limb. Now the ques- tion is. Is there any creation of energy anywhere ? Is there any part of the physical progress which cannot be included w^ithin ordinary physical laws ? It has been supposed, I say, by some people, as it seems to me merely by a confusion of ideas, that there is, at some part or other of this process, a creation of energy ; but there is no reason whatever why we should suppose this. The difficulty in proving a negative in these cases is similar to that in proving a negative about anything which exists on the other side of the moon. It is quite true that I am not absolutely certain that the law of the conservation of energy is exactly true ; but there is no more reason why I should suppose a particular exception to occur in the brain than anywhere else. I might just as well assert that whenever anything passes over the Line, when it goes from the north side of the Equator to the south, there is a certain creation of energy, as that there is a creation of energy in the brain. If I chose to say that the amount was so small that none of our present measurements could appreciate it, it would be difficult or indeed impossible for anybody to disprove that assertion ; but I should have no reason whatever for making it. There being, then, an absence The Automaton Theory : Parallelism 305 of positive evidence that the conditions are exceptional, the reasons which lead us to assert that there is no loss of energy in organic any more than in inorganic bodies are absolutely overwhelming. There is no more reason to assert that there is a creation of energy in any part of an organic body, because we are not absolutely sure of the exact nature of the law, than there is reason, because we do not know what there is on the other side of the moon, to assert that there is a sky-blue peacock there with forty-five eyes in his tail. " Therefore, it is not a right thing to say, for example, that the mind is a force, because if the mind were a force we should be able to perceive it. I should be able to perceive your mind and to measure it, but I cannot ; I have absolutely no means of perceiving your mind. I judge by analogy that it exists, >and the instinct which leads me to come to that conclusion is the social instinct, as it has been formed in me by generations during which men have lived together ; and they could not have lived together unless they had gone upon that supposition. But I may very well say that among the physical facts which go along at the same time with mental facts there are forces at work. That is perfectly true, but the two things are on two utterly different platforms — the physical facts go along by themselves, and the mental facts go along by them- selves. There is a parallelism between them, but there is no interference of one with the other. Again, if anybody says that the will influences matter, the statement is not untrue, but it is nonsense. The will is not a material thing, it is not a mode of material motion. Such an assertion belongs to the crude mate- rialism of the savage. The only thing which influences matter is the position of surrounding matter or the motion of surrounding matter. It may be conceived that at the same time with every exercise of volition there is a disturbance of the physical laws; but this disturbance, being perceptible to me, would be a physical fact accompanying the volition, and could not be the volition itself, which is not perceptible to me. Whether there is such a disturbance of the physical laws or not is a question of fact to which we have the best of reasons for giving a negative answer ; but the assertion that another man's volition, a feeling in his con- sciousness which I cannot perceive, is part of the train of physical facts which I may perceive, — this is neither true nor untrue, but nonsense ; it is a combination of words whose corresponding ideas will not go together. 30G Mind and Matter " Thus we are to regard the body as a physical machine which goes by itself according to a physical law, that is to say, is auto- matic. An automaton is a thing which goes by itself when it is wound up, and we go by ourselves when we have had food. Ex- cepting the fact that other men are conscious, there is no reason why we should not regard the human body as merely an exceed- ingly complicated machine which is wound up by putting food into the mouth. But it is not merely a machine, because conscious- ness goes with it. The mind, then, is to be regarded as a stream of feelings which runs parallel to, and simultaneous with, a certain part of the action of the body, that is to say, that particular part of the action of the brain in which the cerebrum and the sensory tract are excited." I have quoted Clifford at such length because it is really important that we should gain a distinct idea of the sort of reason- ing that leads men to become adherents of the doctrine of parallel- ism, and from no writer can we gain it more clearly than from Clifford. Those familiar with the progress of modern psychological theory will see that, had he lived to the present day, he would probably have been inclined to modify his statements in a few particulars. He might, for example, have avoided the use of such a phrase as "the consciousness of the motor impulse." Such details are, however, of trifling importance here, and need not occupy our attention. The first thing that strikes us is the close similarity of much of his reasoning to the argument of Descartes. Indeed, if we leave out of view the Cartesian soul with its definite place in the brain, we may almost say that Clifford's argument is a mere ex- pansion of that of Descartes, and an expansion which has been made possible by the fact that we have gradually acquired a some- what more detailed account of the functioning of the brain than was possessed by man in the seventeenth century. That the nervous discharge takes a short cut through the brain in the case of reflex movements and follows a circuitous path when movements are voluntary was then unknown. It must be admitted, however, that the reader of Clifford's force- ful paragraphs is in danger of supposing that we know more of the intimate structure and of the functioning of the brain than we actually do know. His cheerful optimism carries one along in an uncritical mood, and one has to remind oneself tliat such a The Automaton Theory : Parallelism 307 statement as, "two actions of the brain which occur together form a link between themselves, so that the one being called up the other is called up," does not rest upon an independent basis of direct observation, but is an inference from the fact of the association of ideas, at least in most instances. Much of Descartes' cerebral physiology was hypothetical, and it is not too much to say the same of the cerebral physiology of our own day.^ In this reflection those who do not wish to accept the doctrine of the physical automaton may take such comfort as they can. Again, the clear distinction which Clifford draws between mind and brain, his recognition of the fact that they must not be made members of the same series, is due to his appreciation of the fact that treating the soul as Descartes does simply turns it into a material thing. He follows Spinoza in insisting that mind and brain are things different in kind, and that they must not be unequally yoked together. ^ But to gain a somewhat closer view of this parallelism between mental facts and physical, and to see the bridge that Clifford pro- poses to throw over the gulf which separates them, we must follow one more extract from the lecture we have been considering. It reads thus : ^ — " Again, let us consider what takes place when we perceive anything by means of our eye. A certain picture is produced upon the retina of the eye, which is like the picture on the ground- glass plate in a photographic camera; but it is not there that the consciousness begins, as I have shown before. When I see anything there is a picture produced on the retina, but I am not conscious of it there ; and in order that I may be conscious the message must be taken from each point of this picture along the special nerve-fibres to the ganglion. These innumerable fine nerves which come away from the retina go each of them to a particular point of the ganglion and the result is that, corresponding to that picture at the back of the retina, there is a disturbance of a great 1 See my paper on "Psychology and Physiology," in the Psychological Meview for January, 1896. 2 Besides the internal evidence of the influence of Spinoza's thought furnished by Clifford's papers, "Body and Mind" and "On the Nature of Things-in- them- selves," we have the direct testimony of his friend and biographer, Sir Frederick Pollock. See the introduction to the "Lectures and Essays." 8 Op.cit., pp. 61 ff. 308 Mind and Matter number of centres of gray matter in the ganglion. If certain parts of the retina of my eye, having light thrown upon them, are dis- turbed so as to produce the figure of a square, then certain little pieces of gray matter in this ganglion, which are distributed we do not know how, will also be disturbed, and the impression cor- responding to that is a square. Consciousness belongs to this disturbance of the ganglion, and not to the picture in the eye ; and therefore it is something quite different from the thing which is perceived. But at the same time, if we consider another man looking at something, we shall say that the fact is this — there is something outside of him which is matter in motion, and that which corresponds inside of him is also matter in motion. The external motion of matter produces in the optic ganglion some- thing which corresponds to it, but is not like it. Although for every point in the object there is a point of disturbance in the optic ganglion, and for every connection between two points in the object there is a connection between two disturbances, yet they are not like one another. Nevertheless they are made of the same stuff; the object outside and the optic ganglion are both matter, and that matter is made of molecules moving about in ether. When I consider the impression which is produced upon my mind of any fact, that is just a part of my mind ; the impres- sion is a part of me. The hall which I see now is just an impres- sion produced on my mind by something outside of it, and that impression is a part of me. *'We may conclude from this theory of sensation, which is established by the discoveries of Helmholtz, that the feeling which I have in my mind — the picture of this hall — is something cor- responding, point for point, to the actual reality outside. Though every small part of the reality which is outside corresponds to a small part of my picture, though every connection between two parts of that realit}'- outside corresponds to a connection between two parts of my picture, yet the two things are not alike. They correspond to one another, just as a map may be said in a certain sense to correspond with the country of which it is a map, or as a written sentence may be said to correspond to a spoken sentence. But then I may conclude from what I said before that, although the two corresponding things are not alike, yet they are made of the same stuff. Now what is my picture made of? IMy picture is made of exceedingly simple mental facts, so simple that I only The Automaton Theory : Parallelism 309 feel them in groups.^ My picture is made up of these elements ; and I am therefore to conclude that the real thing which is outside me, and which corresponds to my picture, is made up of similar things; that is to say, the reality which underlies matter, the reality which we perceive as matter, is that same stuff which, being compounded together in a particular way, produces mind. What I perceive as your brain is really in itself your consciousness, is You ; but then that which I call your brain, the material fact, is merely my perception. Suppose we put a certain man in the middle of the hall, and we all looked at him. We should all have perceptions of his brain ; those would be facts in our conscious- ness, but they would be all different facts. My perception would be different from the picture produced upon you, and it would be another picture, although it might be very like it. So that cor- responding to all those pictures which are produced in our minds from an external object, there is a reality which is not like the pictures, but which corresponds to them point for point, and which is made of the same stuff that the pictures are. The actual reality which underlies what we call matter is not the same thing as the mind, is not the same thing as our perception, but it is made of the same stuff. To use the words of the old disputants, we may say that matter is not of the same substance as mind, not homo- ousion, but is of like substance, it is made of similar stuff differ- ently compacted together, homoiousion." With the exception of this last bridge connecting mental facts with physical, Clifford regards the whole of what he has said as a body of doctrine accepted by all competent persons who have con- sidered the subject. There may be, he thinks, some differences of opinion as to particular points, but the doctrine is the doctrine of Science ; it is the doctrine of the parallelism of mental states to cerebral motions. This bridge, which cannot yet be considered to be a part of the accepted doctrine of science, but which Clifford regards as satisfactorily reaching from shore to shore, is the identity of mind and brain. Science must accept the fact that mind and brain are associated — that there is a parallelism ; and since all the consciousness we know of is associated with certain complex 1 1 have in the foregoing omitted Clifford's argument to prove that consciousness is made up of these simple mental facts. It will he more convenient to discuss it later, and its omission here need not affect our conception of the sort of " bridge" he is essaying to huild. 310 Mind and Matter forms of matter, it seems reasonable to assume that there is no consciousness not associated with matter. We have here, how- ever, only a provisional probability. But, on the other hand, the fact that mind and brain are associated in a certain definite way affords a strong presumption that we have here something that can be explained^ a presumption that it is possible to find a reason for this exact correspondence. If such a reason can be found, we are no longer compelled to rest content with a provisional probability, but we have the highest assurance that Science can give us, an assurance amounting to practical certainty, that there is no mind without a brain. Now, writes Clifford, if that particular explanation which he has ventured to offer should turn out to be the true one, the case becomes even stronger. If mind is the reality which appears to us as brain-action, then the supposition of mind without brain is a contradiction.^ In the above-quoted extract the reader has met with the sentence, " What I perceive as your brain is really in itself your consciousness, is You." If we are to take such a state- ment at all literally, it is manifestly a contradiction to speak of mind without brain, for mind is brain. The two cannot be divorced because they are the same thing, and in the strictest sense of that ambiguous word same. But if we thus read Clifford, we cannot but see that his bridge is not so much a bridge as rather a denial of the existence of the gulf which it was proposed to bridge over. He seems to be arguing that two shores run parallel to each other, and must run parallel to each other because they are not really two shores, but are one and the same shore, and there is no gulf. It is surely unfair to take Clifford's statements of the identity of mind and brain quite so literally. If mind and brain are strictly the same thing, it seems foolish to go on talking as though we had here two things. Parallelism itself disappears, for it is absurd to say that a thing is parallel with itself. And the reader who has followed carefully the statements contained in the last long extract which I have given cannot have failed to see that it was not in- tended to make mind and brain strictly identical with each otlier, but merely to make them identical in some looser sense of the word. Of course, the looser the sense in which the word is taken, the less clear is it that it is a contradiction to speak of mind without 1 Op. cit., p. 60. The Automaton Tlieory : Faralldism 311 brain, and the less sure are we of the solidity of the " bridge " which Clifford has built for us. That his own ideas about this "bridge " were decidedly nebulous seems clear even from what is said in the above-mentioned extract. It appears worth while to point this out briefly now, though the whole matter will have to be discussed later more thoroughly. In the extract the dramatis personce to whom we seem to be introduced at the outset are: an external object, which we will call a square ; a retinal image of that object, which is also square ; a disturbance of the ganglion, which we have no reason to believe square; and a mental image, which is a square. Consciousness, Le. the mental image, belongs to the disturbance of the ganglion, and, as this is something quite different from the external object, consciousness also is something quite different from the external object. In this scheme, there seems to be no doubt about the fact that the mental image is one thing and the external object another. There are even two things mentioned as between them in some sense of the word — the retinal image and the disturbance of the ganglion. No reason is apparent why this scheme should not serve, no matter what the particular character of the external object may be. That is to say, we have every reason to believe that an ex- ternal brain will be related to the retinal image of the brain, to the corresponding disturbance of the ganglion, and to the mental image of the brain, just as an external square is to its retinal image, ganglionic disturbance, and mental image. In the latter part of the extract, however, we learn with sur- prise that if we place a man's brain in the midst of a hall and look at it, our perceptions will not be identical with each other, but they will all be identical with the brain in question (" that which I call your brain, the material fact, is merely my perception "). The brain seen is thus not an external thing at all, and cannot be placed in the above scheme at two removes from the perception or mental image. It is the mental image itself ; and now the external thing is not a brain, but something very different — it is some one else's consciousness (" what I perceive as your brain is really in itself your consciousness, is You" ). The correspondence or parallelism, then, seems to be not be- tween mind and brain, but between the mind of one man and the mind of another. But if this be so, why are we told that the actual 312 Mind and Matter reality which underlies what we call matter is not the same thing as the mind, is not the same thing as our perception, but is made of the same stuff ? Does this mean simply that when we have a perception which we call the brain of another man, we may assume that there corresponds to this, unperceived by us, certain other perceptions of various sorts that we may call the mind of the other man ? But, even if we assume this to be true, does it not seem rather odd to say that certain perceptions in one mind are identi- cal with certain more or less different perceptions in another — to say that " what I perceive as your brain is really in itself your con- sciousness " ? It is this identity or quasi-identity of the two that furnishes Clifford with his " bridge." Can nothing better be said for this " bridge " than what is said in the preceding sentences ? As matters stand, there may be parallelism, but there seems to be no identity whatever except perhaps an identity of kind^ and the "bridge" simply disappears. Yet there are few who read Clifford's pages without being impressed by the fact that there is at least some plausibility in his theory. The source of this plausi- bility I shall investigate in the next chapter, where I shall subject the conception of parallelism to a preliminary criticism, leaving out of view some of the difficulties which have come to the surface just above, and which it is convenient to reserve for later discussion. CHAPTER XX WHAT IS PARALLELISM? In this chapter I shall assume that there is a world of material things, including human bodies, without inquiring very narrowly how we are to conceive this world, and in what sense it is external. Descartes' study of the human body led him to believe, as we have seen, that the nervous system is more directly the organ of mind than is anything else in the body, and that the brain is, so to speak, the very citadel of the place. The modern science of cere- bral psychology has continued the investigation which he began, and has continued it along the same lines. Although we may be- gin by speaking somewhat vaguely of mind and body, we always end, when we wish to be exact, by speaking of mind and brain, or rather of this or that mental phenomenon and this or that part of the brain. Infinite labor has been expended in the effort to deter- mine with accuracy and in all possible detail the correspondences between mental activity and cerebral activity, and this labor has not been wholly without result. The localization of cerebral func- tions is not an empty phrase to any one who has examined the results which have so far been obtained. The supposition that these results as a whole may, in the fur- ther progress of science, have to be abandoned, may be dismissed as unworthy of serious attention. They may undoubtedly be modified in detail, but we have every reason to believe that the method of research which has led to their formulation is a sound one, and that it will one day give us results far more complete and satisfactory. It is no more absurd to regard some particular manifestation of consciousness as related to the activity of some particular part of the brain, than it is to think of consciousness as related to the brain as a whole, instead of thinking of it as vaguely related to the whole body. And the same sort of evidence that inclines us to regard the brain as the special organ of conscious- 313 314 Mind and Matter ness may incline us to particularize still more. How far we are justified in going is solely a question of evidence, and it is a rash man who will undertake to set an arbitrary limit to such investigations. That the progress of science has ousted the Cartesian soul from its place in the pineal gland will be a matter of small regret to those who have given the subject adequate attention. That soul was not a soul at all ; that is to say, it was not a consciousness, but was a material thing that could be located in this part of the brain or in that, like the veriest lump of matter. And any soul that the interactionist is inclined to put in its place must, since it is to take its place and become a cog in a material mechanism, be itself a material thing, and not a something of a different order. He who truly realizes this loses his inclination to be an inter- actionist, and he casts about for some other way of conceiving the relation of mind and brain. He is pretty sure to become an ad- herent of the doctrine of parallelism, and to say with Professor Clifford and many others that physical phenomena and mental phenomena must not be conceived as patched together into one sj^stem, but must be conceived as belonging to different orders, must be relegated to separate series which never intersect one another. It is a fair question to ask : Just how much does a man mean by the word, when he speaks of physical phenomena and mental as being parallel ? The word may, like most words, be abused, and its use may be an occasion of falling into more or less serious error. One cannot follow the arguments which have led to the adop- tion of the doctrine of parallelism without assuming, at least pro- visionally, the existence of an external world of things and of minds perceived to be distinct from them. A material object exists ; I perceive it ; the object makes an impression upon the retina of the eye ; as a result of this a certain disturbance is set up somewhere in the brain ; I have a mental image of the object. The object is one thing, the impression upon the retina another, the cerebral change still another, and the mental image something distinct from all of these. Investioration seems to show that the mental image is more intimately related to the cerebral disturbance than to any other motion of matter, and we say tliat the mental image and the cerebral disturbance are parallel. How much have we a right to mean by this ? What is Parallelism? 315 For one thing, we evidently mean that these two things are so related that the existence of the one may be taken as evidence of the existence of the other. Given the cerebral disturbance, the mental image is given ; and given the mental image, the cerebral disturbance is given. The one may be taken as a sign or as a guarantee of the other. We evidently mean, moreover, that the mental image does not belong to the same series with the cerebral disturbance, and hence cannot interact with it. Neither can cause the other ; neither can be the effect of the other. Any attempt to put them in such a rela- tion partakes, as Clifford expresses it, of " the crude materialism of the savage " ; and although this relationship may be cloaked by ambiguity of expression or by inconsistency of statement, it be- comes unmistakable when we try to conceive quite clearly just what interaction implies. When this second point is borne well in mind, we realize that there are certain ways in which we must not think of the parallel- ism of the mental and the physical. We must not conceive of a man's mind as lying beside his brain in space, as we do conceive of parallel lines as lying beside each other. We must not think of it as fitted to his brain as a gilt halo is fitted to the head of a saint in a picture by Fra Angelico. The warning is by no means superfluous, for the error appears to be a very easy one to fall into. We are all apt to talk as though the relation of mind and brain were more or less analogous to this ; and when, before our classes, we attempt to make clear certain psychological facts by the aid of diagrams upon a blackboard, we place brains and ideas side by side, as though they really occurred side by side in nature. The endeavor to point out to the student that this diagrammatic representation is faulty is met by the trium- phant query : " When a man goes to Europe, may we not assume that he takes his mind with him ? " And the man of science may deprecate dogmatism on the sub- ject of mind and matter, and may declare himself to be without any hypothesis whatever, and yet we may find him, when he per- mits himself " to suggest a rough and crude analogy," writing as follows : " That the brain is the organ of consciousness is patent, but that consciousness is located in the brain is what no psycholo- gist ought to assert; for just as the energy of an electric dis- charge, though apparently on the conductor, is not on the conductor 316 Mind md Matter but in all the space round it; just as the energy of an electric cur- rent, though apparently in the copper wire, is certainly not all in the copper wire, and possibly not any of it; so it may be that the sensory consciousness of a person, though apparently located in his brain, may be conceived of as also existing like a faint echo in space, or in other brains, though these are ordinarily too busy and preoccupied to notice it."^ Thus certain cases of supposed thought-transference are ren- dered comprehensible by the suggestion that two saints may, so to speak, touch halos, and enter into a mystical spiritual communion. There is nothing in this conception that strikes the average man as inherently absurd, at least until he has thought the matter over with a good deal of patience, because his first impulse is always to put minds in space, where brains are. But when he realizes that the parallelism in question cannot be a spatial one, he begins to see that the relation of mind and brain is something that cannot be so easily grasped. And if this relation is not a spatial one, we cannot assume that the mind is present to the brain in any ordinary sense of that word. If mind and brain really do belong to two different orders of exist- ence which do not intersect, we cannot say that, when a given cerebral disturbance is present, a certain mental state is present, without admitting that we are using the word in a sense quite dis- tinct from the usual one. We must remember that the mind is neither in the brain nor near the brain. It is worth Avhile to repeat over and over again, since it is so easy to become oblivious of the fact, the statement that my mind, which is supposed to be parallel to my brain and to no other, is not a whit nearer to my brain than it is to the brain of the Emperor of China or to that of the Pope of Rome. Of course, it is not further from my brain than from either of these, but it certainl}^ is not nearer. Near and far have no meaning when we are not speak- ing of spatial relations ; and when one thing is supposed to have a place in space and another is not, it is absurd to try to measure the distance between them. When, therefore, we speak of a mind and of a brain as being parallel, we must be most careful not to conceive of the mind and of the brain as present to each other in any ordinary sense of the word, or as near to each other. This is 1 Professor Oliver J. Lodge, " Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Re- search," Part V, p. 191. What is Parallelism F 317 an important matter, for all sorts of strange results may follow from our allowing ourselves to fall into such confusions. It must be admitted that it is exceedingly difficult to use lan- guage that will not suggest such confusions. No man tries more earnestly than Clifford to relegate mind and matter to different and distinct worlds. Yet when he speaks of a message carried from the eye to the brain, he tells us, " the mental fact does not begin anywhere before the optic ganglion." ^ A little farther on he says : " The mental fact is somewhere or other in the region RCCB of the diagram," which means that it is somewhere in the region of the optic thalami, the cerebral hemispheres, and the corpora striata. The body, he tells us, is not merely a machine, because consciousness " goes with it," and he reiterates that " mental facts go along with the bodily facts." ^ He informs us that the action which goes on in a brain may be looked at "from the mental side." 3 Such statements may be so interpreted as not to be misleading, but there can be no question of what they suggest to the uncritical reader. There can, I think, be as little question of what they sug- gested to Clifford himself, and this I shall endeavor to bring out shortly. Meanwhile, I wish to insist upon the fact that those who talk of the parallelism of mind and brain constantly speak as though a particular mind and a particular brain were parallel in some physi- cal sense, were near each other and could go together somewhat as do a man and his shadow — which illustration suggests to my mind a good instance of the fact that this really is the effect upon men's minds of reading the words of the parallelists. Professor James, after an examination of Clifford's doctrine, thus characterizes it : " The mind-history would run alongside of the body-history of each man, and each point in the one would correspond to, but not react upon, a point in the other. So the melody floats from the harp-string, but neither checks nor quickens its vibrations ; so the shadow runs alongside the pedestrian, but in no sense influences his steps."* Such misleading expressions are often used even by those who are ready to warn us that we must not be misled by them. Thus in an early work by Professor Bain we find the following : " All feelings have a Physical Side^ or relation to our bodily organs ; the sensations, for example, arise on the stimulation of a special organ 1 "Lectures and Essays," London, 1879. "Body and Mind," p. 57. 2 Ibid., p. 58. 8 Ihid., p. 59. * " Psychology," Vol. I, p. 133. 318 Mind and Matter of sense ; and both sensations and emotions have a characteristic outward display or expression, which indicates their existence to a spectator. I include in the description of each feeling whatever is known of its physical accompaniments. The feeling proper, or the Mental Side^ has its relationships exhausted under the three fundamental attributes of Mind — Feeling, Volition, and Intellect." ^ Manifestly, Professor Bain does not intend us to take such expressions as "mental side" and "physical side" at all literally, for he has already said only a few pages back : " It has always been a matter of difficulty to express the nature of this concomi- tance, and hence a certain mystery has attached to the union of mind and body. The difficulty is owing to the fact that we are apt to insist on some kind of local or space relationship between the Extended and the Unextended. When we think of connec- tion it is almost always of connection in space ; as in supposing one thing placed in the interior of another. This last figure is often applied to the present case. Mind is said to be internal to, or within, the body. Descartes localized mind in the pineal gland ; the Schoolmen debated whether the mind is all in the whole body, or all in every part. Such expressions are unsuitable to the case. The connection is one of dependence^ but not properly of local union." 2 These sentences are sufficiently clear and unmistakable. They constitute a vigorous warning against the error of conceiving that a given mind " goes along with " a given body as his shadow goes along with a pedestrian. But the man who reads them forgets them when he comes to the account of the physical side and of the mental side of feelings. He then thinks of the concomitance of mind and body after a material analogy, and he draws from this, according to his humor, either an argument against parallelism or an explanation which seems to make parallelism the most natu- ral thing in the world. This is a point of such importance that I must illustrate it at length. First, as to the argument against parallelism. Professor James finds concomitance in the midst of absolute separateness an utterly irrational notion : " It is to my mind quite inconceivable that con- sciousness should have nothing to do with a business that it so faithfully attends. And the question, * What has it to do?' is 1 "Mental and Moral Science," London, 1808, p. 18. * jud.^ p. 4. What is Parallelism? 319 one which psychology has no right to 'surmount,' for it is her plain duty to consider it. . . . If feelings are causes, of course their eifects must be furtherances and checkings of internal cere- bral motions of which, in themselves, we are entirely without knowledge. It is probable that for years to come we shall have to infer what happens in the brain either from our feelings or from motor effects which we observe. The organ will be for us a sort of vat in which feelings and motions somehow go on stewing together, and in which innumerable things happen of which we catch but the statistical result." ^ It is evident that one who can conceive of motions and feelings as stewing together in the same vat has not distinguished them as belonging to different orders. They are both in the one vat, i.e. they are both material, and the problem of their relation to each other cannot be a serious one. As an interactionist, Professor James has, of course, the right to make mind material if he wishes to do so. But the part of the above extract in which we are espe- cially interested is that which preceded his casting feelings into the vat. He speaks of consciousness attending cerebral changes, and he finds it inconceivable that it should so faithfully do this unless there be some causal connection between them. It is interesting to inquire : Why does this seem to him an inconceivability ? Why does something else seem to him more natural^ To this question I think that but one answer can be given. Professor James is aware that the parallelist would be shocked to think of feelings and motions as " stewing together," and that he tries to conceive of them as belonging to distinct and independent orders. Yet he hears him speak of a concomitance, of a parallelism, of feelings and motions as " going along together." He thinks of the consciousness that attends cerebral changes as attending them as a man's shadow attends him. The shadow moves when the man moves, stops when he stops, and reproduces with slavish exactitude all the eccentricities of his behavior. Is it conceivable that such a parallelism should exist in the absence of all causal connection ? What becomes of the method of concomitant varia- tions if men and their shadows may be regarded as so faithfully attending each other when united by no bond of causality ? Must we repudiate the illustration of the moon and the tides, and all the other classical examples upon which our minds have been nourished 1 " Psychology," Vol. I, pp. 136-138. 320 Mmd and Matter ever since the publication of Mill's " Logic " ? If we accept concomi- tance as evidence of some sort of causal connection everywhere else, why not accept it when we come to consider the concomitance of feelings and cerebral changes ? Were the two kinds of concomitance the same, there could be no question of the justice of the argument. But the tacit assump- tion that they are the same ought not to be allowed to pass without challenge. If the parallelist is right., feelings must not be assigned any local habitation whatever. They are not in the brain ; they are not even near the brain ; they do not move about when the brain moves, nor stop moving when it stops. Feelings parallel to one brain are quite as much in or on or about another brain as they are in or on or about it. This is a truth that it is difficult for the psychologist to bear steadfastly in mind. He says to us : " Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will ; nowhere will there be a con- sciousness of a whole sentence."^ But if minds are not in space and must not be conceived as localized at all, why bring the men together? The minds are not farther apart if the men be con- ceived as distributed over four continents. Nearness of body has nothing whatever to do with nearness of mind. It is only when we localize, i.e, materialize, mind, that we are inclined to think that when two men stand near to each other their minds must be near to each other too. The concomitance of mind and brain is, then, conceived b}^ the parallelist, when he is true to his doctrine, to be a concomitance of a quite peculiar kind, and one to which no parallel can be found anywhere else. It is absolutely unique. When we connect the motion of the moon with the flow of the tides, we are dealing exclusively with a mechanical order of things, and we are assigning to certain motions in matter their place of antecedent and consequent in that mechanical world-order. All the positions and motions of matter with which we are concerned belong to the one order, and are clearly susceptible of connection into one series. But when we think of certain mental phenomena as concomitant with the changes in a given brain, we are not justi- fied in assuming that tliis implies that the phenomena of the two 1 James, "Psychology," Vol. I, p. 100. What is Parallelism? 321 orders can be arranged in the one series. He who assumes this simply overlooks the fact that he has distinguished between two orders of things, and he reduces them to one. As well endeavor to arrange in the same series changes in the position of a moon and changes in the position of the drops of water which compose a tidal wave, when, by hypothesis, the space in which the one series of changes takes place is not continuous with that which is the scene of action of the other. When Professor James argues that concomitance must be re- garded as evidence of causal relationship, he is evidently thinking of physical concomitance, and what force the argument seems to have is borrowed from a confusion of concomitance of this kind with concomitance of a very different kind. When one clearly realizes that the consciousness which " attends " the molecular changes in a particular brain is not there where the brain is, and is no nearer to this particular brain than it is to any other, one is less inclined to stitch this consciousness and this brain into the one motley gar- ment. It is difficult to think of things " stewing together," when we realize that they cannot by any possibility be forced into the same pot. But this tendency to conceive of the relation of mind and brain after a material analogy is like the conjurer's hat out of which may be drawn objects the most discrepant and incongruous. We have seen it yield an argument against parallelism and for interaction- ism. Those who have followed the history of speculative thought have seen emerge from it again and again a most plausible argu- ment for parallelism, the explanation^ in fact, which to many minds makes the parallelism of mental phenomena and physical phenom- ena seem a natural and even a necessary thing. This argument has its roots in a remote past, and it has influence with us because we inherit the conceptions which have come down from the days of our fathers and find it difficult to subject them to criticism. Descartes informs us that certain things may be known imme- diately by the " natural light " — among others, that where there are qualities or affections there must be a thing or substance to which these pertain. The same natural light reveals to us that we know a thing or substance the more clearly as we discover in it a greater number of qualities.^ These notions are not, of course, of his own manufacture. They came to him from the centuries 1 " Principia Philosophise," I, 11. 322 Mind and Matter which preceded him, and they were hoary with age when he re- ceived his instruction as a schoolboy at La Fleche. He goes on to tell us that every substance has one principal attribute. Thus, thinking is the principal attribute of mind, and extension is the principal attribute of body. The principal at- tribute constitutes the nature or essence of the substance.^ We must, hence, conceive thought and extension to be the natures of intelligent and corporeal substance ; and we must even conceive them as the thinking and extended substances themselves, as mind and body. To abstract the notions of thought and extension from the notion of substance is difficult, for the distinction is a merely logical one (ipsa ratione tantum diver see sunt^.^ The notion of substance — that which needs nothing but itself in order to exist — can be applied in all strictness only to God, but we may call mind and body substances in a looser sense of the word.^ Here we find material which Spinoza, the first parallelist, built into the structure which he reveals to us in the " Ethics," and this material constitutes a most important element in its composition. Spinoza tells us of one substance, consisting of an infinity of attri- butes, only two of which, thought and extension, are revealed to us. Each attribute expresses the essence of the one substance. The distinction between the attributes and the substance Spinoza nowhere makes clear, but the substance is supposed in some way to unify the attributes. The modes of the attribute extension are individual material things ; the modes of the attribute thought are individual ideas. These two sets of modes constitute two inde- pendent systems ; everything in the world of material things must be explained by a reference to physical causes, and ideas must find their complete explanation in the world of ideas. An idea cannot be caused by a motion in matter, nor can it result in sucli. Notwithstanding the fact that ideas and material things belong to mutually independent systems, the world of thought exactly mirrors the world of extension. Each corporeal thing has corre- sponding to it a mental thing that we may call its idea, and '' the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and con- nection of things." But, we may ask, why should ideas and things thus correspond ? How are we to explain this concomitance in the absence of causal connection? Spinoza's answer — the only an- 1 "Principia Philosophiaj," I, 63. 2 Jli^l^ i^ 03. » Ibid., I, 61. What is Parallelism? 323 swer he has to give to the question — is contained in the scholium to the proposition just quoted. It reads as follows : — " Before going farther we should recall to mind this truth, which has been proved above, namely, that whatever can be per- ceived by infinite intellect as constituting the essence of substance belongs exclusively to the one substance, and consequently that thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same substance, apprehended now under this, now under that attribute. So, also, a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways — a truth which certain of the Hebrews appear to have seen as if through a mist, in that they assert that God, the intellect of God, and the things known by it, are one and the same. For example, a circle existing in nature, and the idea, which also is in God, of this existing circle, are one and the same thing, manifested through different attri- butes ; for this reason, whether we conceive nature under the attribute of extension, or under that of thought, or under any other attribute whatever, we shall find there follows one and the same order, or one and the same concatenation of causes, that is, the same thing." ^ From the metaphysics of Descartes and Spinoza to the specula- tions of the modern scientist may seem a far cry to some ; yet, as regards the point under discussion, the distance is so inconsiderable that it scarcely needs to be spanned by a bridge at all. The notion of substance as a something " underlying " qualities, " having " qualities, " explaining the coexistence " of qualities, has made its appearance for many centuries in philosophies the most diverse, and has made its influence felt unmistakably. Even in writers like Descartes and Spinoza, in whose pages the distinction between sub- stance and attributes becomes almost a vanishing one, substance remains as a ghost with a mission. Spinoza's ghost is taken over bodily Qsit venia verho) by Clifford, of whom we think as the typical modern parallelist, together with Spinoza's parallelism ; and it is made to perform the same function which busied it in the seventeenth century. It serves to join, by 1" Ethics," II, 7, scholium. Spinoza's philosophy is a confluence of distinct and different streams. I have indicated only the one whose current seems to bring down to us an explanation of the parallelism of mind and body. For a fuller dis- cussion of the subject, I must refer the reader to my " Philosophy of Spinoza," Henry Holt and Co., N.Y., 1894, Introductory Note, and notes 3 and 55 ; also to my monograph on " Spinozistic Immortality," Ginn and Co., 1899, §§ 1-15. 324 Mind and Matter the laying on of its shadowy hands, what would otherwise be kept asunder. When we bear this in mind, the somewhat incoherent statements in which Clifford describes for us the " bridge " which he has essayed to build between matter and mind become compre- hensible. As long as we only know the fact that consciousness and cerebral disturbances run parallel, we cannot be sure that some exception to the rule will not be discovered. But if we find an explanation for this parallelism, we may enjoy the highest assur- ance that science can give that there will be no exception. Behold the explanation : Consciousness and cerebral change are the same thing ; it is, hence, absurd to think of them as divorced. But how can they be the same thing when they cannot even exist in the same world, but must be relegated to different orders? They can be the same thing thus : " The reality which underlies matter, the reality which we perceive as matter, is the same stuff which, being compounded together in a particular way, produces mind. What I perceive as your brain is really in itself your con- sciousness, is You ; but then that which I call your brain, the ma- terial fact, is merely my perception." ^ " If mind is the reality or substance of that which appears to us as brain-action, the suppo- sition of mind without brain is the supposition of an organized material substance not affecting other substances (for if it did it might be perceived), and therefore not affected by them ; in other words, it is the supposition of immaterial matter. " ^ " The reality external to our minds which is represented in our minds as matter is in itself mind-stuff." ^ Now when Spinoza informs us that a circle in nature and the idea of that circle are the same thing, we know very well that he cannot mean to have us understand that they are the same in the strictest sense, for he finds it necessary to explain that they are tlie same thing " manifested through different attributes." He assures us that they have nothing in common, that they are not even alike, for a circle has a centre and a circumference, while the idea of a circle has neither centre nor circumference* They are only the same thing in that the substance underlying them is the same. That is to say, they themselves are not the same, but something else is the same with itself. 1 "Lectures and Essays,'* London, 1870, Vol. II, pp. 63, 64. 2/6id, p. 06. ^ Ibid, p. S7. * " De Intellectus Emendatione," ed. Van Vloten and Land, 1882, p. XL What is Parallelism f 325 When we examine Clifford's work, we find that this is precisely his thought also. He is evidently speaking carelessly when he says, " What I perceive as your brain is really in itself your con- sciousness, is You," for if there is one thing upon which he wishes to insist more earnestly than upon anything else, it is the fact that your consciousness cannot by any possibility find a place among my perceptions. It is an ejects an outcast^ and it has no right to a place in the world of objects. To identify it, then, with any object^ is to talk nonsense, as he tells us again and again. It is clear, then, that he must mean the above statement of the identity of object and eject to be taken in a Pickwickian sense. It is the " reality " or " substance " that is one ; your brain and your con- sciousness are two distinct things. The distinction between substance and phenomenon is not more clearly drawn by Clifford than by Spinoza ; he is evidently using vaguely a vague word which he has inherited, with its bur- den of associations, from the past. He is not as impartial as Spinoza, for he evidently inclines in the above extracts to make the substance or reality identical with one set of phenomena while re- garding the other set as mere phenomena. But in this eccentricity he cannot be wholly consistent, for if he were, his " bridge " ivould be lost. He would have nothing to join the two sets of phenomena; he would have the two sets of phenomena alone, -and the question would remain. Why do they go together? The words "substance" and "reality" with their associations consti- tute the very being of his " bridge," and he must not and does not wholly rob them of their meaning. The same bridge is found satisfactory by others. I may cite, as a typical instance. Professor Hoffding, an excellent writer, and one who cannot be accused of a lack of sympathy with the results of modern science. He reasons as follows : — " If it is contrary to the doctrine of the persistence of physical energy to suppose a transition from the one province to the other, and if, nevertheless, the two provinces exist in our experience as distinct, then the two sets of phenomena must be unfolded simul- taneously, each according to its laws ; so that for every phenom- enon in the world of consciousness there is a corresponding phenomenon in the world of matter, and conversely (so far as there is reason to suppose that conscious life is correlated with material phenomena). The parallels already drawn point directly 326 Mind and Matter to such a relation ; it would be an amazing accident if, while the characteristic marks repeated themselves in this way, there were not at the foundation an inner connection. Both the parallelism and the pro2)ortlo7iality between the activity of consciousness and cere- bral activity point to an identity at bottom. The difference which remains, in spite of the points of agreement, compels us to suppose that one and the same principle has found its expression in a double form. We have no right to take mind and body for two beings or substances in reciprocal interaction. We are, on the contrary, impelled to conceive the material interaction between the elements composing the brain and nervous system, as an outer form of the in- ner ideal unity of consciousness. What we in our inner experience become conscious of as thought, feeling, and resolution, is thus represented in the material world by certain material processes of the brain, which as such are subject to the law of the persistence of energy, although this law cannot be applied to the relation between cerebral and conscious processes. It is as though the same thing were said in two languages." ^ Again the " same thing " ! Evidently this same thing is neither inner nor outer. It is not to be confused with either "form of expression," but it is something distinct from both. Thoughts are not identical with cerebral activities, but the one substance under- lies the two. How does it come that we are inclined to regard this underlying something as furnishing a satisfactory explanation of the concomitance of things so disparate ? What is the key to the magic of the word " substance," which acts as an opiate upon the restless questionings of so many eager minds? To solve this problem we have only to turn to the notion of substance as it exists in the mind of the plain man to-day. It is much the same that it has been for centuries, and it does not differ greatly from that which has lurked in comparative obscurity in the minds of many philosophers who have thought that they had aban- doned it for something better. No man has given abetter account of the plain man's notion than John Locke, and it is a sympathetic account, for Locke casts in his lot here with the plain man : — " The mind being, as I have declared, furnished with a great number of the simple ideas, conveyed in by the senses, as they are found in exterior things, or by reflection on its own operations, takes notice also, that a certain number of these simple ideas go 1" Outlines of Psychology," English translation, London, 1801, pp. C4, 65. What is Parallelism F 327 constantly together ; which being presumed to belong to one thing, and words being suited to common apprehensions, and made use of for quick despatch, are called so united in one subject, by one name ; which, by inadvertency, we are apt afterward to talk of, and consider as one simple idea, which indeed is a complication of many ideas together : because, as I have said, not imagining how these simple ideas can subsist by themselves, we accustom ourselves to suppose some substratum wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result, and which therefore we call substance." ^ It is thus that we come to have the ideas of a man, a horse, gold, water, etc., of which substances "whether any one has any other clear idea, further than of certain simple ideas coexisting together, I appeal to every one's experience." Locke is a man of sense. He knows that men call a bit of wood a thing or substance because they have experience of the fact that a certain group of qualities coexist hinc et nunc, and that one such group is not to be confounded with another. He knows, too, that they talk as though they were not here dealing with a complex of experiences, but with " one simple idea." Finally, he knows that they are unwilling to regard the bundle of experiences as the whole of the thing, but attribute to them some obscure source or cause which they regard as the substance or even as the " thing." He does not pretend to know anything about this substance, and he calls atten- tion as clearly as one could wish to the fact that men only assume it to exist because they observe that certain qualities " go constantly together." One need not be a Lockian to see the justice of this analysis. One may agree with the plain man, or one may scout his notion of substance ; but the fact that he thinks of the thing in this way it is not reasonable to deny. Now it is important to notice that neither the plain man nor the philosopher pretends to know the substance except through its qualities. The conception of substance is, at bottom, but a recog- nition of a certain concomitance of phenomena. When we see an apple we can also touch it, taste it, smell it. Why can we ? Because the apple is there, the one apple, the reality, the sub- stance, the underljdng something that manifests itself to the various senses in these divers ways. How do we know that the one apple is there ? Because we can see it, touch it, taste it, smell it. Thus the concomitance of the phenomena guarantees the 1" Essay Concerning Human Understanding," Book II, Chapter 23, § 1. 328 Mind and Matter existence of the substance, and the presence of the substance explains the concomitance of the phenomena. It is not possible for a man to walk around in a much smaller <;ircle than this, yet many persons walk around in this circle with a good deal of satisfaction to themselves. As we watch them do it, a little reflection brings us to a realization of the fact that their behavior is not so wholly irrational as it appears on the surface. Their explanation of the concomitance of phenomena by their reference to a substance is nothing more nor less than a reference of this particular case of concomitance to the innumerable other cases of a similar concomitance furnished by their experience as a whole. The individual instance has been explained by being brought under a general law, as all individual instances of any sort must be in order to be explained. We can now understand clearly just how much force we ought to allow to Clifford's argument that consciousness and cerebral activity not only go together, but must go together. He has dis- covered that they are one and the same thing — not strictly one and the same thing, but one and the same as two manifestations of one and the same substance are one and the same. Stripped of its mysticism and of all needless obscurity, this statement amounts to just this: The concomitance of consciousness and cerebral activity is not an inexplicable thing to which no parallel can be found in our experience ; it is simply an instance of the con- comitance of " aspects " or " manifestations " which we find all about us when we are dealing with " substances," " things," or "realities." It is one of a class, not an isolated instance. In other words, mind and brain are related as are the color and smell ^f the apple. Nothing can be clearer than that Clifford has quite forgotten how widely his doctrine has separated mind and brain. It puts them in different and independent worlds. What would we think of the concomitance of the qualities which constitute our notion of an apple, if the color always appeared in one mind, the taste in another, the smell in a third, and the tactual qualities in a fourth, the group as a whole never making its appearance in any one consciousness ? Evidently Clifford's " bridge " rests upon an obliteration of the distinction between mind and brain. His argument conceives of the concomitance of mind and brain after a material analogy ; and What is Parallelism f " 329 we are inclined to view it as satisfactory only because the natural man is ever ready to materialize mind, to think of it as being there where the brain is, and as related to the brain somewhat as the one side of a door is related to the other. " It would be an amazing accident," writes Hoffding, " if, while the characteristic marks repeated themselves in this way, there were not at the foundation an inner connection." Why this amazement? Clearly because Hoffding assumes that we have abundant evidence, in our experience, of the fact that where there is invariable concomitance there is '• inner connection," i.e. there is substantial identity. But what if the concomitance of mind and brain be of a startlingly different sort from that observed in all these instances ? what if it be a something unique in our experi- ence? Can we assimilate it to the other instances and regard it as explained^ simply by invoking the magic of the word " substance " ? When we do this, we are explaining concomitance of one sort here, by pointing out that there is concomitance of a wholly different sort there, and that there are many instances of the latter. We see instances of concomitance on every hand; what more natural, says Hoffding, than that there should be con- comitance of mind and brain. In any such argument the unique- ness of the latter kind of concomitance is allowed to drop quietly out of sight: concomitance is concomitance — and the nakedness of our fallacy is hidden from our view by a whole apron of fig leaves, such as " substance," " underlying reality," " identity at bottom," " inner connection," " aspects," " inner and outer," "parallelism," and the like. Every one of these carries with it materialistic suggestions, just such suggestions as Clifford was most anxious to strip away from his notion of mind. If we make the concomitance of " ob- ject " and " eject " seem natural by using vague words which sur- reptitiously assimilate " ejects " to " objects," we are solving our problem by annihilating it. It is not worth while to point out at great length that a given fact is unique, and then to expend our ingenuity in showing that it is not unique at all, but may be assimilated to a multitude of other facts and thus given an explanation. The materialistic suggestion in Clifford's words is quite unmis- takable : " The reality which underlies matter, the reality which we perceive as matter, is the same stuff which, being compounded 330 Mind and Matter together in a particular way, produces mind. What I perceive as your brain is really in itself your consciousness, is You ; but then that which I call your brain, the material fact, is merely my per- ception." Where is the reality which we perceive as matter? Where are you, while I am perceiving your brain ? Are you not out there, where I seem to perceive the brain ? If you are not in this direction from my body rather than in that, if you are no nearer to this particular brain than to the brain of a man I never saw and never shall see, how comes it that I am perceiving you^ that you are affecting me^ when I see this brain ? Is the reality or substance of the brain not to be found where the brain is ? Surely the reader can see that Clifford's words draw all their force from a materialistic "outside" and "inside" conception. We have here the philosophy of the plain man forced to do service in a new field, but equipped with all its old arms and accoutrements. The "bridge," then, that is to unite consciousness with cere- bral activities turns out to be no better than a materialistic mis- conception. So far from explaining parallelism, if parallelism be rigorously adhered to, and mind and brain really kept distinct, it must fall. Thus we see that, whether we read the works of the antiparallelists or the works of the parallelists, we must be on our guard against being misled into conceiving of parallelism in a materialistic way, i.e. into virtually denying its existence. It is not easy to use language which may not suggest error ; the very word " parallelism " has associations which the doctrine that passes by tliat name is called into being to deny, though it is perhaps a trifle less objectionable than the various other words which may be made to serve the same purpose. Our only safety lies in not allow- ing ourselves to be influenced by the associations which cling to words, but in compelling ourselves to bear in mind just how much a word ought to mean when it is put to a particular use ; that is to say, we are only safe when we bear in mind just how far our facts go. This is a sort of empiricism to which no reasonable man can object. It is, of course, a sort of empiricism that it is by no means easy to carry consistently into effect. It may be objected that the doctrine of parallelism loses both its plausibility and its attractiveness when it is thus rigorously understood. The cerebral chanfje is admitted to be a siorn of the mental phenomenon, but sign and thing signified are relegated to orders of things so different, that all of those figures of speech by What is Parallelism? 331 the aid of which we ordinarily grasp the significance of the rela- tionship are banished. We seem to ourselves to realize with a good deal of vividness what is meant by the parallelism of mind and brain so long as we are permitted to conceive the two as phe- nomena of the one substance, as manifestations of the same under- lying reality, as aspects of one thing, as at bottom identical, as having an inner connection, etc. If we lose these phrases, how shall we conceive it? Minds and bodies seem to float apart, and the imagination is left brooding upon a void. But in considering this objection it is well to remember that it is not merely against the doctrine of parallelism that it can be brought. Material analogies have always been pressed into the service of the attempt to conceive clearly what is assumed to be not material. How can it be otherwise ? The very words we use to denote mental functions of every description have been exhumed from the soil, torn from the world of matter, and they have been transported to another sphere still reeking with earthly odors. It is only the purgatorial fires of reflection that can purge these away, and they sometimes seem unequal to the task. Of what absurdities may one not be guilty when one has described con- sciousness as an "internal light "?i What is suggested to the mind by the word " intuition "? ^ When we speak of conscious- ness as an " agent ," ^ where do we get the meaning of the word ? What fallacies may not lurk behind the ambiguity of the phrase " direction of the attention " ? That one should always and under all circumstances keep one's mind free from the materialistic asso- ciations of such forms of expression, it is too much to expect, but it does not seem unreasonable to expect a man to exercise a jeal- ous watchfulness lest he be tripped up by them. So it is with parallelism. For the purposes of common life, and for the purposes of many special psychological investigations, it may matter little that a man loosely conceives of mind and brain as " manifestations," " aspects," or " sides." But if he takes such conceptions seriously, and builds a theory upon them, he is build- ing upon sand. A man is not in duty bound to be a metaphysician at the breakfast table, but when he does set out to be a metaphysi- cian, he ought to be a good one. 1 Hamilton, "Lectures on Metaphysics," XI. 2 McCosh, "First and Tundamental Truths," Part I, Chapters I-IV. 3 Green, " Prolegomena to Ethics," § 32. CHAPTER XXI THE MAN AND THE CANDLESTICK So much for the general conception of parallelism and its justi- fication through the assumption of an " inner identity." It is now- time that we ask ourselves how the parallelist may know that mind and matter are parallel, even as a matter of "brute fact." The reflective reader will see that, as in the '^ Thousand-and-one Nights " the Story of the Little Hunchback leads on to the Story of the Christian Merchant, and that to the Story of the Sultan's Purveyor, so Clifford's exposition of the doctrine of parallelism, as found in the essay on " Body and Mind," leads naturally to the Story of the Man and the Candlestick. Certain difficulties, which enter and make their bow in the first essay, must be allowed to speak their lines in the second, and must step out into the glare of the footlights, that they may be inspected by the audience. We have seen that the argument for the parallelism of con- sciousness and cerebral activity carefully distinguishes between the external object, the retinal image of that object caused by rays of light from it entering the eye, the cerebral image due to the dis- turbance of the retina, which cerebral image exists in the region of the optic thalami, and the mental image, which constitutes the perception of the object. These four appear to be quite distinct from each other, and to be divisible into two widely different classes. The external object, the disturbed retina, and the stimulated ganglion belong to the one class. They are all matter in motion. They stand to each other in relations of causality, and the investi- gation of the conditions of all three falls within tlie province of the science of mechanics. The mental image, on the other hand, stands by itself. It cannot be given a place in the same series with the others, but it is " parallel " to one of them, to the cerebral image. It is not caused by the disturbance in the ganglion, but first comes into being with it. It is mind, the other three are mat- 332 The Man and the Candlestick 333 ter, and between mind and matter there is a gulf fixed. The only point at which there is any hope that a " bridge " may be thrown across the gulf is at the cerebral disturbance, for there the mind seems to come, if one may use such a phrase, nearest to matter. Let represent the object, RI the retinal image, CI the cerebral image, and MI the mental image, and we may express the relations of the four to each other thus : — O RI CI^ MI We are to conceive 0, JSJ, and CI as belonging to an order of things in which MI can find no place. It can only be parallel to something which has a place in that order. But even in the essay in which Clifford so carefully fixes these distinctions, there occur certain sentences which seem to obliterate them and to confuse the scheme. Thus we are told that "that which I call your brain, the material fact, is merely my perception." ^ Does this mean that is not an inhabitant of a different sphere from that inhabited by Mil Does it mean that it is identical with MI — not identical in the loose sense in which men use the word when they speak of one thing as being the " substance " or " underlying reality " of something else, but identical in a strict sense ? If is not something external, but is really my perception, i.e. is MI^ then what is the relation of CI^ which is supposed to be in the same world with it, and to be a thing of the same kind, to the MI with which it is assumed to be parallel — with which, we seem justified in saying, it has been proved to be parallel, if the argument for parallelism has any weight at all ? The difficulty here suggested does not have to be hunted out from its cover, but stalks boldly into the open and menaces us of its own accord, in Clifford's essay " On the Nature of Things-in- themselves " : — " Suppose that I see a man looking at a candlestick. Both of them are objects, or phenomena, in my mind. An image of the candlestick, in the optical sense, is formed upon his retina, and nerve messages go from all parts of this to form what we call a cerebral image somewhere in the neighborhood of the optic thalami in the inside of his brain. This cerebral image is a certain com- plex of disturbances in the matter of these organs ; it is a mate- 1 " Lectures and Essays," Vol, II, p. 64. 334 Mind and Matter rial or physical fact, therefore a group of my possible sensations, just as the candlestick is. The cerebral image is an imperfect rep- resentation of the candlestick, corresponding to it point for point in a certain way. Both the candlestick and the cerebral image are matter; but one material complex represents the other material complex in an imperfect way. '' Now the candlestick is not the external reality whose exist- ence is represented in the man's mind ; for the candlestick is a mere perception in my mind. Nor is the cerebral image the man's per- ception of the candlestick ; for the cerebral image is merely an idea of a possible perception in my mind. But there is a perception in the man's mind, which we may call the mental image; and this corresponds to some external reality. The external reality hears the same relation to the mental image that the (^phenomenal) can- dlestick hears to the cerehral image. Now the candlestick and the cerebral image are both matter ; they are made of the same stuff. Therefore the external reality is made of the same stuff as the man's perception or mental image, that is, it is made of mind-stuff. And as the cerebral image represents imperfectly the candlestick, in the same wa}^ and to the same extent the mental image repre- sents the reality external to his consciousness. Thus in order to find the thing-in-itself which is represented by any object in my consciousness such as a candlestick, I have to solve this question in proportion, or rule of three : — As the physical configuration of my cerebral image of the object, is to the physical configuration of the object, so is my perception of the object (the object regarded as complex of my feelings) to the thing-in-itself." ^ It is extremely desirable that we should get these several entities and their relations quite clear. According to the parallelistic scheme, we may try to represent them in the following formula : — C'V RT O RI CI M'V MI 1 Op. rit., pp. 85, 80. It is not necessary to suppose that Clifford occupies a dif- ferent standpoint in his two essays. The essay on " Body and Mind " wna printed in the Fortnifjhtly lieviexo, December, 1874 ; that on " The Nature of Thin