[Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 1, No. 18, September 1, 1904. For the relation between this essay and those which follow, cf. below, A World of Pure Experience, § 3 ¶ 5. Ed.]
Thoughts
and things
are names for two sorts of object, which common sense will always find contrasted and will always practically oppose to each other. Philosophy, reflecting on the contrast, has varied in the past in her expectations of it, and may be expected to vary in the future. At first, spirit and matter,
soul and body,
stood for a pair of equipollent substances quite on a par in weight and interest. But one day Kant undermined the soul and brought in the transcendental ego, and ever since then the bipolar relation has been very much off its balance. The transcendental ego seems nowadays in rationalist quarters to stand for everything, in empiricist quarters for almost nothing. In the hands of such writers as Schuppe, Rehmke, Natorp, Münsterberg — at any rate in his earlier writings, Schubert-Soldern and others, the spiritual principle attenuates itself to a thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a name for the fact that the content
of experience is known. It loses personal form and activity — these passing over to the content — and becomes a bare Bewussheit or Bewusstsein überhaupt, of which in its own right absolutely nothing can be said. (Essay I ¶ 1)
I believe that consciousness,
when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing soul
upon the air of philosophy. During the past year, I have read a number of articles whose authors seemed just on the point of abandoning the notion of consciousness, and substituting for it that of an absolute experience not due to two factors. But they were not quite radical enough, not daring enough in their negations. For twenty years past I have mistrusted conscousness
as an entity: for seven or eight years past I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded. (Essay I ¶ 2)
Essay I, n. 1: Articles by Baldwin, Ward, Bawden, King, Alexander, and others. Dr. Perry is frankly over the border. ↩
To deny plumply that consciousness
exists seems so absurd on the face of it — for undeniably thoughts
do exist — that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. Consciousness
is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known. Whoever blots out the notion of consciousness from his list of first principles must still provide in some way for that function's being carried on. (Essay I ¶ 3)
Essay I, n. 2:
[Similarly, there is no activity of
See below, pp. 170 ff., note. Ed.] ↩consciousness
as such.
I.
My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff pure experience,
then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its terms
becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known. This will need much explanation before it can be understood. The best way to get it understood is to contrast it with the alternative view; and for that we may take the recentest alternative, that in which the evaporation of the definite soul-substance has proceeded as far as it can go without being yet complete. If neo-Kantism has expelled earlier forms of dualism, we shall have expelled all forms if we are able to expel neo-Kantism in its turn. (Essay I § 1 ¶ 1)
Essay I § 1, n. 1: In my Psychology I have tried to show that we need no knower other than the passing thought.
[Principles of Psychology, vol. I, pp. 338 ff.] ↩
For the thinkers I call neo-Kantian, the word consciousness to-day does no more than signalize the fact that experience is indefeasibly dualistic in structure. It means that not subject, not object, but object-plus-subject is the minimum that can actually be. The subject-object distinction meanwhile is entirely different from that between mind and matter, from that between body and soul. Souls were detachable, had separate destinies; things could happen to them. To consciousness as such nothing can happen, for, timeless itself, it is only a witness of happenings in time, in which it plays no part. It is, in a word, but the logical correlative of content
in an Experience of which the peculiarity is that fact comes to light in it, that awareness of content takes place. Consciousness as such is entirely impersonal — self
and its activities belong to the content. To say that I am self-conscious, or conscious of putting forth volition, means only that certain contents, for which self
and effort of will
are the names, are not without witness as they occur. (Essay I § 1 ¶ 2)
Thus, for these belated drinkers at the Kantian spring, we should have to admit consciousness as an epistemological
necessity, even if we had no direct evidence of its being there. (Essay I § 1 ¶ 3)
But in addition to this, we are supposed by almost every one to
have an immediate consciousness of consciousness itself. When the world of outer
fact ceases to be materially present, and we merely recall it in memory, or
fancy it, the consciousness is believed to stand out and to be felt as a kind of
impalpable inner flowing, which, once known in this sort of experience, may
equally be detected in presentations of the outer world. The moment we try to
fix our attention upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it
is,
says a
recent writer, it seems to vanish. It seems as if we had before us a mere
emptiness. When we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is
the blue; the other element is as if it were diaphanous. Yet it can be
distinguished, if we look attentively enough, and know that there is something
to look for.
Consciousness
(Bewusstheit), says another philosopher, is inexplicable and hardly
describable, yet all conscious experiences have this in common that what we call
their content has this peculiar reference to a centre for which
(Essay I § 1 ¶
4)self
is
the name, in virtue of which reference alone the content is subjectively given,
or appears .... While in this way consciousness, or reference to a self, is the
only thing which distinguishes a conscious content from any sort of being that
might be there with no one conscious of it, yet this only ground of the
distinction defies all closer explanations. The existence of consciousness,
although it is the fundamental fact of psychology, can indeed be laid down as
certain, can be brought out by analysis, but can neither be defined nor deduced
from anything but itself.
Essay I § 1, n. 3: Paul Natorp: Einleitung in die Psychologie, 1888, pp. 14, 112. ↩
Can be brought out by analysis,
this author says. This
supposes that the consciousness is one element, moment, factor — call it what
you like — of an experience of essentially dualistic inner constitution, from
which, if you abstract the content, the consciousness will remain revealed to
its own eye. Experience, at this rate, would be much like a paint of which the
world pictures were made. Paint has a dual constitution, involving, as it does,
a menstruum (oil, size or
what not) and a mass of content in the form of pigment suspended therein. We can
get the pure menstruum by letting the pigment settle, and the pure pigment by
pouring off the size or oil. We operate here by physical subtraction; and the
usual view is, that by mental subtraction we can separate the two factors of
experience in an analogous way — not isolating them entirely, but
distinguishing them enough to know that they are two. (Essay I § 1 ¶ 5)
Essay I § 1, n.
4: Figuratively speaking, consciousness may be said to be the one
universal solvent, or menstruum, in which the different concrete kinds of
psychic acts and facts are contained, whether in concealed or in obvious
form.
G. T. Ladd: Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory,
1894, p. 30. ↩
II
Now my contention is exactly the reverse of this. Experience,
I believe, has no such inner duplicity; and the separation of it into
consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way of
addition — the addition, to a given concrete piece of it, of other sets of
experience, in connection with which severally its use or function may be of two
different kinds. The paint will also serve here as an illustration. In a pot in
a paint-shop, along with other paints, it serves in its entirety as so much
saleable matter. Spread on a canvas, with other paints around it, it represents,
on the contrary, a feature in a picture and performs a spiritual function. Just
so, I maintain, does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one
context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of
consciousness
; while in a different context the same undivided bit of
experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective content.
In a
word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing. And,
since it can figure in both groups simultaneously we have every right to speak
of it as subjective and objective both at once. The dualism connoted by such
double-barrelled terms as experience,
phenomenon,
datum,
Vorfindung
— terms which, in philosophy at any rate, tend
more and more to replace the single-barrelled terms of thought
and
thing
— that dualism, I say, is still preserved in this account, but
reinterpreted, so that, instead of being mysterious and elusive, it becomes
verifiable and concrete. It is an affair of relations, it falls outside, not
inside, the single experience considered, and can always be particularized and
defined. (Essay I § 2 ¶ 1)
The entering wedge for this more concrete way of understanding
the dualism was fashioned by Locke when he made the word idea
stand
indifferently for thing and thought, and by Berkeley when he said that what
common sense means by realities is exactly what the philosopher means by ideas.
Neither Locke nor Berkeley thought his truth out into perfect clearness, but it
seems to me that the conception I am defending does little more than
consistently carry out the pragmatic
method which they were the first to
use. (Essay I § 2 ¶ 2)
If the reader will take his own experiences, he will see what I mean. Let him begin with a perceptual experience, the presentation,
so called, of a physical object, his actual field of vision, the room he sits in, with the book he is reading as its centre; and let him for the present treat this complex object in the common-sense way as being really
what it seems to be, namely, a collection of physical things cut out from an environing world of other physical things with which these physical things have actual or potential relations. Now at the same time it is just those self-same things which his mind, as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus's time downwards has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person's mind. Representative
theories of perception avoid the logical paradox, but on the other hand they violate the reader's sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist. (Essay I ¶ 2 § 3)
The puzzle of how the one identical room can be in two places is at bottom just the puzzle of how one identical point can be on two lines. It can, if it be situated at their intersection; and similarly, if the pure experience
of the room were a place of intersection of two processes, which connected it with different groups of associates respectively, it could be counted twice over, as belonging to either group, and spoken of loosely as existing in two places, although it would remain all the time a numerically single thing. (Essay I § 2 ¶ 4)
Well, the experience is a member of diverse processes that can be followed away from it along entirely different lines. The one self-identical thing has so many relations to the rest of experience that you can take it in disparate systems of association, and treat it as belonging with opposite contexts. In one of these contexts it is your field of consciousness
; in another it is the room in which you sit,
and it enters both contexts in its wholeness, giving no pretext for being said to attach itself to consciousness by one of its parts or aspects, and to outer reality by another. What are the two processes, now, into which the room-experience simultaneously enters in this way? (Essay I § 2 ¶ 5)
Essay I § 2, n. 1: [For a parallel statement of this view, cf. the author's Meaning of Truth, p. 49, note. Cf. also below, pp. 196-197. Ed.] ↩
One of them is the reader's personal biography, the other is the
history of the house of which the room is part. The presentation, the
experience, the that in short (for until we have decided what
it is it must be a mere that) is the last term of a train of
sensations, emotions, decisions, movements, classifications, expectations, etc.,
ending in the present, and the first term of a series of similar inner
operations extending into the future, on the reader's part. On the other hand,
the very same that is the terminus ad quem
of a lot of previous physical operations, carpentering, papering, furnishing,
warming, etc., and the terminus a quo of a lot of
future ones, in which it will be concerned when undergoing the destiny of a
physical room. The physical and the mental operations form curiously
incompatible groups. As a room, the experience has occupied that spot and had
that environment for thirty years. As your field of consciousness it may never
have existed until now. As a room, attention will go on to discover endless new
details in it. As your mental state merely, few new ones will emerge under
attention's eye. As a room, it will take an earthquake, or a gang of men, and in
any case a certain amount of time, to destroy it. As your subjective state, the
closing of your eyes, or any instantaneous play of your fancy will suffice. In
the real world, fire will consume it. In your mind, you can let fire play over
it without effect. As an outer object, you must pay so much a month to inhabit
it. As an inner content, you may occupy it for any length of time rent-free. If,
in short, you follow it in the mental direction, taking it along with events of
personal biography solely, all sorts of things are true of it which are false,
and false of it which are true if you treat it as a real thing experienced,
follow it in the physical direction, and relate it to associates in the outer
world. (Essay I § 2 ¶ 6)
III
So far, all seems plain sailing, but my thesis will probably grow
less plausible to the reader when I pass from percepts to concepts, or from the
case of things presented to that of things remote. I believe, nevertheless, that
here also the same law holds good. If we take conceptual manifolds, or memories,
or fancies, they also are in their first intention mere bits of pure experience,
and, as such, are single thats which act in one context as objects, and
in another context figure as mental states. By taking them in their first
intention, I mean ignoring their relation to possible perceptual experiences
with which they may be connected, which they may lead to and terminate in, and
which then they may be supposed to represent.
Taking them in this way first, we confine the
problem to a world merely thought-of
and not directly felt or seen.
This world, just like the world of percepts, comes to us at first as a chaos of
experiences, but lines of order soon get traced. We find that any bit of it
which we may cut out as an example is connected with distinct groups of
associates, just as our perceptual experiences are, that these associates link themselves with it by
different relations, and that one forms the inner history of a person, while
the other acts as an impersonal objective
world, either spatial and
temporal, or else merely logical or mathematical, or otherwise ideal.
(Essay I § 2 ¶ 1)
Essay I § 3, n.
1: [For the author's recognition of concepts as a co-ordinate realm
of reality, cf. his Meaning and Truth, pp. 42, 195,
note; A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 339-340;
Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 50-57,
66-70; and below, p. 16, note. Giving this view the
name logical realism,
he remarks elsewhere that his philosophy may be
regarded as somewhat eccentric in its attempt to combine logical realism with an
otherwise empiricist mode of thought
(Some Problems of
Philosophy, p. 106). Ed.] ↩
Essay I § 3, n. 2: Here as elsewhere the relations are of course experienced relations, members of the same originally chaotic manifold of non-perceptual experience of which the related terms themselves are parts. [Cf. below, p. 42.] ↩
The first obstacle on the part of the reader to seeing that these
non-perceptual experiences have objectivity as well as subjectivity will
probably be due to the intrusion into his mind of percepts, that third
group of associates with which the non-perceptual experiences have relations,
and which, as a whole, they represent,
standing to them as thoughts to
things. This important function of the non-perceptual experiences complicates
the question and confuses it; for, so used are we to treat percepts as the sole
genuine realities that, unless we keep them out of the discussion, we tend
altogether to overlook the objectivity that lies in non-perceptual experiences
by themselves. We treat them, knowing
percepts as they do, as through and
through subjective, and say that they are wholly constituted of the stuff called
consciousness, using this
term now for a kind of entity, after the fashion which I am seeking to
refute. (Essay I § 3 ¶ 2)
Essay I § 3, n. 3: Of the representative function of non-perceptual experience as a whole, I will say a word in a subsequent article: it leads too far into the general theory of knowledge for much to be said about it in a short paper like this. [Cf. below, pp. 52 ff.] ↩
Abstracting, then, from percepts altogether, what I maintain is, that any single non-perceptual experience tends to get counted twice over, just as a perceptual experience does, figuring in one context as an object or field of objects, in another as a state of mind: and all this without the least internal self-diremption on its own part into consciousness and content. It is all consciousness in one taking; and, in the other, all content. (Essay I § 3 ¶ 3)
I find this objectivity of non-perceptual experiences, this complete parallelism in point of reality between the presently felt and the remotely thought, so well set forth in a page of Münsterberg's Grundzüge, that I will quote it as it stands. (Essay I § 3 ¶ 4)
I may only think of my objects,
says Professor Münsterberg; yet, in my
living thought they stand before me exactly as perceived objects would do, no
matter how different the two ways of apprehending them may be in their genesis.
The book here lying on the table before me, and the book in the next room of
which I think and which I mean to get, are both in the same sense given
realities for me, realities which I acknowledge and of which I take account. If
you agree that the perceptual object is not an idea within me, but that percept
and thing, as indistinguishably one, are really experienced there,
outside, you ought not to believe that the merely thought-of object is hid
away inside of the thinking subject. The object of which I think, and of whose
existence I take cognizance without letting it now work upon my senses, occupies
it definite place in the outer world as much as does the object which I directly
see.
(Essay I § 3 ¶ 5)
What is true of the here and the there, is also true of the now and the then. I know of the thing which is present and perceived, but I know also of the thing which yesterday was but is no more, and which I only remember. Both can determine my present conduct, both are parts of the reality of which I keep account. It is true that of much of the past I am uncertain, just as I am uncertain of much of what is present if it be but dimly perceived. But the interval of time does not in principle alter my relation to the object, does not transform it from an object known into a mental state. ... The things in the room here which I survey, and those in my distant home of which I think,the things of this minute and those of my long-vanished boyhood, influence and decide me alike, with a reality which my experience of them directly feels. They both make up my real world, they make it directly, they do not have first to be introduced to me and mediated by ideas which now and here arise within me .... this not-me character of my recollections and expectations does not imply that the external objects of which I am aware in those experiences should necessarily be there also for others. The objects of dreamers and hallucinated persons are wholly without general validity. But even were they centaurs and golden mountains, they still would be
(Essay I § 3 ¶ 6)off there,
in fairy land, and not inside
of ourselves.
Essay I § 3, n., 4: Münsterberg: Grundzüge der Psychologie, vol. I, p. 48. ↩
This certainly is the immediate, primary, naïf, or practical way of taking our thought-of world. Were there no perceptual world to serve as its reductive,
in Taine's sense, by being stronger
and more genuinely outer
(so that the whole merely thought-of world seems weak and inner in comparison), our world of thought would be the only world, and would enjoy complete reality in our belief. This actually happens in our dreams, and in our day-dreams so long as percepts do not interrupt them. (Essay I § 3 ¶ 7)
And yet, just as the seen room (to go back to our late example) is also a field of consciousness, so the conceived or recollected room is also a state of mind; and the doubling-up of the experience has in both cases similar grounds. (Essay I § 3 ¶ 8)
The room thought-of, namely, has many thought-of couplings with many thought-of things. Some of these couplings are inconstant, others are stable. In the reader's personal history the room occupies a single date — he saw it only once perhaps, a year ago. Of the house's history, on the other hand, it forms a permanent ingredient. Some couplings have the curious stubbornness, to borrow Royce's term, of fact; others show the fluidity of fancy — we let them come and go as we please. Grouped with the rest of its house, with the name of its town, of its owner, builder, value, decorative plan, the room maintains a definite foothold, to which, if we try to loosen it, it tends to return, and to reassert itself with force. With these associates, in a word, it coheres, while to other houses, other towns, other owners, etc., it shows no tendency to cohere at all. The two collections, first of its cohesive, and, second, of its loose associates, inevitably come to be contrasted. We call the first collection of the system of external realities, in the midst of which the room, as real,
exists; the other we call the stream of our internal thinking, in which, as a mental image,
it for a moment floats. The room thus again gets counted twice over. It plays two different rôles, being Gedanke and Gedachtes, the thought-of-an-object, and the object-thought-of, both in one; and all this without paradox or mystery, just as the same material thing may be both low or high, or small and great, or bad and good, because of its relations to opposite parts of an environing world. (Essay I § 3 ¶ 9)
Essay I § 3, n. 5: Cf. A. L. Hodder: The Adversaries of the Sceptic, pp. 94-99. ↩
Essay I § 3, n. 6: For simplicity's sake I confine my exposition to external
reality. But there is also the system of ideal reality in which the room plays its part. Relations of comparison, of classification, serial order, value, also are stubborn, assign a definite place to the room, unlike the incoherence of its places in the mere rhapsody of our successive thoughts. [Cf. above, p. 16.] ↩
As subjective
we say that the experience represents; as objective
it is represented. What represents and what is represented is here numerically the same; but we must remember that no dualism of being represented and representing resides in the experience per se. In its pure state, or when isolated, there is no self-splitting of it into consciousness and what the consciousness is of.
Its subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely, realized only when the experience is taken,
i.e., talked-of, twice, considered along with its two differing contexts respectively, by a new retrospective experience, of which that whole past complication now forms the fresh content. (Essay I § 3 ¶ 10)
The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the
pure
experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or
subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or
existence, a simple that. In this naïf
immediacy it is of course valid; it is there, we act
upon it; and the doubling of it in retrospection into a state of mind and a
reality intended thereby, is just one of the facts. The state of mind,
first treated explicitly as such in retrospection, will stand corrected or
confirmed, and the retrospective experience in its turn will get a similar
treatment; but the immediate experience in its passing is always truth,
practical
truth, something to act on, at its own movement. If the world were then and there to go out like a
candle, it would remain truth absolute and objective, for it would be the
last word,
would have no critic, and no one would ever oppose the thought in
it to the reality intended. (Essay I § 3 ¶
11)
Essay I § 3, n. 7: Note the ambiguity of this term, which is taken sometimes objectively and sometimes subjectively. ↩
Essay I § 3, n. 8: In the Psychological Review for July [1904], Dr. R. B. Perry has published a view of Consciousness which comes nearer mine than any other with which I am acquainted. At present, Dr. Perry thinks, every field of experience is so much fact.
It becomes opinion
or thought
only in retrospection,when a fresh experience, thinking the same object, alters and corrects it. But the corrective experience becomes itself in turn corrected, and thus experience as a whole is a process in which what is objective originally forever turns subjective, turns into our apprehension of hte object. I strongly recommend Dr. Perry's admirable article to my readers. ↩
I think I may now claim to have made my thesis clear. Consciousness connotes a kind of external relation, and does not denote a special stuff or way of being. The peculiarity of our experiences, that they not only are, but are known, which their conscious
quality is invoked to explain, is better explained by their relations — these relations themselves being experiences — to one another. (Essay I § 3 ¶ 12)
IV
Were I now to go on to treat of the knowing of perceptual by
conceptual experiences, it would again prove to be an affair of external
relations. One experience would be the knower, the other the reality known; and
I could perfectly well define, without the notion of consciousness,
what
the knowing actually and practically amounts to — leading-towards, namely, and
terminating-in percepts, through a series of transitional experiences which the
world supplies. But I will
not treat of this, space being insufficient. I will rather consider a few
objections that are sure to be urged against the entire theory as it stands. (Essay I § 4 ¶ 1)
Essay I § 4, n. 1: I have given a partial account of the matter in Mind, vol. X, p. 27, 1885, and in the Psychological Review, vol. II, p. 105, 1895 [partly reprinted in The Meaning of Truth, pp. 43-50]. See also C.A. Strong's article in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol I, p. 253, May 12, 1904. I hope myself very soon to recur to the matter. [See below, pp. 52 ff.] ↩
V
First of all, this will be asked: If experience has not
(Essay I § 5 ¶
1)conscious
existence, if it be not partly made of consciousness,
of
what then is it made? Matter we know, and thought we know, and conscious content
we know, but neutral and simple pure experience
is something we know not
at all. Say what it consists of — for it must consist of something —
or be willing to give it up!
To this challenge the reply is easy. Although for fluency's sake
I myself spoke early in this article of a stuff of pure experience, I have now
to say that there is no general stuff of which experience at large is
made. There are as many stuffs as there are natures
in the things
experienced. If you ask what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the
answer is always the same: It is made of that, of just what appears,
of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not.
Shadworth Hodgson's analysis
here leaves nothing to be desired. Experience is only a collective name for
all these sensible natures, and save for time and space (and, if you like, for
being
) there appears no universal element of which all things are
made. (Essay I § 5 ¶ 2)
Essay I § 5, n. 1: [Cf. Shadworth Hodgson: The Metaphysic of Experience, vol. I, passim; The Philosophy of Reflection, bk. II, ch. IV, § 3. Ed.] ↩
VI
The next objection is more formidable, in fact it sounds quite crushing when one hears it first. (Essay I § 6 ¶ 1)
If it be the self-same piece of pure experience, taken twice
over, that serves now as thought and now as thing
— so the objection runs
— how comes it that its attributes should differ so fundamentally in the two
takings. As thing, the experience is extended; as thought, it occupies no space
or place. As thing, it is red, hard, heavy; but who ever heard of a red, hard or
heavy thought? Yet even now you said that an experience is made of just what
appears, and what appears is just such adjectives. How can the one experience in
its thing-function be made of them, consist of them, carry them as its own
attributes, while in its thought-function it disowns them and attributes them
elsewhere. There is a self-contradiction here from which the radical dualism of
thought and thing is the only truth that can save us. Only if the thought is one
kind of being can the adjectives exist in it
(Essay I § 6 ¶ 2)intentionally
(to use the
scholastic term); only if the thing is another kind, can they exist in it
constituitively and energetically. No simple subject can take the same
adjectives and at one time be qualified by it, and at another time be merely
of
it, as of something only meant or known.
The solution insisted on by this objector, like many other common-sense solutions, grows the less satisfactory the more one turns it in one's mind. To begin with, are thought and thing as heterogeneous as is commonly said? (Essay I § ¶ 3)
No one denies that they have some categories in common. Their
relations to time are identical. Both, moreover, may have parts (for
psychologists n general treat thoughts as having them); and both may be complex
or simple. Both are of kinds, can be compared, added and subtracted and arranged
in serial orders. All sorts of adjectives qualify our thoughts which appear
incompatible with consciousness, being as such a bare diaphaneity. For instance,
they are natural and easy, or laborious. They are beautiful, happy, intense,
interesting, wise, idiotic, focal, marginal, insipid, confused, vague, precise,
rational, causal, general, particular, and many things besides. Moreover, the
chapters on Perception
in the psychology-books are full of facts that
make for the essential homogeneity of thought with thing. How, if subject
and object
were separated by the whole diameter of being,
and had
no attributes and common, could it be so hard to tell, in a presented and
recognized material object, what part comes in thought the sense-organs and what
part comes out of one's own head
? Sensations and apperceptive ideas fuse here so intimately that
you can no more tell where one begins and the other ends, than you can tell, in
those cunning circular panoramas that have lately been exhibited, where the real
foreground and the painted canvas join together.
Essay I § 6, n. 1: Spencer's proof of his Transfigured Realism
(his doctrine that
there is an absolutely non-mental reality) comes to mind as a splendid
instance of the impossibility of establishing radical heterogeneity
between thought and thing. All his painfully accumulated points of
difference run gradually into their opposites, and are full of
exceptions. [Cf. Spencer: Principles of Psychology, part VII, ch. XIX.] ↩
Descartes for the first time defined thought as the absolutely
unextended, and later philosophers have accepted the description as correct. But
what possible meaning has it to say that, when we think of a foot-rule or a
square yard, extension is not attributable to our thought? Of every extended
object the adequate mental picture must have all the extension of the
object itself. The difference between objective and subjective extension is one
of relation to a context solely. In the mind the various extents maintain no
necessarily stubborn order relatively to each other, while in the physical world
they bound each other stably, and, added together, make the great enveloping
Unit which we believe in and call real Space. As outer,
they carry
themselves adversely, so to speak, to one another, exclude one another and
maintain their distances; while, as inner,
their order is loose, and they form a durcheinander in which unity is lost. But to argue from
this that inner experience is absolutely inextensive seems to me little short of
absurd. The two worlds differ, not by the presence or absence of extension, but
by the relations of the extensions which in both worlds exist. (Essay I § 6 ¶ 5)
Essay I § 6, n. 2: I speak here of the complete inner life in which the mind plays freely with its materials. Of course the mind's free play is restricted when it seeks to copy real things in real space. ↩
Does not this case of extension now put us on the track of truth
in the case of other qualities? It does; and I am surprised that the facts
should not have been noticed long ago. Why, for example, do we call a fire hot,
and water wet, and yet refuse to say that our mental state, when it is of
these objects, is either wet or hot? Intentionally,
at any rate, and when
the mental state is a vivid image, hotness and wetness are in it just as much as
they are in the physical experience. The reason is this, that, as the general
chaos of all our experiences gets sifted, we find that there are some fires that
will always burn sticks and always warm our bodies, and that there are some
waters that will always put out fires; while there are other fires and waters
that will not act at all. The general group of experiences that act,
that do not only possess their natures intrinsically, but wear them adjectively
and energetically, turning them against one another, comes inevitably to be
contrasted with the group whose members, having identically the same natures, fail to manifest them in the
energetic
way. I make for myself now an experience of blazing fire; I
place it near my body; but it does not warm me in the least. I lay a stick upon
it, and the stick either burns or remains green, as I please. I call up water,
and pour it on the fire, and absolutely no difference ensues. I account for all
such facts by calling this whole train of experiences unreal, a mental train.
Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks; mental water is what won't
necessarily (though of course it may) put out even a mental fire. Mental knives
may be sharp, but they won't cut real wood. Mental triangles are pointed, but
their points won't wound. With real
objects, on the contrary,
consequences always accrue; and thus the real experiences get sifted from the
mental ones, the things from out thoughts of them, fanciful or true, and
precipitated together as the stable part of the whole experience-chaos, under
the name of the physical world. Of this our perceptual experiences are the
nucleus, they being the originally strong experiences. We add a lot of
conceptual experiences to them, making these strong also in imagination, and
building out the remoter parts of the physical world by their means; and around
this core of reality the world of laxly connected fancies and mere rhapsodical
objects floats like a bank of clouds. In the clouds, all sorts of rules are
violated which in the core are kept. Extensions there can be indefinitely
located; motion there obeys no Newton's laws. (Essay I § 6 ¶ 6)
Essay I § 6, n.
3: [But there are also mental activity trains,
in which thoughts do
work on each other.
Cf. below, p. 184, note. Ed.] ↩
VII
There is a peculiar class of experience to
which, whether we take them as subjective or
as objective, we assign their several natures as
attributes, because in both contexts they affect
their associates actively, though in neither
quite as strongly
or as sharply as things affect
one another by their physical energies. I
refer here to appreciations, which form an ambiguous
sphere of being, belonging with emotion
on the one hand, and having objective value
on the other, yet seeming not quite inner nor
quite outer, as if a diremption had begun but had not made itself complete.
Essay I § 7, n. 1: [This topic is resumed below, pp. 137 ff. Ed.] ↩
Experiences of painful objects, for example, are usually also painful experiences; perceptions of loveliness, of ugliness, tend to pass muster as lovely or as ugly perceptions; intuitions of the morally lofty are lofty intuitions. Sometimes the adjective wanders as if uncertain where to fix itself. Shall we speak of seductive visions or of visions of seductive things? Of healthy thoughts or of thoughts of healthy objects? Of good impulses, or of impulses towards the good? Of feelings of anger, or of angry feelings? Both in the mind and in the thing, these natures modify their context, exclude certain associates and determine others, have their mates and incompatibles. Yet not as stubbornly as in the case of physical qualities, for beauty and ugliness, love and hatred, pleasant and painful can, in certain complex experiences, coexist. (Essay I § 7 ¶ 2)
If one were to make an evolutionary construction of how a lot of
originally chaotic pure experience became gradually differentiated into an
orderly inner and outer world, the whole theory would turn upon one's success in
explaining how or why the quality of an experience, once active, could become
less so, and, from being an energetic attribute in some cases, elsewhere lapse
into the status of an inert or merely internal nature.
This would be the
evolution
of the psychical from the bosom of the physical, in which the
esthetic, moral and otherwise emotional experiences would represent a halfway
stage. (Essay I § 7 ¶ 3)
VIII
But a last cry of non possumus will
probably go up from many readers. All very pretty as a piece of
ingenuity,
they will say, but our consciousness itself intuitively
contradicts you. We, for our part, know that we are conscious. We
feel our thought, flowing as a life within us, in absolute contrast
with the objects which it so unremittingly escorts. We can not be faithless to
this immediate intuition. The dualism is a fundamental datum: Let no man join what God has put asunder.
(Essay I § 8 ¶ 1)
My reply to this is my last word, and I greatly grieve that to
many it will sound materialistic. I can not help that, however, for I, too, have
my intuitions and I must obey them. Let the case be what it may in others, I am
as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which
I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when
scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing.
The I think
which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is
the I breathe
which actually does accompany them. There are other internal facts besides breathing
(intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a word in my
larger Psychology), and these increase the assets of consciousness,
so
far as the latter is subject to immediate perception; but breath, which was
ever the original of spirit,
breath moving outwards, between the glottis
and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have
constructed the entity known to them as consciousness. That entity is
fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the
concrete are made of the same stuff as things are. (Essay I § 8 ¶ 2)
Essay I § 8, n. 1: [Principles of Psychology, vol. I, pp. 299-305. Cf. below, pp. 169-171 (note).] ↩
I wish I might believe myself to have made that plausible in this article. In another article I shall try to make the general notion of a world composed of pure experiences still more clear. (Essay I § 8 ¶ 3)