SPACE, TIME, AND DEITY SPACE-TIME AND DEITY THE GIFFORD LECTURES AT GLASGOW 1916-1918 BY S. ALEXANDER F.B.A., Hon. LL.Dm D.Litt., Litt.D. HON. FELLOW OF BALLIOL AND LINCOLN COLLEGES, OXFORD HON. PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. II THE HUMANITIES PRESS NEW YORK COPYRIGHT First Edition 1920 Reprinted 1927 REPRINTED, 1950 BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT WITH THE MACMILLAN COMPANY CONTENTS BOOK III THE ORDER AND PROBLEMS OF EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE CHAPTER I The Clue to Quality A. Mind and its Neural Basis Introductory .... Identity of mental with its neural process Consciousness something new in life Consciousness not an epiphenomenon . No parallelism of neural and mental processes Causality between mind and brain Animism, (i) The argument from meaning (2) The argument from fusion . Unity of consciousness . Divided consciousness and the unconscious 3 4 6 8 9 12 13 18 22 25 B. The Apprehension of other Minds Acquired not by analogy but direct experience . The experience is of sociality . The grades of such experience . 3i 32 36 VI SPACE, TIME, AND DEITY CHAPTER II The Order of Empirical Qualities A. A Formula for Space-Time PAGE Time as the mind of Space . . . - 3^ Grounds of this formula. The relation of point-instants to one another . . . • • • 39 Complexities of detail . . •-. • • 41 Mind a form of Time, not Time a form of mind . . 43 B. The Order of Qualities Qualities as emergents . . . . • 45 Time as the generator of qualities . . • -47 Space -Time anterior to material things. Misconceptions superseded . . . • • .48 Matter ........ 52 Secondary qualities. * Permanent secondary qualities ' . -55 Life .61 Entelechy. The antithesis of mechanical and vital . . 64 Summary. * Minds ' of various levels differ in kind . . 6j Corollaries . . . . . . -7° CHAPTER III The Empirical Problems How the problems arise The problems stated . . . . 74 75 CHAPTER IV Mind and Knowing A. The Cognitive Relation Cognition as an instance of compresence. Problem T. Images and memory. Analogues 81 83 CONTENTS vii PAG* Comparison of this result with direct experience . . 87 Mind never an object to itself . . . . .89 The selectiveness of mind. Problem III. . . .90 Things and objects . . . . . 92 Alleged reference in cognition to something behind presentation 95 Aspects of selectiveness . . . . . 99 Corollaries: (1) Various kinds of compresence. (2) Extension to lower levels. (3) Higher existents than mind. (4) The object not dependent on the mind . . . 102 B. Mind and Body Experience of the body in knowing . . . .107 The searchlight view of knowing. Its shortcoming . .109 CHAPTER V Mind and its Acts Mental acts responses to objects . . . .116 Mind made up of conations . . . . .118 Practical and theoretical conation . . . .120 Feeling . . . . . . .122 The contents of the mental act : empirical determinations of categorial characters . . . . .126 The spatio-temporal mental correlate of the quality of sensa- tion. Problem II. . . . . .128 The universal element in sensation . . . -131 Intensity of sensing . . . . , .132 Has thinking intensity ? . . . . • *35 Summary . . . , . . -137 Secondary qualities and the mind. Secondary qualities and the sense-organs . . . . . .138 PAGE H3 H4 148 I50 1 55 158 160 161 164 viii SPACE, TIME, AND DEITY CHAPTER VI The Ways of Apprehending Categories and Qualities The question ...... Intuition of Space and Time . . . Cautions against misunderstanding The unity of mind ..... Intuition and enjoyment of the categories — Substance, Causality 15 Causality as between mind and things . Apprehension of matter .... Apprehension of secondary qualities. Intrinsic extension and extent ...... Intensity of sensum intuited . . Extent of sensum ..... History of ' extensity.' Place as " partial content " of sensation 165 Remarks on space-perception — Motor sensations. Local signs as peripheral . . . . . . . 168 Apprehension of life . . . . . 1 70 Apprehension of foreign life . . . . 174 Apprehension of mind . . . . . .176 Order of growth of the forms of apprehension . . 177 Supplementary Note. On Localisation . . .178 CHAPTER VII Appearances Thing as synthesis of appearances. Problem III. . .183 The kinds of appearances . . . . .184 Variations of real appearances : (1) due to position in place and time of percipient ; (2) due to varying sensitiveness . 187 Mere appearances. Problem IV. . . . .191 Variation in primary qualities. Real appearances. Reason of the appearance . . . . . .192 CONTENTS Mere spatial appearances How there can be mistakes in space-perception The superiority of touch Correctives of defects of intuition IX PAGE 197 200 203 205 CHAPTER VIII Illusion and Ideas Illusory appearances. Problem IV. .... 209 The source of illusory appearances . . . .211 Their non-mental character ; and how they are possible . 213 * Unreality ' of illusions . . . . .216 Memory-appearances . . . . .218 Constructive imagination . . . . .219 Assumptions and unrealities ..... 222 Appearances in mind itself . . . . .225 Public and private, personal and impersonal, experience. Inter- subjective intercourse : its function . . . 227 Supplementary Note. On the Possibility of Many Spaces or Times . . . . . . . 233 CHAPTER IX Value A. Tertiary Qualities in General Values arise from amalgamation of mind with objects. Secondary and tertiary qualities . . . . .236 Appreciations arise from the community of minds . . 239 The character of the object of value .... 241 The experience of values. Values are not qualities . . 243 The reality of values . . . . . . 244 SPACE, TIME, AND DEITY B. Truth and Error Reality and truth ..... Belief ....... The object of judging ..... What makes truth true. Not correspondence to reality. But coherence. What a science is Coherence as determined by reality Incoherence and real opposition Truth and error related to mind, Truth and reality . No truth or error for a mere individual Error as the oblique judgment of reality Progress in truth. No degrees of truth or reality ; but of perfection ...... Pragmatism Mental propositions. Mental error The science of mind ..... Logic ....... C. Goodness and Evil Difference of goodness and truth Nature of morality Goodness and the good Union of mind and objects in goodness . Moral evil .... Progress in morals Morality not self-contradictory . Good and evil in general Moral values .... D. Beauty and Ugliness Meaning of beauty .... Beauty partly real, partly illusory. Natural beauty Contrast with illusion .... 287 287 290 CONTENTS xi PAGE Beauty due in part to mind . . . . . .291 Beauty and coherence ...... 293 Beauty implies coherence of minds . . . . 294 E. The Relations of the Tertiary Qualities Goodness as inclusive . . . . . 297 Beauty as inclusive ...... 298 All values included in truth . . . . . 299 F. Value in General Tertiary qualities as (1) relations ; (2) typical ; (3) social . 302 Reflective and instinctive value. Economic values . . 304 Value in general. Problem VI. .... 307 Darwinism and value ...... 309 The range of value. A lacuna . .310 Corollaries . . . . . , .313 CHAPTER X Freedom Freedom as determination in enjoyment. Problem V. . . 3 1 5 Verification from experiences of freedom and unfreedom. Con- firmatory exceptions. Lower and higher freedom . . 316 Freedom and preference . . . • . 321 Freedom and prediction. The limits of prediction. The cal- culator of Laplace ..... 323 Freedom and necessity. Freedom not indetermination . -. 329 Other mistaken criteria . . . . • • 331 Universality of freedom . . . • • 332 Summary of the Empirical Problems . . . 333 Supplementary Note. Have all the Forms of Existence existed always? . . • • • • -33^ Xll SPACE, TIME, AND DEITY BOOK IV DEITY than mind CHAPTER I Deity and God Two ways of defining God Method Deity the next higher empirical quality Extension of the conception of deity Deity not spirit Theories of God as a spirit God as universe possessing deity Personification of this conception : (a) (b) Infinite God God's infinitude. We are finitely infinit God as actual . God and other infinites. Unqualified qualified infinites . Finite gods and infinite God How can a variable God be the whole finite gods and infinite deity The world-soul Comparison with the notion of an Absolute Spirit finite god e ; God infinitely infinite nfinites actual ; but not universe ? Blending of PAGE 341 343 345 347 349 350 352 354 356 358 361 362 365 366 368 369 CHAPTER II Deity and the Religious Sentiment The religious sentiment and its object The nature of its object. Not a mere imagination How a future quality can affect us 373 375 378 CONTENTS Xlll PAGE 380 Assurance of God and of foreign minds . Religious criteria of the conception of God. (1) God greater than man ; (2) universal ; (3) different in quality from man ; (4) responsive to man, and worthy of man's trust . 382 Theism for religion and speculation. Its strength, and weakness 388 Pantheism ....... 392 Is the present conception theistic or pantheistic ? Transcend- ence and immanence of God . . . . 394 Reflective notions of religion. Is God creative ? God's father- hood. God's supposed timelessness : its difficulties for theism ; and for pantheism .... 396 CHAPTER III Deity and Value The approach to deity . . . . . 402 Religion and conduct. Religion not an outgrowth from morality 404 Deity and goodness. Deity not a value but a quality . . 408 The communal element in religion . .• . .411 Deity on the side of goodness. Comparison with life . .412 Faith in the conservation of value. Religion as faith in deity . 416 Conservation of evil . . . . . • 4!9 The problem of evil . . . . . 42° Immortality . . . . . • 423 Deity and feeling. Difference of God and finites in respect of feeling. Summary . . . . . 425 A brief index ....••• 42** INDEX 43i BOOK III THE ORDER AND PROBLEMS OF EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE VOL. II CHAPTER I THE CLUE TO QUALITY A. Mind and its Neural Basis Empirical things are complexes of space-time with their introduc- qualities ; and it is now my duty to attempt to show how tory* the different orders of empirical existence are related to each other, and in particular to explain more precisely the nature of qualities which hitherto have merely been described as being correlative with their underlying motions, the exact nature of this relation having been left over for further consideration. To do this is the second and perhaps the more difficult of the two problems assigned to metaphysics in the Introduction. The first was to describe the fundamental or a priori elements of experience. The second was to explain what empirical existence is and to indicate those relations among empirical existences which arise out of the a priori features of all existence, if any such can be discovered. In making this attempt I am met by a particular difficulty. My principal object is to ask whether minds do not fall into their appropriate place in the scale of empirical existence, and to establish that they do. It would be most con- vincing if minds were first mentioned in their place at the end of the scale. But this procedure would compel me to use conceptions which would remain difficult until their application to minds was reached. Moreover, the nature of mind and its relation to body is a simpler problem in itself than the relation of lower qualities of existence to their inferior basis ; and for myselr it has afforded the clue to the interpretation of the lower levels of existence. EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. Ill Identity of mental with its neural process. I shall therefore adopt a method of exposition (not of demonstration) which partakes of compromise, and shall preface the inquiry with two problems as to mind, the solution of which can be used as a clue and a means of simplification. The one problem is the relation of mind to the living organism with which, or with a part of which, it is correlated. The other is the relation of minds to one another. I shall then be able to state a hypothesis as to Space-Time and the kinds of empirical existence, — matter, life, mind, to name the most obvious distinctions, — which arise within the one Space-Time. Mind is at once the case which most urgently forces on our attention the problem of quality and at the same time offers the readiest means for its solution. For our mind is experienced by us as a set of connected processes which have the character of being mental, possessing the quality of ' mentality/ or as I shall most frequently say, the character of consciousness. Whether there is any department of mind, which, remaining mind, may be said to be unconscious, and in what sense this is true, is a question T shall defer for the present. Any one who wishes can substitute for the quality of consciousness the quality of being mind, and can, if he pleases, continue to think of mentality as something less specified than consciousness. A mind, then, is for immediate experience a thing or organisation of processes with this distinctive property of being mind, and, however much interrupted it may be, it is normally linked up by memory in its various forms. Under consciousness I include without further ado those vague and indistinct mental processes on the extreme margin of consciousness which are some- times described as subconscious, such as, in general, the tone of the organic sensations when we are occupied with external events. Such then is mind as we experience it. But we experience also our bodies, and, moreover, in the organic and motor sensations, such as hunger and breath- ing and the like, we experience our bodies as alive, while they are also experienced by touch and sight, etc., as being physical things of the order of external things. And, as CH. I. A MIND AND ITS NEURAL BASIS we have seen in a previous chapter, experience leads us on to connect our mental processes with our body, and in particular with our central nervous system, and more specifically still with a certain part of our brain, and to localise our mental processes in the same places and times1 as certain neural processes. We thus become aware, partly by experience, partly by reflection, that a process with the distinctive quality of mind or conscious- ness is in the same place and time with a neural process, that is, with a highly differentiated and complex process of our living body. We are forced, therefore, to go beyond the mere correlation of the mental with these neural processes and to identify them. There is but one process which, being of a specific complexity, has the quality of consciousness ; the term complexity being used to include not merely complexity in structure or constitution of the various motions engaged, but also intensity, and above all unimpeded outlet, that is, con- nection with the other processes or structures with which the process in question is organised. For failure in intensity may mean failure of an otherwise sufficiently complex process to be conscious, and so may any cause which disconnects it from the rest of the neural processes which in their connection give us mind. Correlation is therefore an inadequate and misleading word to describe the relation of the mental to the corresponding neural process, and is only used provisionally so long as the two are separated from one another. In truth, according to our conception, they are not two but one. That which as experienced from the inside or enjoyed is a conscious process, is as experienced from the outside or contem- plated a neural one. When we speak of them separately it is that we consider the .same process first in respect of the character which allies it with simpler vital processes, and second in respect of the new quality which emerges at this higher stage of vital complexity. It has then to be accepted as an empirical fact that a neural process of a certain level of development possesses the quality of consciousness and is thereby a mental process ; and, 1 For the qualifications as to position in Time see vol. i. pp. 130 ff. 6 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. in alternately, a mental process is also a vital one of a certain order. Conscious- Now it is not the character of being vital that gives the nesssome- mental process its individuality, but its new quality of thing new .. r . T ' ' . ■% r in life. mentality or consciousness. Let us take as examples or vitality such operations as digestion or breathing or secretion. There is no reason that I know for not reckoning with them physiological reflex action or any ■ neural process not attended with consciousness or mind. But while mental process is also neural, it is not merely neural, and therefore also not merely vital. For, that mind should emerge, there is required a constellation of neural or other vital conditions not found in vital actions which are not mental. To use the word which Mill has made familiar, mind requires, as a fact of experience, a collocation of conditions which constitutes something new. What that collocation is, might be very difficult for any one but a physiologist to say, and perhaps not possible completely for him. I take it that in the main what determines the difference of the psychical from the merely physiological process is its locality in the nervous system, implying as this does the special structure of the living nervous elements in that locality. It may still be open for discussion at what level in the brain-structure consciousness is found, whether it may attend processes in some of the higher ganglia or whether it belongs ex- clusively to the cerebral cortex, or whether, again, it is not different if it belongs to a lower and a higher level in the cortex itself. But assuming that the conception of local- isation of mental functions in specific regions of the brain is physiologically correct,1 we may safely regard locality of the mental process as what chiefly makes it mental as distinct from merely neural, or what distinguishes the different sorts of mental processes from one another. This is, however, a subsidiary matter for our purposes. i Always of course with the proviso alluded to before (Bk. I. ch. iii. vol. i. p. 1 08), that the localisation of functions in a part of the brain does not mean that only that part of the brain is concerned in subserving the function, but only that it ia the part principally so concerned. CH.I.A MIND AND ITS NEURAL BASIS 7 What counts is, that without the specific physiological or vital constellation there is no mind. All less complex vital constellations remain purely vital. Thus not all vital processes are mental. There is not, or not necessarily, to each neurosis a corresponding psychosis. The equiva- lent proposition is, that while all psychoses are neuroses, the psychoses imply the emergence of a new feature, that of mind. It would follow that mental process may be expressible completely in physiological terms but is not merely physiological but also mental. Its resolution into physiological terms may be infinitely difficult, and even if it can be performed it remains that the statement of these conditions only means mental action because we are already acquainted with the fact of their mentality. To put the matter in different terms : suppose we regard the description of mind as a chapter of physiology ; it would still be the physiology of mental action ; we should still be attending to this kind of physiological constellation because it is the basis of mind, and should be directed to it from psychology. Nor, as we shall see later, could any physiological knowledge of the physiological constellation implied in a mental action enable us to predict that it would have the mental quality. Mental process is therefore something new, a fresh creation, which, despite the possibility of resolving it into physiological terms, means the presence of so specific a physiological constitution as to separate it from simpler vital processes. I do not mean, to take a particular and interesting case, that the foresight of ends as distinguished from mere vital purposiveness, is not also vital. Every idea of an end to be gained, every thought of a universal, or of a combination to be made executive by some invention, I shall assume to be also a physiological process. I mean that such processes though they may be reduced to the class of vital processes are so distinct from the remainder of the class that they hold a privileged position in it. Precisely in the same way the king is a man and belongs to the same class with his subjects. But he is not one of his subjects. Abt Vogler in Browning's poem declares of the musician 8 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE „k. hi " that out of three sounds he frames not a fourth sound but a star." Out of certain physiological conditions nature has framed a new quality mind, which is there- fore not itself physiological though it lives and moves and has its being in physiological conditions. Hence it is that there can be and is an independent science of psychology, and that the translation of mental processes into their physiological counterparts follows the lead of the more primary description of mind. Mind is thus at once new and old. No physiological constellation explains for us why it should be mind. But at the same time, being thus new, mind is through its physiological character continuous with the neural processes which are not mental. It is not something distinct and broken off from them, but it has its roots or foundations in all the rest of the nervous system. It is in this sense that mind and mental process are vital but not merely vital. conscious- Hence it follows that we are entitled summarily neas not an to dismiss the conception that mind is but an inert accompaniment of neural process, a kind of aura which surrounds that process but plays no effective part of its own : the doctrine that mind is an epiphenomenon of nervous process, which nervous process would continue to work equally well if mind were absent. The doctrine is not simply to be rejected because it supposes some- thing to exist in nature which has nothing to do, no purpose to serve, a species of noblesse which depends on the work of its inferiors, but is kept for show and might as well, and undoubtedly would in time be abolished. It is to be rejected because it is false to empirical facts. The mental st.ate is the epiphenomenon of the neural process. But of what neural process? Of its' own neural process. But that process possesses the mental character, and there is no evidence to show that it would possess its specific neural character if it were not also mental. On the contrary, we find that neural processes which are not mental are not of the same neural order as those which are. A neural process^does not cease to be mental and remain in all respects the same neural menon. CH. I. A MIND AND ITS NEURAL BASIS process as before. Even if it remains in the same place, its connection with the rest of the brain is in some way disturbed, and it cannot proceed freely on its course. The neural process which carries thought becomes changed into a different one when it ceases to carry thought. All the available evidence of fact leads to the conclusion that the mental element is essential to the neural process which it is said to accompany by way of embellishment, and is not accidental to it, nor it in turn indifferent to the mental feature. Epiphenomenalism is a mere fallacy of observation.1 It is otherwise with the other well-known doctrines of No parallel- the relation of body and mind. The statement which has i8m °f i . i_ • i .... neural and been given above is by no means new in principle nor mental for that matter in its particular form. It is a species of ProceMe'- the identity doctrine of mind and body, maintaining that there are not two processes, one neural, the other mental, but one. We shall do well to deal shortly with these other doctrines, not in order to treat the subject with thorough- ness but to defend it sufficiently for our objects against the rival conceptions, or at least to exhibit the contrast between it and these conceptions. The mental process and its neural process are one and the same existence, not' two existences. As mental, it is in my language enjoyed by the experient ; as neural it is contemplated by an outsider or may be contemplated in thought by the experient himself. There can therefore be no parallelism between the series of mental and the series of neural or physiological events, such as is postulated by the strict theory of so-called psychophysical parallelism. That theory was devised to give expression to the complete disparity of the merely physiological and the mental, and the reason for it disappears so soon as it is 1 Mr. Bosanquet has an admirable sentence (Falue and Destiny of the Individual, London, 191 3, p. 3) summing up the results of his previous treatment of the subject (Lect. v.) in his preceding volume. " It seems to me that the fertile point of view lies in taking some neuroses — not all — as only complete in themselves by passing into a degree of psychosis." See also the rest of the paragraph, which is too long to quote, where it is however taken for granted that the activity of mind is non-spatial. io EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE „k. m recognised that what corresponds to the mental is not merely physiological but the bearer of a new quality. It solved or evaded the problem by regarding the mental series as entirely independent of the neural and yet in precise correspondence therewith. The difficulties of establishing such precise correspondence in detail may be neglected here, and they are probably not insuperable. But it is evident (as Mr. Ward convincingly pointed out1) that an exact correspondence of two completely disconnected series, which do not influence each other, is no more than a restatement of the problem. The only solution it offers is that the problem must be left unsolved. It could therefore at most be accepted for psychological purposes as a compendious statement of the fact that every psychosis has its corresponding neurosis. There still remains the metaphysical question whether the mind whose processes are mental is not a being which interacts with the brain, or whether, as I have urged, the mind is not itself identical with the totality of certain neural processes as they are enjoyed. But even as a psychological convenience, the theory is without justification and superfluous, and moreover false in what it suggests. Psychology is concerned with a parallelism between the mental series and another series of a different order, the series of physical objects of which the mental processes are aware. One of the draw- backs of the order of exposition I am adopting is that I must take for granted what will only be fully clear hereafter (though it has been formulated provisionally in the Introduction), that the object of the mind in any mental process is something non-mental, which is con- templated, while the mental process is enjoyed. To each non-mental object (and there is no mental process which is without its non-mental object, even if it be only a sensum which is the object of sensing, even if it be only the internal condition of the percipient's body as in organic sensation) there corresponds a mental process which has the quality of conscious awareness. As the 1 Naturalism and Agnosticism, Pt. iii. Lect. xi. (vol. ii. ist ed., London, 1899). ch. i. a MIND AND ITS NEURAL BASIS 1 1 object varies, so does the neural process or the mental process vary. But there is no parallelism of the neural and the mental series of which psychology should take account. They are one. Psychology considers the series from the point of view of the experient or enjoyer ; physiology from the point of view of the onlooker, or, if of the experient himself, not in his character of experiencing the mental process but of reflecting on its basis in neural process. I can only account for the admission of a metaphysical miracle as a convenient psychological fiction by supposing that mental processes were believed to have not merely the quality of consciousness, but other qualities disguised under the name of ' content ' which varied with the object. If the sensory object blue or the image of a table is in some way contained in the apprehension of it, doubtless there is an unbridged chasm between the neural process which clearly has no such ' content ' and the mental process which has. No one has indeed imagined that a mental process was itself blue or tabular. Yet these processes are supposed to be qualified correspondingly, or at least to have before them presentations or ideas which are not themselves merely external or a selection from what is external. The lingering tradition of representationism provides a mental process (hence called a mental state) with a mental object. But once we recognise that mental processes have no character, beyond the quality of being mental, other than such as all processes present, intensity or locality or velocity and the like, that is to say, empirical forms of categorial characters, all reason is removed for supposing the mental process to be a different existent from the neural one. That neural process differs with every difference in the object which stimulates it to activity, or upon which it is directed. The neurosis of green occurs for instance in a different place from that of sweet. The neuroses all possess the vital quality but are different configurations of categorial characters. In like manner the psychoses present, corresponding to the qualities of the object, differences in the process-features of the psychosis ; but there is nothing to indicate the 12 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. m difference of quality of the object but these process- features. The separation of the mental process from the neural one is therefore superfluous,, for it is the same process-features which are in the one case enjoyed and in the other contemplated. Ultimately this separation depends upon failing to recognise the distinctness of the mental process from its non-mental object. It is therefore not only superfluous but founded in error. Causality If we do not regard the mind as the connected totality between 0f ftg mental processes and therefore identical with the tTrahi.311 totality of the physiological processes of which they are the presence in enjoyment, the only alternative is some form of animism ; which conceives the mind as an independent entity which acts upon, or is acted upon by, the brain, or operates through it as the instrument of mind. On our view it still remains true that mind and brain interact if the phrase is properly interpreted. Just as we continue to speak of sunrise and sunset, though it is the earth that revolves, so we may continue to say under a certain proviso that the mind, as in an act of will, acts upon the brain directly and produces indirectly movements of the limbs ; or that a stimulus excites the mind through the brain and sets going a train of thought. The proviso under which such language is permissible is that no brain process shall be understood to cause its corresponding mental process and no mental process its corresponding brain process. Let large letters denote the psychical and small ones the neural series. What we have then in fact is a series, Aa, Bb> Q, etc., where some of the small letters may have no corresponding large letter at all. Now A does not cause a but is identical with it ; but A being also a may cause the next member of the series £, and if b is equivalent to B, A causes also B. Strictly speaking, the effect of A is B and of #, b. But in so far as A does not exist without #, A also causes b. And where some of the steps in the causal chain as in willing are purely neural, A causes them because it is itself a neural process a. In like manner no sensory neural process a causes the corre- sponding sensing A, for it actually is that process ; but in ch. i. a MIND AND ITS NEURAL BASIS 13 so far as it is identical with A it may be said to cause the next psychical event B. In this way we may legitimately say that my determination to strike a man causes the blow of my fist ; or that a piece of yellow makes me think of an orange tree in a garden on the Palatine Hill. Just because mind is also vital it can act on my body, and because some neural results of stimulation are also mental, my brain may act upon my mind. There is therefore causality between the members of the mental series and between those of the physical series, and because of the identity of the mental with its physical correspondent there is causality in the sense defined between members of the two series. Needless to say, it is not such interaction of mind Animism, with brain which is implied in the notion of animism. The mind is there distinct from the neural series. But the reasons which have been thought more recently to compel the adoption of animism have, more particularly in the impressive statement of Mr. McDougall,1 been coloured by antagonism to the notion of psychophysical parallelism. The argument has also assumed, or seemed to assume, the alternative to animism to be the so-called associationist conception of mind, according to which mind consists of a number of separate events corresponding to separate objects linked together by associative con- nections. There are sensations or ideas grouped together into wholes by contiguity or similarity. To this correspond on the neural side certain central excitements which are connected by association -fibres. This crude psychology, obsolescent in this country since the article 1 Psychology ' of the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannic a , may fairly be regarded now as obsolete. Mental processes are not grouped into wholes by association but are distinguishable processes within a mental continuum. The agglutinative conception of mind is replaced by the organic one. Mind has its structure and constitution as an animal body has. Moreover, as we have seen, the life of mind is essentially one of 1 Body and Mind, London, 191 1, chs. xix.-xxii. i4 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. m transition, and substantive processes of mind like per- ceptions or images are but the more stable processes corresponding to things in the object world which stand out in the stream, while the transitive ones are the vaguer, but still definite processes, which correspond to the relations among the objects. ' Now, when the notion of psychophysical parallelism is rejected in its natural form and the assumptions of associationism are dismissed, the arguments in favour of animism lose half their persuasive- ness. It will be as well to substantiate this proposition by indicating the considerations which on. our hypothesis of identity modify these arguments. I am able to be shorter on this subject because much of what I have to say has been already said by Mr. Lloyd Morgan in the concluding chapter of his work on Instinct and Experience} The argument is that mind has certain specific char- acters to which there is or even can be no neural counter- part. It is not enough to say that there is no mechanical counterpart, for the neural structure is not mechanical but physiological and has life. Mind is, according to our interpretation of the facts, an 'emergent'2 from life, and life an emergent from a lower physico-chemical level of existence. It may well be that, as some think, life itself implies some independent entity and is indeed only mind in a lower form. But this is a different question, which does not concern us yet. If life is mind, and is a non- physical entity, arguments derived from the conscious features of mind are at best only corroborative, and it is an inconvenience in these discussions that the two sets of arguments are sometimes combined. Accordingly I may neglect such considerations as the selectiveness of mind which it shares with all vital structures. These considerations really obscure the issue. For even if life is an entity of a different order from existences on the 1 Instinct and Experience, London, 191 2. 2 I use the word ' emergent ' after the example of Mr. Lloyd Morgan. It serves to mark the novelty which mind possesses, while mind still remains equivalent to a certain neural constellation. Consequently, it contrasts with the notion that mind is a mere 'resultant* of something dower. The word is used by G. H. Lewes (Problems of Life and Mind, vol. ii. p. 412), as Mr. Lloyd Morgan reminds me. ch. i. a MIND AND ITS NEURAL BASIS 15 purely physical level, it would still be a question whether mind is not so distinct from life as to claim to be a yet higher order of existence. Let us then confine ourselves at present to mind in its character of a conscious being. The important question is whether it must be conceived as discontinuous with the neural structure or (if the phrase be preferred) the neural mechanism. c Meaning/ it is said, has no neural counterpart, but (0 The the use of meaning is the very life-blood of mind. Now ?rr0gmmcnt it is important here to distinguish two senses of meaning, meaning, because the argument for animism has been used by different writers in the two senses. I may mean in the first place an object, as when I point with my finger to a person and say, I mean you. Meaning here signifies reference to an object, and in this sense every conscious process means or refers to an object other than the mental process itself. All mental action implies the relation of a subject to an object ; and it makes no difference whether the object is a perceived one present to the senses ; or an ideal one like a purpose consciously entertained, such as going to London as entertained in idea or in thought ; or even an imaginary object such as *J — 1. What neural (or as it is sometimes irrelevantly asked what mechanical) equivalent can there be for this unique relation? This sense of meaning corresponds to what the logicians call the meaning of a word in extension. On the other hand, meaning may signify what the logician calls intension ; a word is used with a meaning ; a flower may mean for me a person who is fond of it ; " there's pansies, that's for thoughts " ; and in general our minds may have a sensory object before them, but what we mean by it is a thought which has no sensory embodiment. In the words, " when I say religion, I mean the religion of the Church of England as by law established," these two senses of the word meaning seem to be combined, but on the whole it is mainly in the second sense that the word is used. Now meaning in extension raises a quite different problem from meaning in intension ; and that problem is not the question of the relation of mind to its alleged neural basis. It is the question whether the relation of 1 6 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. m the conscious subject to an object which transcends it is unique, or whether it is not, as I shall maintain, found wherever two finites are compresent with each other. It is the problem of what is involved in the knowledge of what is not-mental. To be conscious of an object, to mean it, or to refer to it, may turn out in the end to be nothing but the fact that, to take a particular case, a table excites in my mind a conscious process of perceiving it. Accordingly in this sense of meaning, meaning does not belong here but to a later stage of our inquiry. Nor do I think that it would have seemed relevant were not the neural structure taken as alleged to be mechanical. For if it is a vital structure there is surely nothing very far- fetched in thinking that the stomata of leaves mean some- thing beyond themselves, the air, to which they are adapted. I may then neglect meaning in the extensive sense for the present. (See later, pp. 89 ff.) The other sense of meaning is undoubtedly relevant, and it offers real difficulty. For meaning is a conscious condition of mind. When I use a word, the meaning is in my mind (and of course besides this refers to something not in my mind). What then is meaning ? Any part of a complex whole means for me the rest of the complex. A word, for instance, has been intimately connected with the characters of the things it names, and it means those characters. That is what it is to use a word with a mean- ing. My perception of the word means my thought of what the word stands for. The sight of the orange means for me the feel of it ; the sight of the marble means its coldness. The knight on the chess-board means the moves which I may make with that piece. The symbol „/ — 1 means its mathematical interpretation. Now what is there in meaning so described which prevents- us from believing that the conscious meaning corresponds to or, as I should say, is identical with a certain neural process ? Doubtless if we imagine that our mind is made up of sensations connected together by mere indifferent lines of association, the solution is impossible. But if mental life is mental processes arranged in various complicated patterns, why should not a word set going in my brain, ch.i.a MIND AND ITS NEURAL BASIS 17 and also in my mind, that pattern of process which we call the meaning ? I have answered the question in anticipation when I pointed to the existence of imageless thought, customs of mind which may also be customs in the neural structure, not mere neural statical dispositions, but those neural exercises of a habit which are identical with the consciousness of a thought without its necessary embodiment in sense. When the exercise of the habit is more specific and detailed we may have the meaning turn into an illustration or concrete embodiment of the mean- ing, as when the word horse not only makes me think of horse but of the particular foal whose affection I attach to myself in the country by the offer of sugar. And when the marble looks cold the very essence of the condition of my mind is that the sight process is qualified by the ideal touch process, and the transition from the one to the other is in my mind. Even bare association of the orange with Sicily is more than the fact that I think of Sicily when I see an orange. Orange and Sicily are woven into a complex, of comparatively loose texture indeed as compared with the relation of cold to white in the marble, but still a texture in which the transition from the orange to Sicily is felt as a transition, and not as a mere juxtaposition. When I use a word like 'govern- ment,' a whole complicated neuro-psychical pattern is set going in my mind and brain, which is transitive and elusive, but none the less conscious, and only called transitive because it is wanting in definite detail. I may go on to fill out this transitive outline with the pictures of the coalition ministry. But it is still the elusive complex which stands but as the main occupation of my mind. The figures of the ministers are the fringes of it, not it the fringe of them. Thus mental connections to which correspond neural connections are as much con- scious as what they connect, and meaning remains a unitary whole, while it still possesses its neural counterpart. If meaning is thus neural as well as mental, it follows that a very slight change in an object, or stimulus, may produce an overwhelming difference in the mental response if that change is charged with meaning. The vol. 11 c 1 8 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. m famous telegram argument for animism loses therefore all its force. A telegram * our son is dead ' may find the recipient sympathetic but calm. Alter the word * our ' to 'your,' a trifling change in the stimulus, and the recipient may be overcome with grief. On the other hand, change all the words into French, a large change in the stimulus, and the effect on the recipient is the same as when the telegram was in English. The facts present no difficulty in view of the constitution of the recipient's mind. The little change of a letter makes an enormous change in the meaning of the telegram. But the words mean the same in French as in English. No conclusion in favour of a mind independent of the neural process can be drawn unless we are prepared to say that a spark should physically produce the same effect when it falls on a sheet of iron as when it falls upon a mass of gunpowder, or that a red ball will not cause the same bruise when it hits my body as if it were painted white. (2) The Very different and far weightier are the considerations argument drawn from the phenomena of so-called fusion, that is to from I, * . . fusion. say where two stimuli which would singly produce their corresponding sensations produce, when acting together, a sensation different from either. It is thought that where this occurs there must somewhere in the neural mechanism be compounding of the physical effects : that there can be no compounding of mental states.1 But in some cases at any rate there is said to be no such physical arrangement forthcoming. The subject is a technical one, and I cannot hope, nor am I fully able, to discuss it as it deserves. I desire only to remove a prejudice. It will be best to take a single case, that of so-called binocular fusion. Let the two eyes look at a disc or spot of light, the one eye through a blue the other through a red glass. Sometimes we see a disc of purple, but sometimes we see alternately either blue alone or red alone, in virtue of retinal competition. The possibility of this competition is taken to mean that the two stimuli are conveyed to different 1 The words of W. James (Psychology, vol. i. p. 158) are 'self- compounding of mental facts is inadmissible. ' ch.i.a MIND AND ITS NEURAL BASIS 19 places in the brain and do not compound their effects physically. And yet in spite of this we can see purple on occasion. There is thus an action of the mind in the sensation of purple which has no correspondent in the brain. There is unity in the consciousness without unity in the cerebral neural structure which carries the separate sensations. Many other such facts are described by Mr. McDougall in his chapter on the unity of conscious- ness, in particular those of 'binocular flicker.'1 Mr. Sherrington sums up his account of his experiments on this subject in the striking sentence : " Pure conjunction in time without necessarily cerebral conjunction in space lies at the root of the solution of the problem of the unity of mind."2 Now I confess that if a mental state is also neural in the s*ense I have assumed, it is difficult to understand how the mental states corresponding to the two stimuli can affect each other if there is not physical connection between them somewhere. But in the first place in- hibition between them, as in competition, seems to require some communication between the neural processes which the stimuli set up. In the next place, though there may be no connection between the sensory centres of the two eyes yet the efferent process from each eye is determined from both, as is indicated by the motor reactions of the two eyes.8 Mr. McDougall adds that 1 I quote Mr. McDougalTs account of these phenomena or some of them, and his inference from them. " If the retina is stimulated inter- mittently, the rate of succession of the stimuli may be increased until the subject ceases to perceive any intermittence or flicker of the sensation. This rate of succession is known as flicker-point ; it varies with the intensity of the stimulating light ; but we may take for illustration a case in which flicker-point is reached when the stimulus is repeated twenty times a second. Now if each retina is stimulated intermittently twenty times a second, but in such a way that the stimuli fall alternately on the two retinae, the flicker-point is not changed ; whereas, if the fibres from corresponding points converge to a common centre, flicker-point should be reached when the stimulus falls ten times a second on each retina; for then the centre would still be stimulated twenty times a second " (p. 292). My concern is not with this inference itself but with the further inference to which it leads of the necessity of an intervening soul. 2 C. S. Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (London, 191 1), p. 384. 3 Sherrington, loc. cit. pp. 384 ff. 20 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE „*. m the sensations are localised in the same external place and connects the "identical motor tendencies" of corre- sponding points with Lotze's doctrine that "local signature of the visual sensation is bound up with, or is a function of, the motor tendency excited by stimula- tion of that point."1 Whatever value may attach to Lotze's doctrine, it is at any rate of the greatest im- portance to note that the sensations in question belong to ( ( are referred to ' or c projected to,' are the ordinary, very questionable, phrases) the same external place. Now as long as there is physical connection somewhere, it is not necessary that the connection should be sensory or cerebral and be a conscious one as it is in the associative connections which were mentioned above. The signi- ficance of this will be apparent presently when we come to speak of the unity of consciousness. Even then, it will be asked, how in the absence of composition of the two processes can there be a fusion of the two colours into a new colour purple ? Must this not at least be attributed to the mind apart from its cerebral instrument? The question seems to presume the same misconception (or at least the same contradiction of my conception) which, as I have suggested, leads to the notion of a complete separation, of mere parallelism, of the psychical and the neural series. The assumption seems to be that the two mental processes, sensing blue 'and red, have blue and red for their c content ' or are qualified by those colours ; and in that case it is im- possible to understand how the mental sensation of purple with its different content could arise in the absence of some new neural process resulting from the separate neural processes of blue and red. No wonder the fusion is then attributed to the mind itself. But if mental process is without quality or content save the quality of consciousness and corresponds to its object blue, or red, or what not, in virtue of its locality or the other spatio-temporal characters mentioned before, a different answer is possible and intelligible without difficulty. 1 W. McDougall, Brain, vol. xxxiii., "On the Relations between Corresponding Points of the Two Retinae" (p. 380). ch. i. a MIND AND ITS NEURAL BASIS 21 Granted the union somewhere of the neural processes of blue and red, even if the union be only at a common efferent path, we should say that these neural arrange- ments were the neural arrangements, carrying conscious- ness, which are correlated with the object purple, and that under these circumstances we were conscious of purple. There is no common sensory centre, let us admit, for the different excitements of the corresponding points in the two eyes. This is the arrangement, neural or mental, for seeing purple, when the purple is seen by both eyes in the same place.1 There is another neural arrangement, in that case, for seeing purple when both red and blue stimulate the one eye alone. Yet there is no occasion to postulate an interfering soul. The alterna- tives are not between having a common centre for the two eyes, and assuming something which combines the two sensations into a different one. Both alternatives presuppose subtly that the quality of sensations belongs to the mind and a different one if not produced by external action in a brain centre must be manufactured by the mind. But there is a third alternative.2 If we distinguish the sensing from the sensum, and hold that the sensum is in the external thing, then all our busi- ness is to note the difference in the neural machinery of response (carrying with it the quality not of the sensum but of consciousness) in the binocular in- stance. The brain centres being through the binocular arrangement affected neurally in the manner appropriate to purple, the mind sees purple. The " specific synergy," to use a phrase of Prof. C. Stumpf, is supplied neurally, though not by direct sensory connection, and the mind sees the object to which that specific synergy is^ the appropriately corresponding neural arrangement. What would need explanation is not so much why the 1 There is of course no purple thing present. But neither is there when a disc of red and blue sectors is revolved before the single eye. For the presence of the object when the appropriate nervous arrange- ment is given, see later, ch. iv. A, p. 85. 2 This alternative has been suggested in the Introduction, and remains to be justified. (See later, chs. iv. v.) 22 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. n, mind sees purple under such conditions, but rather why under certain other conditions it sees only either one or other of the component colours. From this point of view there seems to me to be, in a sense not perhaps the same as his, a profound importance in the sentence I have quoted from Mr. Sherrington above. Two simultaneous processes in the mind, not necessarily con- nected at the conscious level, may form a single act of consciousness with an object different from that of either of the two mental processes taken singly. The case of binocular flicker is a different one from the seeing of purple. The physical object is an inter- mittent illumination. The question is when the mind fails to detect the intermittence ; and it appears that in general the result is the same whether the stimulation is binocular or monocular. From Mr. Sherrington's experiments it appears that there is a difference when the rate of intermittence is different in the two sets of stimulations ; but here the objective difference of the sensa affects the sensibility for detection of intermittence. In these experiments also the sensations belong to the same place, and this is intimately connected with the common issue of the reaction from the visual centres. unity of This leads us directly to the problem of the unity of conscious- . . . • . * . ..>.- * , ne85. consciousness : how there can be such unity if the neural counterparts of the mental processes are not, as it is fairly clear is not always the case, united by connecting processes at the level of consciousness. This is one of two problems upon which our statement of the facts may perhaps throw light. The other problem is that of rupture of the unity of consciousness in spite of the existence of neural paths at the conscious level. If, as I have suggested, mental process is also neural there is no discontinuity (I mean disconnection) between those neural processes and processes occurring at lower levels of the nervous system or even of the organism taken as a whole. A conscious neural process may consequently be replaced (I purposely use a vague word to cover all cases) by a lower neural process which is not attended by conscious- ch. i. a MIND AND ITS NEURAL BASIS 23 ness. Nor is it enough to urge that possibly there may be discontinuity in the neural structure itself, for at the bottom of this neural structure there lies, as at the bottom of all finite existences, the indefeasible continuity of its space-time ; and the problem is but deferred to an earlier stage in the history of things. Let us consider first the unity of consciousness. The case of fusion just discussed is enough to show that there may be unity of mind though the component processes are not connected at the conscious level. A still more obvious case is the unity of two experiences which do not fuse and are entirely disparate, such as a vision of trees and the touch of the chair on which I sit. These are disconnected experiences, but they are felt to belong to the one mind. Yet their nervous counterparts, though united by no definite neural connection at the conscious level, so long as they are not noticed to occur together, are part of one neural structure and are physically not dis- connected at some level or other. Though these are united in time they are also connected somewhere in the neural space. Similarly there are gaps in time as that of dreamless sleep, where there is no consciousness in the ordinary interpretation of that word,1 but where through some form of memory the interrupted history of our minds is united across the void. Our memory does not fill up this void but unites, to borrow the phrase once more, the broken edges of our mental life on the two sides of the gap. Thus the problem of mental unity assumes a different character. It is not how there can be mental unity without complete physical unification by lines of conscious connection, but how there can be unity in enjoyment when enjoyments are discontinuous though the neural structure as a whole is continuous. There is enough and to spare somewhere in the neural structure, to provide for everything in the mental life. The puzzle arises from the fact that while all psychoses are neuroses not all neuroses are psychoses. Hume, as I have so often pointed out, used the fact that the intermediate stages of 1 If there is no really dreamless sleep, and no forgetting, the question disappears. 24 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. m a volition are not conscious but purely neural to contro- vert the notion that causality is a mental experience. We have, in other words, to account not so much for the apparent absence of neural connections as for the presence of mental unity though there are neural connections, but not direct mental ones. The fact of mental unity is beyond dispute. Our minds are normally unitary, and no matter how disconnected our experiences may be they are not experienced as merely juxtaposed to make a unity, but as differentiations of that unity. This is the initial and central fact of our mental life expressed by the some- what loose phrase that the mind is sensibly or to experience continuous. Now it is just because the neural structure is (at least relatively) continuous, so that all its parts are physically connected, that there can be unity between divided processes of consciousness, so as to make them belong to one mind. In other words, because conscious processes are parts of a larger whole which is not all of it conscious, in spite of the absence of conscious connections there is still connection.1 This would be sufficient for our purposes, for it turns the flank of the contrary plea that for want of evidence of conscious connection we must assume an independent mind. Still the problem remains of how to understand the fact of experienced mental unity. Unity of substance, we have seen, means belonging to one contour of space-time. The unity of mind should be the unity of one enjoyed space-time. Yet though the mind is aware of its past stages as connected with the present ones, and though at any moment its various experiences belong to the one enjoyed space of the mind, there are gaps in time and gaps in space as it enjoys them, and we know, more- over, that there are such gaps. There are not gaps, 1 We have here a particular case of the general question of how a substance may have different affections which are not themselves directly causally connected. Their connection may lie lower down in the intrinsic- ally simultaneous structure of the thing. They appear consequently to be merely juxtaposed, but they are in the end connected. (See Bk. II. ch. yi. A, vol. i. pp. 276 ff., and Bk. I. ch. iv. vol. i. pp. 135 ff., on mental juxtaposition.) ch. i. a MIND AND ITS NEURAL BASIS 25 as we have seen, in the physical basis taken as part of a larger neural structure. How then are we aware of these gaps in our enjoyment, and so enjoy our mental unity ? The answer cannot be given till we come to learn how Space and Time themselves are apprehended. Various experiences palliate the difficulty but do not remove it. Sometimes we can by memory fill up the intervening time, going over the events between now and an hour ago. We cannot always do so, and never for the interval filled by dreamless sleep. Nor if we could, would the intervals of our memories be completely filled. From the reports of others we learn (as Leibniz observes) that we have continued to exist in sleep and can think of ourselves as existing in the interval, because we in turn have observed others to live in sleep, while from their reports they have not been conscious of the interval. Such experiences supplement but do not provide the direct consciousness we have of a mental unity containing gaps which we enjoy, though these gaps in our mental space and time are unfilled by mental events. In the external world two events of different date and place are observed as connected by a stretch of time or space how- ever much foreshortened. These conditions are not presented in enjoyment. We must leave the problem for the present at this point, to resume it later.1 It is enough to have shown what it really is, and that it offers no support to animism but rather, however difficult of solution, it in fact admits no solution at all unless mind is identical with some physical counterpart and is con- nected by some physical connections which need not necessarily be themselves mental ones, carrying the mental quality. The second of these problems, that of divided Divided consciousness and of the unconscious, presents great eoaK!??' difficulties to the psychologist and requires expert the un- knowledge of special cases for adequate discussion. All con8CIOU8- that I can hope to do here, or need to do, is to indicate on 1 Below, ch. vi. pp. 1 50 f. 26 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. ni what lines a solution might be sought in accordance with the view of identity between the conscious process and its neural correlate ; with the additional principle that such neural counterparts of mental processes are parts of a larger neural structure. The question of divided person- ality is more manageable than that of the unconscious. Whether the personalities alternate or coexist, it would seem that the normal personality, that is the total consciousness, is c dissociated ' ; and it is not difficult to suppose that normal lines of connection between processes which are normally continuous, are for some reason barred or broken. In this way groups of mental pro- cesses with their neural basis are formed which have no complete connection with one another ; though they may and do in certain cases overlap, each for instance using the common speech apparatus. They are comparable to those systematised groups of mental processes which constitute interests, when in persons of normal condition these interests are exercised almost in independence of each other, the week-day mind and the Sunday mind which in many persons seem to have so little to do with each other. Suppose the separation of these interests to become absolute ; each interest would then constitute a separate personality of a limited kind. So in the body politic there are groups which almost ignore each other, and have different standards of feeling and conduct. Such separate personalities are called by a happy term * co- conscious,/ for in their case there is no good evidence to doubt that the split-off group really possesses a conscious- ness of its own, and the one person may treat the other very much as one normal person treats another with whom he has no such bodily alliance. That these co-conscious personalities mean the blocking of normal physical paths of communication (generally no doubt at the conscious level, as where there is actual loss of memory for tracts of a life), but possibly also at lower levels, is indicated by the process of restoration, where that occurs, of the original unity. Such restoration may assume a much more consciously deliberate shape than it probably possesses. Thus in the famous case of ' Miss ch. i. a MIND AND ITS NEURAL BASIS 27 Beauchamp ' and her demon Sally,1 the ingenious physician persuades the demon to abdicate in favour of the rightful possessor of the body. This act of resignation on the part of the demon, who is by no means a good demon, but selfish and somewhat malignant, probably is only a pictorial representation of the fact that the blocked lines of association belonging to the original personality are becoming permeable once more.2 Now where the original unity breaks up into two persons, A and B, and where A, as sometimes occurs, does not happen to be aware of B as a foreign person, A is unconscious of B, but inquiry shows that B is itself a consciousness. A's unconscious turns out to possess a consciousness of its own. But it by no means follows that we may extend this precedent and assume, where- ever what is unconscious can under certain conditions emerge into consciousness, that therefore the unconscious condition was all the while mental. We are here dealing not necessarily with pathological minds, but with the commonest facts of the normal mind. Thus incidents completely forgotten may at some time swim into memory, but must we assume that these processes were all the while preserved, not indeed as conscious but as an unconscious department of the mental ? Dreams, as is now well known, may be an expression of tendencies in the dreamer's mind which cannot be expressed overtly, but which subsequent analysis of the person's mind shows to have been there somehow preserved and seeking expression in the person. Evidence of this sort has become so abundant and has been marshalled with so much skill by Dr. Freud that to many it would seem natural to disregard the scientific scruples of those who in the face of such facts still question whether a truly 1 Dr. Morton Prince's famous case, in The Dissociation of a Personality (New York, 1906). 2 Divided personality then seems to be perfectly explicable on the identity statement. On the other hand, it is difficult to see a reason why, for certain pathological causes, there should be two independent souls controlling parts of one organism, and certainly why in the case of a cure the two souls should become one. How does animism conceive the splitting of a soul or the fusion of two souls ? 28 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. hi unconscious state is ever mental, is ever, that is to say, more than a neural condition which may under appropriate circumstances lead to a conscious condition, and because this is so, may justly be called psycho-physical without being psychical. The other view leads to the conception of a larger mind of which the conscious mental states are but the appearance, somewhat in the fashion of a thing- in-itself, embodied no doubt in the neural structure, out of whose mysterious depths mental conditions emerge into the light of day. One may be very sensible of the enormous value for pure psychology (for I am not concerned with the therapeutic side of the matter) of Mr. Freud's discoveries without necessarily pledging oneself to belief in the existence of an unconscious mind.1 On the contrary, with the identity interpretation of the relation of mind and neurosis, a mental process may leave its traces in a neural form which is purely physio- logical. A memory may remain latent as a physiological trace or disposition, awaiting the touch of an appropriate stimulation to take on the full vividness and complexity of a conscious memory. At what level an experience is preserved it may not be easy to say. Possibly at the highest level ; but possibly also a conscious process may be registered in a lower level of the vital structure which subserves the mind. On the view that mental processes are also vital and therefore connected with the rest of the vital nervous structure, this proposition presents no difficulty. Thus we may have neural dispositions at lower levels than the conscious level, which may at any time be completed neurally and so call into play the action of the higher level. They would thus form a permanent undercurrent of the mental life, but would remain purely physiological till called, upon to enter into the psychical neural constellation. For this reason they may be termed psycho-physical to indicate their essential continuity with what is psychical, but there is some risk that the expression may be misunderstood to imply the presence of a psychical factor. I prefer to speak of 1 See for Mr. Freud's hypothesis the last chapter of Traumdeutung (Leipzig and Vienna, 1909, ed. 2), esp. p. 380. ch. i. a MIND AND ITS NEURAL BASIS 29 physiological dispositions, which are in themselves not psychical but may emerge into consciousness. Thus it would seem better to distinguish what are strictly mental dispositions, that is conscious plans, from dispositions secondarily acquired, automatic habits, which may remain entirely below the level of consciousness. With this explanation we can understand how a mental, that is a neural process at a certain level, may either become so lacking in intensity or so much disconnected with other processes as no longer to carry with it consciousness or may be replaced by and registered in a subjacent part of the structure ; and at the same time how owing to their continuity with the mental level such purely physiological conditions affect the course of the mental life and on occasion enter into it. Just so, at an even extremer remove from the mental life, the state of the nutrition, though it may not be psychically perceptible, may affect the working of the mind. Instead then of the mythological or at least hypothetical larger mind of which the conscious mind is only a part or an appearance, we should have a very palpable and unhypothetical neural system (itself a part of the whole organism) of which the workings of a particular part correspond to and in fact are consciousness, and any part of which may affect con- sciousness or may register the traces of past experiences. Hence, to take an instance or two from a field whose details are matter for the specialist, it does not follow that because analysis after the event discloses the presence of a feeling in a dreamer's mind which disguised itself in the " manifest content " of the dream, that that feeling was present in a mental form. The physiological tendency may have been enough, for example the stirring of some organic process contained within an emotional condition. In psycho-analysis the inhibition is removed which prevented the tendency from coming to the surface in its natural form. It may well happen that ideas, for instance of decorum, set going by the physiological stirring of a tendency reputed immodest, may give a different turn to the tendency. From this point of view the machinery of the " censorship " exercised over the 3o EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. in unconscious wish may be only a mythological or pictorial way of representing something very real which is going on in some part of the neural structure, but does not imply that all of it is mental. In the same way in negative hallucinations where a patient is told not to see cards with odd numbers of pips, though it is evident he must distinguish odd cards from even ones in order to notice only the even ones, it does not follow that he sees the card with odd pips and then suppresses the perception ; the visual stimulus may be suppressed or inhibited by his instructions before it reaches the mental level of development. It is by no means asserted that, where there is c unconsciousness ' which can be seen to be conscious under certain conditions, it is really purely physio- logical. On the contrary, it may be co-conscious. I am only pleading that we must choose between the conscious (which includes subconsciousness in the sense that word sometimes and perhaps most conveniently bears of what is in consciousness but indistinctly separ- able from the mass of mental experience) and what is not mental at all but purely physiological though it remains continuous with the mental and may affect the mental. The truly unconscious is not mental at all, though continuous with it ; if it is mental it is co-con- scious. It is only for the expert to say when there is co-cc»nsciousness and when there is not. Accordingly, on the statement here adopted I find myself in agree- ment with a passage of Dr. Morton Prince,1 which I will conclude this subject by quoting : " We can say at once that considering the complexity and multiformity of psycho-physiological phenomena, there would seem to be no a priori reason why all subconscious phenomena must be the same in respect of being either co-conscious or unconscious ; some may be the one and some the other. It is plainly a matter of interpretation of the facts and there still exists some difference of opinion." By unconscious processes the writer means processes which are wholly unconscious, that is, are purely physiological. 1 The Unconscious (New York, 1914)^. 161. CH. 1. B OTHER MINDS 3i B. The Apprehension of Other Minds Another topic which 1 discuss here, out of its proper Acquired place, but for convenience in exposition, is how we come "°!^y but to recognise each other as conscious subjects. In a direct ex- previous chapter I was at pains to show that our belief in Penencc- the intimate connection of mind with brain was founded on direct experience ; though that experience was helped out by reflection, as all our experience is ; the issue of such reflection upon experienced data, some of them enjoyed, some contemplated, has been to identify the mental process with a certain constellation of physiological processes. I shall now try to indicate what the experience is on the strength of which we believe in other minds than our own. For without some direct experience of other minds such recognition does not occur. The existence of other minds is commonly regarded as an inference by analogy from the outward behaviour of other persons* bodies. Their gestures, actions, and speech in various circumstances resemble our own in those circum- stances, and we regard them, it is said, as proceeding from a consciousness like our own. Now it is true that when we already have the notion of other minds, we interpret outward behaviour on the analogy of our own experience, and can thus sympathetically enter into their minds in all manners of refined and subtle interpretation. But in the first place the doctrine in question cannot apply from the nature of the case to unreflective animals, such as dogs, who certainly appear in some of their behaviour to recognise other dogs as of the same kind as themselves. And in the next place it is flatly at variance with the history of our minds. It implies that we begin with a knowledge of ourselves and construe foreign selves in that likeness. Now it is almost a commonplace that the reverse is rather the case, that our reflective consciousness of ourselves arises in and through our consciousness of 32 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE B*. m others. We are led, not of course to the enjoyment of ourselves but to noticing ourselves, through intercourse with others : the knowledge of ourselves and that of others grow up together. Our own individuality stands out for us against a background of other persons. Were we alone in a non - conscious world, we should enjoy ourselves and feel success and disappointment, but we should hardly experience ourselves as individual persons. But what is more important, mere inference by analogy cannot account for our original recognition of other minds. For the idea of a foreign consciousness, unless directly supplied by some experience to that effect, is something to which we have no clue in ourselves. We enjoy our own consciousness and our own conscious- ness only, and we do not contemplate it, but only our bodies. The idea of a consciousness not our own belonging to the body of some one else would be a sheer invention on our part. How should we invent such a conception of something totally new, if foreign conscious- ness were not in some manner revealed to us as such ? * For it is safe to assert that we never invent in that sense, but only discover, though we may combine the materials we already know in all sorts of new combinations. We have then to search for the experience which assures us not inferentially but directly of other minds. Thccxperi- That experience is a very simple and familiar one, sodality0 tne experience of sociality, and has a double aspect. Our fellow human beings excite in us the social or gregarious instinct, and to feel socially towards another being is to be assured that it is something like ourselves. We do not first apprehend that another being is a mind and then respond to him, whether positively as in affection or negatively as in aversion ; but in our tenderness or dislike we are aware of him as like ourselves. Just as the emotion of fear or the instinct to run away from 1 Compare A. E. Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics (London, 1903), p. 205, for a clear statement of how inadequate the notion of inference by analogy is to account for our having the idea of a foreign self. Bk. III. ch. ii. § 3 of his book gives his version of the case. CH.I.B OTHER MINDS 33 certain things discovers them to be dangerous, the cognitive apprehension being given to us only in so far as we practise a certain response, so in seeking the company, or avoiding it, of our fellows we are aware of them as like ourselves. But while without the social instinct we should not be led to this apprehension, we do not experience the satisfaction of the instinct of sociality till we have the experience that the creature towards which we act socially reciprocates our action, either by co-opera- tion or rivalry. The emotion of sociality is a double- sided one ; it is a response on our part to the other being, confirmed by a response on his part to us. The double experience is necessary to sociality ; it takes two persons to make friends or two persons to make a quarrel. Without the instinctive response we should seek nothing from the other ; without the co-operation we should not be aware of him in the fullest sense as our fellow.1 Instances upon this merely instinctive level are the experiences of parental or filial affection, or sexual love, competition in pursuit of prey, or jealousy. We do not merely feel ourselves performing certain actions towards another but we want him, and in turn we find him playing his part in the joint experience in which we are both concerned. Without this reciprocation, our instinctive action would not have its peculiar flavour. Our social feeling towards him is the divination that he is like ourselves ; his reciprocation confirms it and makes 1 The prior importance of the social instinct was omitted in my account of the matter in Af/W, xxii. N.S., 191 3, "Collective willing and truth," § 2, pp. 17 ff., which therefore was open to the objection that the resistance of a table to my pressure was a response to my action. The importance of the other element can be recognised by reflection on the similar problem, which will occupy us later, of how we come to have assurance of the exist- ence of God. There too God stands for something in the Universe which we find responding to our religious sentiment or desire (below, pp. 373 fF.). Mr. Laird {Problems of the Self London, 19 17, p. 25) appears to miss my point when he urges that it is because a human hand behaves differently from a stuffed hand that the doctrine I am contending against explains the difference by another consciousness like our own. The idea of a foreign consciousness would be miraculous if it were not based on a direct experience of it. VOL. II D 34 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE •* m it assurance. Thus we feel tenderly to a child as we should not feel towards a soft warm cushion (the illustra- tion is from W. James). But we do not feel socially towards him, the tenderness has not its distinctive flavour, except for the reciprocation of the child. It is felt more plainly towards an affectionate than towards a cold child, and felt more and differently towards a child than towards a puppy. It may be questioned whether we should feel tenderness to a fly in distress if we had not already acquired tenderness in respect of living creatures which can reciprocate. There is, to take a different example, all the difference between grasping a hand which returns the pressure and grasping an unresponsive piece of flesh in the shape of a hand. It seems to us inhuman and disappoints our expectation of a return, and we wonder whether we are not shaking hands with a fish or a statue. To have the warm human experience we require recipro- cation. Again, rivalry for the possession of food is a different experience from appetite for the food ; it contains the experience of jealousy or hate. Or again, if the rival is inanimate and cannot participate with us.; when for instance a cigar which I am smoking goes out I may be disappointed, but if it is knocked out of my mouth by a person I am angry. When the dog's bone rolls away from him he grasps it more firmly ; but if another dog or a man seizes it, he growls. The experience of another man's trying to get the same thing as yourself is a different experience from mere obstruction or difficulty in obtaining the object, and is the suggestion that he too wants it. It is of course true that when the experience of real rivalry has become familiar the obstructing inanimate agent may also be credited with consciousness ; and the dog may be angry if his bone slips or the man if his cigar goes out, or he may, like Sir Walter Scott, say that a letter which he cannot find has been hidden by the Devil. But he must have experienced rivalry to begin with. Once more, the feeling of love to the opposite sex is not the same when the love is not reciprocated, and accordingly love is different from mere selfish lust though even the mere animal satisfaction CH. I. B OTHER MINDS 35 implies too complementary action of the other party.1 A lover may of course feel genuine love when it is not returned, but his expectation or hope is for reciprocation, and his disappointment implies that the person is capable of returning the emotion though he is not the chosen object. Thus it is because we are social beings and have the social instinct that we become aware of others as like ourselves and the possessors of minds. The animals, like ourselves, are aware of each other as like. But their consciousness of the likeness being without reflection amounts to nothing more than behaving towards each other as if they were what we call alike. Since it is sociality which gives us this assurance, the consciousness of other minds comes to us from our relations to one another and we do not learn so directly from animals that they have minds. Now in this experience that other humans excite our social desires and in turn satisfy them, which gives us the assurance that they also are minds like ourselves, it is not their similarity of behaviour to us which describes the situation into which I and another human enter. Hence the radical mistake of supposing that analogy of behaviour assures us of the existence of other minds. In general the part which the two participants in the social situation play is not the same but different ; the child's response to the. mother is not the same as the mother's caresses. In some cases, as in struggle for food or fighting for a female, the acts may be in most respects alike.2 But the likeness of behaviour is not a necessary 1 Compare as to this the following interesting passage of Shaftesbury, Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit, Bk. II. pt. 2, § 1, p. 128, ed. 1727 : " The courtesans and even the commonest of women who live by prostitution know very well how necessary it is that every one whom they entertain with their beauty, should believe there are satisfactions reciprocal; and that pleasures are no less given than received. And were this imagination to be wholly taken away, there would be hardly any of the grosser sort of mankind who would not perceive their remaining pleasure to be of slight estimation." 2 The same thing is true in respect of moral judgments. The greater part of our practical action is the same, because the conditions are repeated, but morality recognises that the proper work of each may be 36 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. m incident. What is necessary is that the whole situation, of going out on the part of one person, does not exist without participation of both, and consequently the experience of either is incomplete without the response, whether it is by way of help or hindrance, of the other. We become aware in this direct experience of something like ourselves. The primary concerns of life and its appetites, and the simplest occupations of primitive man or the animals supply material for this experience of other minds. Such recognition is in the main instinctive, that is, is upon the instinctive level of life. On the basis of this experience the savage or the child or the animal even, may impute personality or something like it to inanimate things, the doll or stocks and stones or the wind and the sun. This is an act of projection which is perfectly intelligible when the mysterious object, a foreign mind, has been dis- covered by revelation of it through such experiences as have been described. It is the extension of the notion of a foreign mind to things which behave in some ways like persons or ourselves. But, intelligible as an extension of something already discovered, it is not intelligible as a foundation for the original belief in a foreign mind. Psychologists have explained for us in detail how our consciousness of others changes, not only in extent but in grade, with our years ; how for instance the father is to the child at first hardly more than a vague and unfathom- able and arbitrary being, but as the child measures itself against its equals it comes in the end to understand him and to conceive him more precisely as a person like him- self. All this too is intelligible as a further incident in the growth of the original fundamental awareness of a mind not our own. In the reflective growth of the apprehension of the minds of others we are soon beyond those simple situations on the instinctive level with which we have different, and it is not identity of conduct which makes morality (the identity is relatively accidental), but the conduct suitable to the position of each person. CH. I. B OTHER MINDS 37 hitherto been dealing. We make ourselves intelligible to one another by speech so that external objects de- scribed by one party are brought before the mind of the other. Mutual understanding by speech in reference to objects common to us is the most pervasive experience of reciprocity ; and to this is added the direct description of our own mind to another person. On the speculative side we have co-operation of many minds in the pursuit of knowledge or science. On the practical side we have the combination of wills in conduct, with its judgments of the kinds of action which make common intercourse tolerable and good. Moral judgments and scientific agreement are the highest expressions of the existence of other minds which we experience directly and on this level ' acknowledge.' But although we thus ha_ye direct experience of the existence of minds in others, such experience is not knowledge derived either from contemplation of the external or enjoyment of ourselves. We can enjoy only our own mind and not the mind of another. On the other hand we do not contemplate our own mind as if it were an external object, much less the mind of another. Thus I am not aware of B's mind as I am aware of his body, so that I should be able to inspect it and say what it is. Yet experience assures me that he has a mind. What sort of a mind it is, how the other mind feels in a given situation, I am left to divine sympathetically on the basis largely of analogy with my own. But that a mind is there, is assurance. It is not invented by inference or analogy, but is an act of faith forced on us by a peculiar sort of experience. It is only the details of its nature into which we have to enter symbolically by imagining ourselves in the situation of the other person. It is sufficient for our purposes to have indicated that their existence is revealed to us by experience directly and by what experience it is so revealed. CHAPTER II THE ORDER OF EMPIRICAL QUALITIES A. A Formula for Space-Time With this clue in our minds we may proceed to discuss the various empirical qualities that characterise existent things at their respective levels, as distinct from the categories. But it will help us to preface the discussion by attempting to sum up in a formula the relations of Space and Time as they have been exhibited in our analysis of -Space-Time. The formula may be received as a hypothesis to be judged by its success in unifying the different forms of empirical existence, and it presupposes the conclusions reached in the preceding chapter. It is that Time as a whole and in its parts bears to Space as a whole and its corresponding parts a relation analogous to the relation of mind * to its equivalent bodily or nervous basis ; or to put the matter shortly that Time is the mind of Space and Space the body of Time. According to this formula the world as a whole and each of its parts is built on the model with which we are familiar in ourselves as persons, that is as union of mind and body, and in 1 In the following pages I sometimes use mind for the quality of mentality or consciousness, sometimes for the thing or substance which has this distinctive quality. The substance mind is the complex of mental processes contained within its proper contour of space-time. The mental processes are identical with their equivalent neural processes and are these processes as enjoyed. With a little goodwill on the part of the reader, there is no danger of confusion, and it avoids the use of the word ' mentality ' which is odious, or the constant substitution of consciousness for mind which in common speech is used both as a concrete and an abstract name. 38 ch.ii.a FORMULA FOR SPACE-TIME 39 particular as a union of mind and brain. But as this may lead to the misapprehension that we are the standard and exemplar of things, the statement is better made in the reverse and truer form that we are examples of a pattern which is universal and is followed not only by things but by Space-Time itself. In any point-instant the instant is the mind or soul of its point ; in a group of points there is a mind of those points, which upon the primary level of Space-Time itself is the corresponding time of that complex. Qualities will be seen to be the special form which on each successive level of existence the mind element assumes. In Space-Time as a whole the total Time is the mind of total Space. The difficulty of the formula arises from two sources, first, the com- plexity of the internal constitution of Space-Time, to which much discussion was devoted in a previous passage ; second, the fact that the relation of Time to Space is not absolutely identical with that of mind to its body (by which, to avoid repetition, I am to be understood to mean the corresponding neural basis) but analogous to it, or rather that which corresponds to it under the simpler conditions of the case. The identity between the relation of Time and Space Grounds and that bf mind and body, on which the hypothesis is ^ui.. based, is that mind and its corresponding body are indissoluble and identical. Space and its Time are in like manner not two things but one, and there is no Space without Time nor Time without Space. The difference between the two relations, which prevents us from identifying them absolutely, is that in us mind is a new quality which belongs to physiological constellations of a certain kind, but these brain processes are in turn part of a vital body which exists as it were of its own right, in the sense that there are vital processes which have not the quality of mind. A certain constellation of such vital processes has the quality of consciousness. The quality of mind presupposes lower grades of existence. Accordingly the mind is able by reflection to think of its own corresponding neural processes, ♦that is to con- 40 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. Ill The relation of point- instants to one another. template them, while also, though not in respect of the same act,1 it enjoys itself. This is possible because there are things external to our minds, among which things are of course included our own bodily organism which we are aware of through organic and other sensations. We are able to think of our neural mental processes because we can count our brains as being included amongst non- mental things ; and because we can only enjoy ourselves as minds in so far as we are aware of and contemplate some object not our minds ; for consciousness without an object does not exist. Thus on our level there subsists the distinction of enjoyment and contemplation. But in Space-Time as such this distinction has not yet emerged. Space does not exist of its own right and therefore Time is not a new quality which emerges from Space. Space or Time only exists with the existence of the other, and their relation is such as we might imagine that of mind and brain to be if neuro-mental processes could subsist by themselves without their presuppositions in a larger vital and hence in a physico-chemical world of things. Hence Time cannot contemplate Space nor the elementary parts of Space-Time contemplate each other. The relation of Time to Space is therefore something closer than that of being merely analogous to the relation of mind and its neural basis, and something less than that of being identical with it. Yet it is legitimate, and as we shall see fruitful, to regard Time as the mind of Space, just because while neuro-mental processes are also vital ones, they do not exist in their peculiar and distinctive constellation without being mind, while on the other hand mind is nothing apart from them. It would seem more natural to say that Space-Time and point-instants enjoy themselves. 'However, if we do so we use the term enjoyment in a sense not possible for ourselves, with whom enjoyment is correlative or compresent with a non-mental object. In fact the * experience ' which Space-Time and point-instants have is 1 It does not of course enjoy itself as seeing or hearing in respect of the act by which it contemplates the neural process which is equivalent to seeing or hearing. Thinking of that is a fresh enjoyment. ch. ii. A FORMULA FOR SPACE-TIME 4i something out of which enjoyment and contemplation, as* we know them in ourselves and can distinguish them on lower levels of existence than ours, both arise. This is but to say once more that Space-Time is the matrix of all empirical existence. But within Space-Time we can properly identify the relation of point-instants to one another with that of persons to one another, which are assured of each other's minds not by contemplation nor enjoyment of foreign minds but by that experience of co-operation or competition which may fitly be called social. There is a society of instants which are minds established through their connections in space. This analogy will develop in significance as we proceed. It was with a view to convenience in stating this result that the problem of how minds come to acknowledge each other's existence was introduced into the last chapter. The other and greater difficulty in envisaging our Compicx- formula arises from the immense complexity of the ^uof picture we have to draw of Time as the mind of Space. For these details we have to refer back to the previous chapters in Book I. (chs. i. ii.). Primarily we are to think of each instant, say the instant of reference, as the momentary mind of its point. But in the first place that mind is not merely momentary ; for it is continuous with the minds of the points along its line of advance. This is the continuance of the mind of reference into its past and future. At the higher stage of real or conscious mind we have, correspondingly, enjoyment of the present as linked on to enjoyment of the mind's past and of its future. In the next place the instant is also spread out in space over the points which each instant intrinsically occupies, and which are its structure. The minds of these points which are thus intrinsically synchronous overlap and are one mind, one instant of time. We thus have first overlapping of several minds so as to form one mind spread out in time, and second so as to form one instant spread out in space. In the third place, any instant of reference is not only connected with all the past and future that lie on lines of advance passing 42 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE «.m through that point-instant, but owing to the extension of any moment in space there are points in the past (or future) which are all at the same distance in time from any one of the points in* the extension of the moment. a is the present instant and there is a line of advance from b to a ; but there is also a line of advance from d to f, and £, let us say, is synchronous intrinsically with a. b and d are thus in the past and they may be at the same date in the past with reference to the instant which is spread out over a and c> although there is no direct line of advance from d to a. If we combine these considerations we have a picture of Space-Time as a whole with regard to any point of reference. For that instant, Space is occupied partly with an extensive present, and partly with a past and future at various dates. This picture corresponds exactly to what we enjoy in our own minds, where there are tracts of present, past, and future enjoyments spread out in their appropriate spaces. As was said before, Space for itself at any instant not only con- tains present time but is full of memory and expectation. There is a further complexity. For besides the present of reference there are other point-instants arrived at by entirely independent lines or advance, which the supposed outsider looking on at total Space-Time can see to be synchronous, but which are not present to one another in the sense in which points intrinsically synchronous are. We have seen that if a suitable selection of point-instants be made from total Space-Time the whole of Space is filled at any instant, just as the whole of Time streams through every point of Space and each point is the seat of the whole time-history of the world. Now it is difficult to understand how in total Space-Time any moment can thus be the union of present instants which are apparently indifferent to each other. We have to think of disconnected point-minds which yet in the total mind belong to the same instant. Yet this condition of things also has its analogue in our experience of minds. For in the abnormal patient there may be co-conscious minds which are not aware of each other, or at least, as in ch. ii. a FORMULA FOR SPACE-TIME 43 the Beauchamp case, one mind within the patient may be unaware of the other, while the second may still be aware of the first. The whole personality of the patient may be restored as in this case by the blending of the separate minds developed by dissociation within it. Sometimes a deeper hypnosis reveals a fuller mind which is aware of the person developed in a less deep hypnosis. The blending of co-conscious minds into the whole restored personality, a process already begun where one of the minds is aware of the other, suggests the solution of our problem.1 The disconnected but synchronous presents which are not present to each other are comparable to co- conscious minds within the same body. In the per- spective taken of Space-Time from any point of reference, these co-conscious elements do not exist and their space is filled by past or future. But in the total Space- Time, which unites the two minds thus synchronous but divided, the disunion is broken down and they belong to the same moment in the whole mind. It is in this way that we may represent according to our formula the fact that at any instant in the whole Space-Time's life, the whole of Space is occupied. In some such fashion as this we may attempt to give Mind a fulness and some degree of explicitness and precision to Tim^Lt the formula that Time is the mind of Space. There is Time' a nothing in the mere hypothesis which is strange or un- fc familiar. The conception of a world-soul is an old one. Leibniz once described body as momentary mind,2 and it 1 I have been led to this notion by an ingenious conjecture as to the relation of the divine mind and finite minds, which is made by Mr. A. E. Taylor in the course of his contribution to a Symposium with the title 1 Why Pluralism ? ' in Proc. Arist. Soc. N.S. vo>. ix., 1908-9, esp. p. 214. The point made there is that God's mind may be contained in the Universe and be in community with our minds, and God may know us and yet our sinfulness be hostile to him, much as Sally hated Miss Beauchamp. I am not concerned with this account of the relation of God's mind to man, mainly because what is distinctive of God is not mind but mind. of his edition of Leibniz. (Oxford, 1898.) 44 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. m is clear from the spirit of our inquiry that for it a point- instant and Space-Time as a whole are c material ' in an. extended sense of that term. It is more important to explain, or rather to repeat, in what exact sense the formula is used. It does not mean that Time is mind or any lowest degree of mind. I do not mean as Leibniz meant that things on their different levels possess varying degrees of consciousness, from the distinct stage of intelligence down to the confused stage of matter. On the contrary mind is mind and Time is Time. Mind exists only on its own level of existence. I mean that in the matrix of all existence, Space-Time, there is an element Time which performs the same function in respect of the other element Space as mind performs in respect of its bodily equivalent. The points of Space have no consciousness in any shape or form, but their instants perform to them the office of consciousness to our brains. A similar caution will have to be put in presently in respect of the proposition that a point-instant is something material ; and because of the danger of mis- understanding, the caution is almost more important than the formula. Our hypothesis is merely that alike in the matrix of finite things and in all finite things there is something of which, on the highest level we know of finite existents, mind is the counterpart or correspondent. So far as the philosopher is concerned with empirical facts, it is his business to indicate what this element is on each level. On the bare level of Space-Time, it is Time. Rather than hold that Time is a form of mind we must say that mind is a form of Time. This second pro- position is strictly true. Out of the time-element, as we shall see, the quality mind as well as all lower empirical qualities emerge, and this quality mind belongs to or corresponds to the configuration of time which enters into the space-time configuration which is proper to the level of existence on which mind is found.1 1 Still less are minds, as Leibniz thought, monads. The only monads are point-instants. Consequently the monads are not for me minds of a lower order, but they contain an element comparable to mind. ORDER OF QUALITIES 45 B. The Order of Qualities We come now to the order of finites with their Qualities »• distinctive empirical qualities. Empirical things or cmergent8* existents are, it has been more than once suggested in accordance with our general conception, groupings within Space-Time, that is, they are complexes of pure events or motions in various degrees of complexity. Such finites have all the categorial characters, that is, all the funda- mental features which flow from the nature of any space- time, in an empirical form — each finite has its proper extension and duration, is built on the pattern of its specific universal, in a substance of a certain sort and the like. What remains to be described is its possession of quality. The facts can best be .described as follows. New orders of finites come into existence in Time ; the world actually or historically develops from its first or elementary condition of Space - Time, which possesses no quality except what we agreed to call the spatio- temporal quality of motion. But as in the course of Time new complexity of motions comes into existence, a new quality emerges, that is, a new complex possesses as a matter of observed empirical fact a new or emergent quality. The case which we are using as a clue is the emergence of the quality of consciousness from a lower level of complexity which is vital. The emergence of a new quality from any level of existence means that at that level there comes into being a certain constellation or collocation of the motions belonging to that level, and possessing the quality appropriate to it, and this colloca- tion possesses a new quality distinctive of the higher complex. The quality and the constellation to which it belongs are at once new and expressible without residue in terms of the processes proper to the level from which they emerge ; just as mind is a new quality distinct from life, with its own peculiar methods or behaviour, for the 46 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. in reason already made clear that the complex collocation which has mind, though itself vital, is determined by the order of its vital complexity, and is therefore not merely vital but also vital. If, to borrow the language of Mr. Lloyd Morgan,1 with whom on this matter I believe myself to be in general agreement (would that my faith were founded on knowledge comparable to his), the processes of a particular level are represented as a processes, a constellation of such processes is of such a kind as to be a new process ab with its quality B. That is, the thing which is based on that constellation of a processes has an emergent quality B, whose behaviour consists in ab pro- cesses ; and though ab processes are also a processes they are not merely such, and are on a different level from the processes which are sufficiently distinguished from other forms of existence as being merely a processes. Before proceeding to details, let me take a few examples.2 Material things have certain motions of their own which carry the quality of materials. In the presence of light they are endowed with the secondary quality of colour. Physical and chemical processes of a certain complexity have the quality of life. The new quality life emerges with this constellation of such processes, and therefore life is at once a physico-chemical complex and is not merely physical and chemical, for these terms do not sufficiently characterise the new complex which in the course and order of time has been generated out of them. Such is the account to be given of the meaning of quality as such. The higher quality emerges from the lower level of existence and has its roots therein, but it emerges therefrom, and it does not belong to that lower level, but constitutes its possessor a new order of existent with its special laws of behaviour. The existence of emergent qualities thus described is something to be noted, as some would say, under the compulsion of brute empirical fact, 1 Scientia, vol. xviii., 191 5, * Mind and Body in their relation to each- other and to external things.' 2 I fear I cannot assume that I should have Mr. Lloyd Morgan with me in all that I say in detail, especially as concerns secondary qualities of matter. ch. ii. b ORDER OF QUALITIES 47 or, as I should prefer to say in less harsh terms, to be accepted with the " natural piety " of the investigator. It admits no explanation. To adopt the ancient distinction of form and matter, the kind or existent from which the new quality emerges is the 'matter' which assumes ascertain complexity of configuration and to this pattern or universal corresponds the new emergent quality. But whereas up to the present we have been content to treat the quality as something which is correlated with a certain configuration of its basis, we can now, following the clue of the relation between mind and its body, identify the quality with its peculiar form of body. Quality is therefore the empirical fact which we accept, and prima facie there is no more difficulty in accepting the fact that a certain kind of arrangement of existents of a lower level should be qualified with a new quality, than there is in accept- ing (on the common unreflective view) the fact that bodies under certain physical conditions look to us red, or certain other physical dispositions give what we call impressions of being hard or sweet. Quality belongs to things as mind or consciousness belongs to life-processes of a certain configuration. Further discussion of the relation of different levels to one another may be deferred till we have attempted in some fashion to exhibit the various levels themselves in the light of the conception of emergent qualities. But a few observations are still in place, some of a more general character, some designed to remove possible misconceptions. Empirical things come into existence, because Space- Time as Time of its own nature breaks up into finites,1 the lowest *** gc?cr" such finites being simple motions of different velocities qualities. or intensities of motion and different extents of it. Time and Space, either of them, creates differences in the other or breaks it up. But in a special sense Time is the author of finitude, for it is the transition intrinsic to Time which 1 I do not consider at present infinite existents. Whether there can be qualitied infinites is discussed in Bk. IV. ch. i. pp. 363 f. 48 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. m in the first place makes motion possible, and secondly provides for the ceaseless rearrangements in Space through which groupings of motions are possible. Time could not do its work without Space ; but, this being presumed, Time is the principle of motion and change. It brings the future into present being and dismisses the present into the past. In the old Greek sentence it brings the unseen to light and buries it when it has appeared. Commonly it is personified in the figure of a scythe-man mowing down the old to make room for the young. This figure represents rather the transitoriness of things than the real nature of Time. " Nothing stands but for his scythe to mow." It forgets that the same Time which mows down the grass produces the new crop ; and indeed when the simile, not intended to be pressed, is pressed, it seems to imply that conception of the world as a series of present instants, perpetually recreated, which as we have so often urged would destroy history and make even the present moment unintelligible. Time is in truth the abiding principle of impermanence which is the real creator. Or to descend from such high phrases, it is a kind of cosmic gendarme who makes stagnation impossible, and at once creates the movements which con- stitute things and keeps things in movement. Circulezy Messieurs. If it be true that Time is the mind of Space, or rather if Space and every part of it has something standing to it in the relation of mind to body, and that something is Time, then for us, as for certain Greek philosophers, soul is the source of movement. Space- Some current conceptions are superseded by this Time an- statement. The first is the conception that things and tenor to i • i i • i material events are in Space and Time, which are relations between things. things. We need do no more here than recall what has been said on this topic before. For philosophy this con- ception must be inverted, though we need not cease to use the language, if only because common speech does not imply by the phrase, things are in Space, that Space is a mere relation. For us Space-Time logically, and in fact, precedes finite things which are differentiations of CH ii. b ORDER OF QUALITIES 49 that stuff. This inversion, I may here recall,1 is in prin- ciple one with that which was made by the late Osborne Reynolds, who treated Space as material and what we call material things as faults or strains in the uniform structure of Space. This leads directly to the question, in what sense is Space-Time material. Matter has a popular and a philo- sophical meaning. As a philosophical term matter is correlated with form ; and Plato regarded Space as the matrix in which things were made in the likeness of forms. For us the form or configuration of motion belongs not to Space but to Space-Time or motion, and form does not affect the matter from without, but belongs intrinsically to any finite piece of Space-Time. Space- Time then is the stuff which receives determination in the qualities it assumes as its complexity of grouping develops in Time. As stuff it is the recipient of quality in its various empirical or finite forms. In the popular sense of the term, matter is a generic name fof physical substance, and it is very difficult to say what is its distinctive quality. Let us call it for the present, materiality. Now Space-Time, though the stuff of material things and of all other things, is not material, if that means to possess materiality ; it is anterior to such matter. But it is continuous 2 with material existence which is one of the earlier outgrowths from it. It is not attenuated matter, nor is even the spatial element of Space-Time attenuated matter. The only advantage which arises from speaking of it as material is that of helping to make clear that neither Space nor Time are mere rela- tions between things or events, but if such impropriety of designation may be pardoned, they are themselves entities or rather Space-Time is an entity. Of the familiar types of existents, material existence is possibly closest to Space-Time and the stuff of reality may therefore most easily be conceived on the material analogy ; for the 1 Bk. I. ch. vi. vol. i. p. 173, note. 2 I am using the word continuous in the popular sense. There is no break in the chain of finite qualified existents. The qualities as such form a discontinuous series, but they are connected spatio-temporally. VOL. II E 5o EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE «l in phrases « stuff of things,' 'the matrix in which things are precipitated' are all physical descriptions. But if our hypothesis is sound, material existence is itself not purely material in the sense in which matter is opposed to mind. Matter like Space-Time contains an element of body and an element correspondent to mind which is its materiality, whatever that may be. Thus while Space-Time is con- tinuous with matter, so is it equally continuous with mind. For mind as an existent, not simply as the quality of mentality or consciousness, is a living (and therefore a material) body with the mental quality. My motive in anticipating the discussion of empirical qualities by the hypothesis that Time performed towards Space the office of mind, was, that by suggesting that something corresponding to mind was present from 'the beginning at the lowest finite level of mere motion, I might remove the prejudice against any attempt to exhibit all the forms of existence as a continuous series from Space-Time upwards through matter to mind. Miscon- Certain minor difficulties may next be removed. The •upended, conception, once at any rate so widely current, that the ultimate constituents of things are matter and motion, must be modified. Matter it is thought is not itself a form of motion, or comparable with motion itself. It is so difficult to conceive motion as stuff, without something which moves ; we still suppose a something we call matter which changes its place in empty Space. But this difficulty vanishes when once we have learnt to think of motion as stuff, and as in fact the first form of animated body. For there is no reason to regard matter (whatever we may learn from physicists as to what distinguishes matter from other groups of motion), as other than a complex of motion, that is made out of the original stuff which is Space-Time. This conception that matter is in the end a complex of motions and not, like motion itself, ultimate, requires more courage (or rashness) to suggest than the last of these general pleas that I have now to urge, that another scientific conception, the ether, becomes unnecessary except possibly as a convenience of expression or imagina- ch. H. u ORDER OF QUALITIES 51 tion. For the ether has fallen on evil days and he who impugns it runs little risk. Regarded once as a substance or medium filling all Space, it has become little more than a name for the possibility of the transference of energy. " It is not too much to say," writes Mr. Soddy, " that the idea of an ether has been invented by scientific men for the express purpose of accounting for the flow of energy across empty space and is at present little more than a term to express the medium in which these trans- ferences occur." l But the same process by which force has been attenuated into acceleration seems to do away with ether as a medium and leave it as a name for the motions in which the transferences of energy consist. For the empty Space which this medium is supposed to fill is a figment. Space is already full of Time ; that is, there is no such thing as Space by itself, but the system of motions which in their continuity make Space-Time, and in all this there is no vacuum.2 There is no greater difficulty in conceiving the motions of light in Space-Time, that is as a complex within Space-Time, than in conceiving them to be motions of this alleged medium. And a medium which fills Space is now, it would appear, gratuitous and even contains a contradiction. For it fills Space which is already completely full with motion. Thus since the office of ether can be performed by Space- Time, either the ether is unnecessary or we can dispense with the idea of Space-Time. Since we already are familiar with Space and Time from everyday experience, it seems better to keep to them and to acquire a correct notion of them so that empty Space or empty Time shall be seen to be unrealities, than to invent a new medium which makes Space-Time superfluous. The phrase l the ether of Space ' 3 is therefore, so I must think, either a mis- taken conception if it means the ether which fills Space, or else a pleonasm, for it can only mean the ether which is 1 F. Soddy, Matter and Energy (Home University Library, London, p. 184). 2 Above, Bk. I. ch. ii. vol. i. p. 65. 3 The title of a well-known volume of Sir Oliver Lodge (London, 1909). 5 2 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. m Space, or more properly, since Space is nothing without Time, is Space-Tin^ Matter. The interpretation offered in general of the meaning of empirical qualities has been an extension downwards, made without concealment, of what can be derived from considering mind, where we have an order of vital existence blossoming out in respect of a certain portion of the living body into an emergent quality. To verify the interpretation in detail is a task which requires special knowledge, which I do not pretend to possess. Roughly speaking, the different levels of existence which are more obviously distinguishable are motions, matter as physical (or mechanical), matter with secondary qualities, life, mind. Perhaps this assumes too much for a rough enumeration, for the position of the secondary qualities of matter is under dispute. Now it is just at the earlier levels that the interpretation is most difficult. All I have to say on the subject is very little, and that little is encumbered for me with perplexities arising from two sources. One is the state of physical knowledge at the present moment. The great discoveries in physics which are changing the face of our notions about material things have not yet run to their completion. The other is a personal and more oppressive difficulty which lies in my own incompetence even to resume this knowledge, still less to deal with it and use it independently. 1 do no more than suggest that there is nothing in present knowledge as I understand the position to conflict with the interpretation which I am proposing to extend to all levels, and that there are many indications in its direction. It is not indeed the business of the philosopher, but that of the man of science, to trace the history of things. The philosopher may hope to point out if he can the general and outstanding features of the advance, as supplying a connection between the orders of finites ; and I am hope- ful that in spite of its defects what I have to say may be useful in this sense. But I do not seek to excuse myself on the plea that a philosopher who may by tradition be expected to know something of psychology cannot be ch. ii. b ORDER OF QUALITIES 53 expected to be a master of all the sciences. For on the contrary it is my. belief that the metaphysician who is to make the greatest advances will be one who, like the seventeenth-century philosophers, is familiar at first hand with the notions of the fundamental and simple forms of existence which are treated in physics and mathematics. The enumeration of levels given above was, I said, a rough one. In the first place, it is not certain to my mind that matter with its chemical properties and its affinities is not a distinct level from physical matter. But the enumeration is probably most faulty at the beginning. From mere simple motion to matter is a far cry. It is by no means clear that matter is the next level to quality- less motion, that is to motion or groups of motion which have no other quality than to be motion. (For as we have seen it is indifferent whether we treat motion as the most developed category or as the first kind of quality. Finite motion is the category motion in finite form.) On the contrary it is most probable that there are intervening levels. The dissolution of the atom into elements in the electron theory shows physical matter to be an immensely complicated thing, and highly organised. He would be a bold man who would assert that the electron though our present ultimate may not be itself a complex of some- thing simpler. These things are for the physicist and if they belong anywhere belong to the distant future. But of greater importance is that it is not yet absolutely certain whether matter is distinct or not from electrons. There would be nothing extravagant in supposing that electricity or light, for instance, were a substance anterior to matter in the proper sense. Rather, as I understand, it is probable. The first question we have to ask is whether electricity or matter (supposing them for a moment not to be different in kind or level) deserve to be called finites with a distinctive quality, so as to be marked off from mere motion as a distinctive constellation of motions. I assume that this is so. But if so and if our interpretation be correct, their qualities should be expressible in terms 54 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. m of motion. And of this there are, I understand, certain indications. Let «us take inertia or mass and energy as at least items in this distinctive character of materiality. Electrical mass is said to vary with velocity, and to be itself due to the relation between the moving system and the energy of the surrounding ' ether.' Kinetic energy is a function of the mass and its velocity, and as to potential energy (a conception metaphysically so difficult), it is again as I understand referable to kinetic energy in the surroundings of the system,1 and if so ceases to present metaphysical difficulties. Thus, to say nothing of matter proper, it does not seem very far- fetched to suggest that the electron itself may be a complex of motion, with which its electrical quality is cor- related or rather identical. There remains the question whether matter is some- thing specifically distinct from electricity, or whether electricity is itself material and matter only a compound of electrons ? 2 If it were so, the atom would not be on a different level of existence from the electron, but as compared with it might be like more complex forms of life as compared with the unicellular organism, displaying greater complexity of structure, but not of such an order as to lead to the emergence of a new quality, but still remaining on the same level of existence with the same distinctive quality. For on each level there may be variations within that order of existence which exhibit secondary differences so great as to be called in common parlance differences of quality or kind. This is all that I can venture to say upon this most fundamental subject. If it is asked further by what steps it is that mere motion under the guiding hand of Time leads to the emergence of the material complexes of motion which we find in the world of things ; how a specific motion like that of light is generated, with constant and maximal velocity, and how atoms come into existence as combinations of electrons with or without the 1 Cp. Sir J. J. Thomson, ■ Matter and Ether,' Adamson Lecture (Manchester, 1908). 2 Cp, Soddy, he. cit. p. 177. ch. ii. b ORDER OF QUALITIES 55 distinctively material nucleus, with relatively constant constitutions ; I can only reply that I do not know, and that it is not for the metaphysician to say, in the absence of indications from the physicist himself. Yet it is difficult to refrain from hazarding conjecture by way of asking a question. And so I dare to ask if there may not be in these ages of simpler existence something corre- sponding to the method pursued by nature in its higher stages, of natural selection ; however natural selection is to be interpreted whether as operating upon insensible variations or upon large mutations. Whether that is to say, nature or Space-Time did not try various complexes of simple motions and out of the chaos of motion preserve certain types. The ground which justifies us in asking this question is that the beginnings of things present phenomena analogous to those of life ; for instance, in the * organisation ' of the atoms ; in the law that the physical and chemical elements observe certain periods or cycles which are connected with the number of the atomic weights, or " that the properties of an element are shown to be defined by a whole number which varies by unity from one element to the next " ; * in the observed trans- formation of atoms into atoms of other properties ; all phenomena which suggest growth of a certain kind. If it were so the history of life and mind, and we may add societies, would not be so isolated a feature of things as it seems. But all this is rather a question which might be answered by those who know, if they do not dismiss it at once as fanciful, and is not asked as having any further pretension. The primary qualities of things are the empirical Secondary modes of categorial characters, such as size, shape, number, iuahtie8- motion of various sorts. Mass, inertia, and energy, we 1 " This number is to be identified with the atomic number of the elements [that is * the number of the elements when arranged in order of increasing weight '], and also with the number of units of electrical charge in the atomic nucleus." This is the law discovered by H. G.J. Moseley. My information is taken from the obituary notice *of him by Sir E. Rutherford in Proc. Royal Soc. 191 6-17, vol. xciii. $6 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. m have treated as belonging to a higher level of existence than the elementary categorial characters. Though they are the nearest derivatives from the primary qualities, they stand according to this view on a different footing from the primary qualities proper, and it called primary qualities, we must add primary qualities 'of matter' or of the material level of existence, merely to point the contrast with the secondary qualities of matter. They are in fact the distinctive features of materiality. In one sense it is clear that shape, size and motion and number (the traditional primary qualities) are not qualities at all. They are determinations of the thing, but are mis- named qualities because the secondary characters, colour, temperature, taste, and the like, are qualities, and the primary features are ranged into one class with them as a contrasting group within the class. It is the secondary qualities, in their strict sense of qualities whose position has now to be interpreted. In popular or non-philo- sophical notions, they are regarded as belonging to the thing itself. As belonging to things themselves, they may be reflectively regarded as corresponding to certain disturbances, of whatever kind, in or amongst the material particles, which disturbances are then notified to our senses by certain movements of the media, so that we apprehend these qualities. For example, when white light strikes a c red ' body certain processes are set up in the body, the nature of which I will not take upon myself to describe, in virtue of which all the other components of the light are absorbed, and only the movements of a certain wave- length are transmitted. The disturbances are initiated in matter, and whether the medium be itself material as air for sound, or liquid for taste, or sub-material as the ' ether ' for light or heat, it is not the movements of the medium itself which are apprehended as possessing quality, but the material thing from which the movements of those media proceed.1 Thus it is the ochre which is yellow, or 1 Strictly speaking, this goes too far. What we see or hear is a place which is coloured or sounds. Further experience shows the place to have also the other characters of the ochre or bell. (Compare later, chs. vi. and vii.) ch. ii. b ORDER OF QUALITIES 57 the vibrating string or the flute with its contained column of material air, which sounds. The movement in the c ether' which makes the passage of the light is not coloured. It is the bell which sounds, not the air between the bell and our ears. When the poet says to the skylark that "all the earth and air with thy voice is loud," he means only as the context shows that the sound fills the air as moonbeams overflow the heaven. The ether wave is only seen when it illumines some material mote in its path, or the air set vibrating by a tuning fork is heard when it sets another tuning fork into sympathetic vibration. Thus it is a matter of comparative indifference whether the medium is material or sub-material. A material medium as in sound, or taste, or smell, introduces complexity into the statement without altering its general truth. For the air itself which is material may be the material body, or a part of it, which is the source of the sound as well as the medium of transmission ; as in the case already named of the air in the flute or organ pipe.1 Moreover, difficulties arise in respect of combination-tones, which are believed to be produced commonly within the ear and not externally. These difficulties are touched on in the note.2 Such may be taken to be a reflective statement of common speech, which itself is not reflective, and it is accepted here as furnishing the data which await interpre- tation. But it is not the view which has been current in 1 " Even tuning forks give at least the octave, if not other partials. The octave partial from a fork originates, not in the fork, but in the air as a result of certain physical processes." H. J. Watt, The Psychology of Sound (Cambridge, 1917), p. 19, note 1. 2 But see Watt, loc. cit. p. 55. "There is in recent years a growing trend of opinion towards the belief that the secondary tonal phenomena of combination tones, variation tones, and interruption tones, not to speak of beats, are not subjective, but rather like all audible tones, due to pendular components of the sound wave as it enters the inner ear." Let us, however, suppose that such tones are subjective, whatever the account be of the physical internal stimulation which produces them ; the sound still remains non-mental. The physical stimulation throws the auditory centre into a neural and mental excitement of the kind to which the sound heard corresponds. The sound heard would still be physical though not really present where it is heard (see later, chs. iv. and viii.). 5 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE „k. hi philosophy and science in virtue of a long tradition from the days of Galileo. All that matter possesses in itself according to this view is the primary qualities, whether of the matter in bulk or of its insensible particles (macro- scopic or microscopic primary qualities). What exists in the thing is certain movements. They affect our senses in appropriate fashion through the medium, and the quality of colour or sou^d i° thereupon apprehended by the mind. These qualities are then as in the matter, movements, but for the mind, sense-qualities, and the sense-quality would not exist except for the mind (or according to a later version of the doctrine, except for the physiological sense-organ). I cannot accept this inter- pretation, which depends to my mind on overlooking the distinction between the apprehending act of mind which is provoked by the medium and the non-mental external object which in this case is the sensum or sensibile. The sense- quality owes nothing on this conception to the mind itself (nor for that matter to the physiological organ), which is but the means or instrument whereby an external sense-quality belonging to the thing itself is revealed. The colour, though it does not exist as colour in the absence of light, exists as colour in the absence of the eye.. If I am asked how I can venture so light- heartedly to question a doctrine so authoritative, I can only answer here, for the subject belongs to a later stage,1 that at least in its accepted form the doctrine cannot stand. For since Berkeley's day no one can doubt that primary qualities are on the same footing in their relation to the mind as secondary ones, that if the latter are mental objects only so also are the former ; that it is no more possible to understand how spatial and temporal characters should look and feel so than how colour and heat should look and feel so. Both or neither must depend on the mind. If neither depends on the mind the distinction of movement and colour belongs to things ; if both do, there still remains within the mental objects the distinction of kind between primary and secondary ideas. These questions arise later. And in the next place 1 See below, ch. v. pp. 138 ff. ch. it. b ORDER OF QUALITIES 59 my concern is not so much to controvert an existing doctrine, however firmly rooted, as to indicate an interpre- tation of facts which shall fall in with a comprehensive hypothesis and in this way supply indirectly the justification both for the general hypothesis and for the interpretation of particular facts ; and this implies anything but lightness of heart in the performance. Accordingly for me the sensible character of what we apprehend in the object, that is of the sensum, stands to the movements in the thing, that is to the primary determinations which underlie it, in the relation of con- sciousness to its underlying vital process. The secondary quality is the mind or soul of its corresponding vibra- tion or whatever the primary movement may be. Thus while we cannot say that the ether vibrations of a certain wave-length are red, we can say that the movements in the material thing, in virtue of which the ether transmits to our eyes only vibrations of a certain wave-length, are red. Secondary qualities are thus a set of new qualities which movements of a certain order of complexity have taken on, or which emerge with them ; and the material movements so complicated can no more be separated from the secondary quality (which is not merely correlated with them but identical with them) than the physiological processes which are also psychical can be what they are in the absence of their conscious quality. Thus a move- ment or process or act occurring in a material thing if it is of the right sort, is red or sounds or is fragrant ; such bodily acts have no longer merely categorial and material characters but possess secondary quality. The movement which may be thought of as being a complex of primary determinations is revealed to sense as a sensum with its so-called sense-quality. The philosopher may learn from the poets as well as from philosophy or science, and in regarding colour, for example, as the mind or spirit or soul of its primary movement I may appeal without scruple to Meredith's Hymn to Colour for support to this conception, and shall afterwards appeal to it again in a more important connection. In this great poem colour is a kind of spirit of which we catch transitory glimpses in 60 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. m moments of its rarest manifestations.1 Or we may refer still more appropriately to a sentence of Pater's in his essay on Botticelli in The Renaissance which Mr. Bosanquet, to whom I am indebted for it, quotes so effectively.2 " Colour is a spirit upon things whereby they become expressive to our spirit." The words are used and quoted by Mr. Bosanquet in a different connection from ours. But they can be adopted here in their literal sense. 'Permanent The conception that a secondary quality is the mind TaHties"^ °^ lts Pr^mary substrate may be carried further. Hitherto we have been speaking of the quality of the sense-datum, that is, of a primary process which though substantial like all movement is transitory. Now the colour or taste of a thing usually means not a transitory but a permanent quality. Such permanence may be secured in things by the continuance of the light, or the solution of the stuff in liquid. The thing maintains in this case its colour or its sweetness as the mind maintains its activity of thought or vision. But in the dark the leaf is no longer coloured ; it is green then, only in that it is in its primary deter- minations such as to take on the secondary quality with the incidence of light. When not active as a sensum or sense-datum, the sensible quality slips into a disposition which is on the primary level. It awaits the entrance of the conditions which are to complete it and convert it into that constellation of primary movements which possesses or carries colour. Precisely in the same way in the absence of the completing conditions which evoke consciousness, the mind slips into a physiological or psycho - physical disposition, which is only potentially 1 Meredith however still holds the depreciatory view of Time. He says of colour, " thy fleetingness is bigger in the ghost than Time with all his host." The stanza I think of more particularly is : Of thee to say behold, has said adieu. But love remembers how the sky was green, And how the grasses glimmered lightest blue ; How saintlike grey took fervour : how the screen Of cloud grew violet ; how thy moment came Between a blush and flame. 2 Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 63. ch.ii.b ORDER OF QUALITIES 61 conscious, but is actually unconscious. Thus the permanent secondary quality of a thing postulates the permanence or continuance of activity and the quality is such continuing activity. Taken by itself the thing possesses the quality in the potential form, in the above explanation of that phrase. One remark may be added, already hinted more than once, and here again repeated only in passing, which follows from the relation of the secondary quality of, say, colour to its primary basis. It is not true that the extension of a material thing is impossible without secondary qualities, as Berkeley taught. If we see extension always coloured, that is because we see it and not because it is extended. Mere extension is not enough for colour. It is true that colour is always seen occupying extension. But the colour is a determination of the exten- sion of it and the extension is not a property of the colour. The quality of mind we have regarded as an Life, emergent from the stage of living existence with its distinctive quality of life. Mind as a thing is a living being with the mental quality or consciousness. Follow- ing this clue we may interpret life as an emergent from material existence. I pass over here as beyond my competence the question whether life is the next level of existence to matter, or whether chemical process is not an independent intermediate level between physical existence and vital : whether, that is to say, chemical matter is not so distinctively different in the way of complexity from mere physical matter that * chemism ' is properly a new quality emerging from physical existence. Such a question is one which can properly be answered only by the expert, from whom philosophy has to take its material. I am content here to follow the usual habit of thought and lump together physical and chemical processes as merely material. Life then would be an emergent quality taken on by a complex of physico-chemical processes belonging to the material level, these processes taking place in a structure of a certain order of complexity, of which the processes are the functions. A living process is therefore 62 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. m also a physico-chemical one ; but not all physico-chemical processes are vital, just as every mental process is also physiological but not all physiological ones are mental. Moreover, just as mental processes belong only to a part of the vital structure, so in life we are dealing with a body which performs processes and exhibits features purely material. Thus an organic body has weight, it exhibits the physical processes of filtration, of pressure of blood upon the walls of the arteries and the like. The total of physical processes which take place within the body, though all subserving life, is not all of it co- extensive with that limited set of processes which are identical with life. "We must not," says Mr. J. S. Haldane, " mistake measurements of the balance of matter and energy entering and leaving the body, for information as to the manner in which this stream passes through the living tissues." ' It is thus- a certain constellation or complex or collocation of physico-chemical processes which behaves vitally, and the presence of such constellations which makes the structure to which they belong an organism. To call it organism is but to mark the fact that its behaviour, its response to stimulation, is, owing to the constellation, of a character different from those which physics and chemistry are ordinarily concerned with, and in this sense something new with an appropriate quality, that of life. At the same time, this new method of behaviour is also physico-chemical and may be exhibited without remainder in physico-chemical terms> provided only the nature of the constellation is known — provided, that is, we remember, as Mr. Lloyd Morgan so rightly insists, that there is already a constitution in the organism, a certain collocation, to return to my own phrases, of movements, which may be called the moving structure, to indicate that it is not merely anatomical but physiological. Until that constellation is known, what is specially vital may elude the piecemeal application of the methods of physics and chemistry. Accordingly 1 J. S. Haldane, Mechanism, Life, and Personality (London, 191*), p. 36. ch. ii. b ORDER OF QUALITIES 63 I am prepared in this sense to believe that they may be right who maintain that biology must be treated as a special science, dealing with its own particular subject of organic life which is distinguished by its own delicate capacity of self regulation. This is the position of Mr. Haldane ; who at the same time admits to the full the triumphant contributions which have been made to the understanding of life by the physico-chemical method. There seems to me no more difficulty in believing this than in believing that psychology is a special science dealing directly and at first hand with mental process, though all mental process is identical in the end, when once the constellation is known, with its correspondent neural process. If the study of life is not one with a peculiar subject-matter, though that subject-matter is resoluble without residue into physico-chemical processes, then we should be compelled ultimately to declare not only psychology to be a department of physiology, and physiology or physics and chemistry, but, if we are consistent,' to be a chapter, like all other sciences, of mathematics, which deals with motion and Space and Time. But in pleading that life is still also entirely physico-chemical, as a complex of processes or structures belonging to that level, I fear I am forgoing the support of such so-called neo-vitalists as Mr. Haldane. How the new emergent quality of life is to be characterised in detail it is not for me to say. Organisa- tion is of course insufficient, for even atoms are highly organised and crystals are often instanced as cases of organised things below organisms. Self-regulation has been mentioned above, and organisms exhibit in addition the property of plasticity in their responses, and, once more, the power of self-reproduction. But these characters are after all but the different ways in which the distinctive quality of life exhibits itself, or which are summed up by it, and for our purposes no advantage is gained by substituting the details comprehended under life for the simple quality of life itself.1 1 Mr. Haldane's view, besides the volume cited, is expounded in many papers. It is largely founded on, or enforced by reference to his 64 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. in Entciechy. Life is thus intermediate between matter and mind. It is also material in that it is expressible (and we may hope may be expressed hereafter) in material terms, but it is not purely material. Life is not an epiphenomenon of matter but an emergent from it. On the other hand, there seems to be no need for postulating in its case any more than in the case of mind a new substance, a directing principle, or, as Prof. Hans Driesch calls it, an * entelechy ' or i psychoid.' x The new character or quality which the vital physico-chemical complex possesses stands to it as soul or mind to the neural basis. The directing agency is not a separate existence but is found in the principle or plan of the constellation. The con- siderations which have led Mr. Driesch to his conclusion are well known and their weight is undeniable, and it is most of all the empirical considerations which carry weight ; such as are derived from the phenomena of regeneration of lost parts or from the striking facts that " in the earliest stages of embryonic development the cells of the embryo may be completely separated from one another or their mutual arrangement may be com- pletely altered by mechanical means and yet one of the separated cells or the disarranged collection of cells may experimental observations of the delicate regulation of the respiration in response to minute variations in the air. One of the most attractive of these statements is to be found in an address on ' The Place of Biology in Human Knowledge and Endeavour ' in the Transactions of the South- Eastern Union of Scientific Societies (191 5). See his recent Silliman Lectures for fuller statement. The most recent is contained in a Symposium in Proc.Arist. Soc, 191 7- 18, vol. xviii. N.S. between Messrs. Haldane, D'Arcy Thomson, Chalmers Mitchell, and Hobhouse (now reprinted in a separate volume with other papers). Unfortunately Mr. Lloyd Morgan's view is not represented in this discussion. It is the one with which in the above interpretation I venture, not on grounds of scientific knowledge but on general philosophical grounds, to feel general agreement. This view is expounded in his Instinct and Experience (London, 191 2), ch. viii. 'Finalism and Mechanism/ See also A. S. Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God (Oxford, 19 17, Lect. v.). It should be added tint Mr. Haldane's so-called vitalism altogether repudiates both the earlier vitalistic theory and Mr. Driesch's new form of it. 1 Science and Philosophy of the Organism (Aberdeen, 1908-9). Also his Problem of Individuality (London, 19 14). ch. H. b ORDER OF QUALITIES 65 develope in a perfectly normal manner " (I quote Mr. Haldane's summary *), though if the animal grows from only half the embryo it will be only half the normal size. I am not in a position to discuss these facts technically. But is there anything in them which is inexplicable when the initial constellation is considered ? Instead of straightway postulating an entelechy to act as a guide, it would seem to me more reasonable to note that a given stage of material complexity is characterised by such and such special features, and that these are part and parcel of the nature of the principle or plan of the new order of complex. It is quite true that no merely material complex will regenerate itself or reproduce itself or grow up into a small perfect specimen from half the stuff of a full-sized one. But the fact is that the new complex is no longer purely material, though it is also material. By accepting this we at any rate confine ourselves to noting the facts, observing loyally the differences of these existents from existents of a lower order ; and do not invent entities for which there seems to be no other justification than that something is done in life which is not done in matter. Why should not matter whose quality has budded out from Space-Time bud out in its turn into a new quality, the ultimate stuff being throughout the same and the proximate stuff of life being matter ? Two causes appear to prejudice this inquiry and The ami- to stand in the way of a satisfactory interpretation, mechanical One is the false or at least ambiguous antithesis «d vital. of the mechanical and the vital, or of mechanism and life. When life is identified with mind, the antithesis becomes still more acute. But { mechanism ' or the 1 mechanical ' means two things which may be confused. It may stand for the behaviour which is distinctive of matter pure and simple or it may stand merely for deter- minate behaviour. Now it is possible for a thing to be mechanical in the sense of acting in a way determined infallibly by its structure and not mechanical in the sense of being purely material. Half the reason for holding 1 hoc. cit. p. 29. VOL. II F 66 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. m that life (or mind) is an entity independent of its body and working through it is that no machine can do what life or mind does. The question must be asked in what respects is mind different from a machine ? A machine is a structure which effects certain results. Now a living thing is not a material machine. Yet in so far as its structure enables it to perform certain vital processes, to react in certain ways to stimuli, it behaves determinately in accordance with its structure. The structure allows for a certain latitude of the response within limits, but the response is within those limits as determinate as if the structure were purely material. In this sense of mechanical the organism is mechanical and we could understand it to be so, provided we knew the constellation of its structure. On the other hand, it is equally true that if we regard the organism as behaving according to the laws determined by its own peculiar structure, a material machine may, since it also obeys the laws of -its structure, be said to be alive, and in many ways this is a helpful conception. The difference of the material and the organic ' machine ' lies in the comparative rigidity of the one and the plasticity of the other. Plasticity is not realised by matter but waits for life. But if we could secure the right sort of machine it would be an organism and would cease to be a material machine. We have no right therefore to confuse tho definiteness of mechanism with its materiality, and on this ground cut off the con- tinuity between the material structure and the emergent order of vital structure. The true antithesis is that of the vital and the material and not of the vital and mechanical.1 The other cause is the dogma that mind or life (so far as life is taken to be the same as or allied to mind) presents us with a soul for which there is no precedent in the lower forms of existence. Life and matter seem 1 This confusion of the determinate and the material also vitiates Mr. Haldane's work, otherwise so moderate and careful in its statement. I should, however, add that I am not concerned with his conception of philosophy and indeed I do not see what a theory of knowledge has to do with the matter. ch. ii. b ORDER OF QUALITIES 67 to be parted by an impassable cleft. To account for the facts of life and mind we need at least an entelechy. Now supposing the case were really so, we should still, in loyalty to the facts, be obliged, I think, to content our- selves with the interpretation that life is the quality distinctive of a certain material constellation. The mystery of it would remain deep. But it has ceased on our hypothesis to be so unintelligible. For though matter has no life, it has something which plays in it the part which life plays in the living organism and mind plays in the person ; and even on the lowest level of existence, any motion has its soul, which is time. Thus matter is not merely dead as if there was nothing in it akin to life. It is only dead in that it is not alive as organisms are. Compare matter with Space-Time ; there is as much reason for assuming an entity or entelechy c materiality ' distinct from the motions which are the behaviour of matter as to assume an entity c life ' or c mind ' distinct from the basis of life in matter. Always under the caveat that Time and materiality and life and mind are empirically not the same and not merely different degrees of one and the same thing, we are compelled to the conclusion that all finite existence is alive, or in a certain sense animated. Mind is the last empirical quality of finites that we Summary. know, and we have seen it to be an emergent from the level of living existence. We have thus verified, how faultily no one can be more painfully aware than I myself, on the inferior levels what was more easily discernible on the highest. Quality is something empirical which in every case but that of motion is seen to emerge from a level of existence lower than itself ; and as to motion it is to be described indifferently as empirical or categorial, for it is the meeting-point of the two. Each new type of existence when it emerges is expressible completely or without residue in terms of the lower stage, and there- fore indirectly in terms of all lower stages ; mind in terms of living process, life in terms of physico-chemical process, sense-quality like colour in terms of matter with its movements, matter itself in terms of motion. More- 68 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. m over, everywhere this result appears to be secured as it is in our own persons. There is a body or material of the lower level, of which one part is so complicated as to be endowed in fact with a new quality, which performs to it the office of soul or mind and may be called with proper caution its mind, body and mind being identical in this portion of the body in question. Life we have seen is a selection from a larger whole of physico-chemical processes. A secondary quality like colour belongs to one part or grouping of primary qualities in the material body to which it belongs, other parts of which may be occupied by other secondary qualities, and others by mere matter without secondary qualities ; according to the conception reached at an earlier stage that a thing or substance was a volume of space-time occupied in diverse parts so as to fill its contour by qualities. Using symbols we may put the case briefly thus. A complex of processes on a level L with the distinctive quality / becomes endowed, within the whole /.-thing or body, with a quality /' and the whole thing characterised by this quality rises to the level L '. The processes with the emergent quality /' constitute the soul or mind of a thing or body which is on the level L. The mind of a thing is thus equivalent only to a portion of that thing. Hence, when in us the mind in the proper sense of that word apprehends its bodily organism through the organic sensations, we have one portion, a highly developed one which carries the mental quality, apprehending a part of the whole body which is at the lower level. Another corollary is the obvious one that a thing or body at the level L[ is as it were stratified and, besides containing processes which have the quality /', is built up on processes of all the lower levels down to the spatio- temporal one itself. Thus the soul of each level is the soul of a body which is the stuff of which it may be called the form. There is a close connection between this conception and that of the universal (or as it was called in Greek philosophy, the form). The universal is, as we have seen, the pattern of construction of the particular. So ch. ii. b ORDER OF QUALITIES 69 far as the neural complex has a certain pattern of com- plexity it has the mental quality. But we cannot say that the quality belongs to the universal in any sense in which it does not belong to the particular. The universal simply emerges with its quality on the higher level of existence. Owing to the historical associations of the word form it is better therefore to keep to the simpler designation of a quality as a quality rather than as form of its body. The body or stuff of each new quality or type of soul has itself already its own type of soul, and ultimately the body of everything is a piece of Space-Time, the time of which is the soul-constituent which is identical with the body-constituent. Beginning with spatio-temporal finites, there is a continual ascent to newer and more developed existents, so that the course of Time issues in the growth of ever new types of c soul/ and in this way all existence is linked in a chain of affinity, and there is nothing which does not in virtue of its constitution respond to ourselves, who are but the highest known illustration of the general plan ; so that there is nothing dead, or sense- less in the universe, Space-Time being itself animated. It will now be clearer that, as was insisted before, the * Minds' of minds of various levels are not merely minds with varying i™™hb„ degrees of what is mind in the distinctive sense. Life is in kind, not a consciousness with something of its powers left out, nor materiality consciousness with still larger omissions and imperfections. The difference is one of kind or quality and not of degree. Nor are we to suppose with Leibniz that the minds of lower orders of being, for example living beings, are monads like our minds which preside over the living beings. Such a supposition was natural if our mind is itself thought to be a monad. But if we begin with what comes first, Space-Time and its constituent point-instants, which may be called monads, we realise that our minds themselves are but special com- plexities of Time. That special complexity carries with it the quality of mind, and it is identical with its bodily neural equivalent. A lower complexity of Time carries the quality life ; a still lower one materiality or colour. 7o EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. m Always these qualities which perform the mental office towards their bodies are themselves complex, and in their order of growth the higher complexity arises out of a lower complexity. Thus the time-complexity contained in a material body as such with physical, and let us assume chemical, modes of behaviour becomes in life the foundation of a still greater complexity of time-configura- tion ; and similarly in the emergence of mind out of life. So much the more important is it to urge that in declaring all things down to point-instants and Space-Time itself to be fashioned on our plan, what we really mean is that there is a more fundamental plan of which we are only the highest known empirical illustrations ; and that there- fore it is truer to call mind the time of our bocly than to call time the mind of its space. The higher emergent has been described as based on a complexity of the lower existents ; thus life is a complex of material bodies and mind of living ones. Ascent takes place, it would seem, through complexity. But at each change of quality the complexity as it were gathers itself together and is expressed in a new simplicity. The emergent quality is the summing together into a new totality of the component materials. Just in this way, as our thoughts become more and more complex, some new conception arises in the mind of a discoverer which brings order into the immense tangle of facts and simplifies them and becomes the starting-point for fresh advances in knowledge ; or in social affairs some vivifying idea like democracy arises to create as it were a new moral order, in which again distinctions and divergences arise which demand in their turn a new practical key. Some- what in this fashion complexes of one stage of existence gather themselves for a new creation, and additional complexities mean new simplifications. It follows as part of this relation of the higher level to the lower, as an empirical emergent from c material ' already endowed with its own quality, that the empirical qualities of the ' material ' are carried up into the body of the higher level but not into its new quality. Life is ch.ii.b ORDER OF QUALITIES 71 based on material existents which have colour or smell or weight. But life is not itself coloured, nor, except in a metaphor, sweet. The living thing has colour in respect of its body but in respect of its distinctive life it has not. Mind has no secondary qualities, nor even has it life, but only as identical with a living thing has it life. The thing called mind has not in respect of its mentality the lower empirical qualities. Energy is an empirical quality of matter and does not belong to mind or life. Yet it is easy to interpret the phrases * vital ' or c mental energy ' as the energy of the material equivalents ; and in this way, be it observed, the difficulties of the application of the principle of conservation of energy to life and mind disappear. For we have no need to think of any entity soul interfering, with its own peculiar energy. Con- trariwise the categorial characters are carried up into the emergent existent. For everything is a complex of space- time and possesses the fundamental properties of any space-time, which are the categories. Hence though life is not coloured it is extended and in time, and this we have seen to be true of mind as well. It is a substance and exhibits causality and the like. This difficult relation is made clearer by referring to what obtains in our own experience, and extending the conceptions used in describing it to other levels of existence. Our minds enjoy themselves, we have agreed to say, and contemplate external things on the level of life and lower levels. The brain which carries mind with it comes in the end to be thought of as an object con- templated. Thus the same thing which as contemplated is a living thing enjoys itself in its distinctive quality of mind, and enjoys its mind under all the categories. We can thus more easily understand how a thing which is not mind but has something which performs to it the office of mind can be at once a member of a lower level and c enjoy ' itself according to the mode of enjoyment proper to its * soul ' in its distinctive character. Its mode of enjoyment need not be ' minding ' as with us, but living or, shall we say ? materialising. It is for itself as it ex- periences itself directly in enjoyment. Its basis in its 72 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. m body or matter is one of the class of objects it con- templates. The twofold way in which our minds are minded and our brains thought of, and in this sense observed, enables us to overcome the apparent difficulty of denying that the empirical characters of the basis enter into the emergent though the categorial ones do, while at the same time we assert that there is only one and the same existent, which is on the higher level but also belongs to the lower one, and is accordingly differently experienced. To the other things on its own level it is related as we are related to one another. Certain special difficulties in this statement I pass over for the moment, for we are definitely trenching on questions belonging to the theory of knowledge, without which it is now hardly possible to proceed a step further. It remains to add that upon any one level there may be several qualities which yet are of the same order. This is the case of the secondary qualities of matter, which apparently are all specifically different. On the level of life or mind we have the different types of plants or those of animals. Now in these two cases, the quality of life or mind seems to be one and the same, and the difference to lie in the bodily structure of the various types. There are on one level degrees of perfection l or development ; and at the same time there is affinity by descent between the existents belonging to the level. This difference of perfection is not the same thing as difference of order or rank such as subsists between matter and life or life and mind. But the various secondary qualities seem to be different in themselves and to have different bodies. It may be, however, that amongst them too there are degrees of development or perfection, so that they may be found in the end to be affined as the animals are or, to take the other instance, as the chemical elements are. A further question which is directly raised by the whole interpretation of new qualities as emerging from a lower basis is how far such new qualities can be predicted. The discussion is better deferred till we can raise the 1 For the notion of perfection, see later, ch. ix. B, p. 264. ch. ii b ORDER OF QUALITIES 73 question of human freedom. Meanwhile it is enough to observe that there is only one respect in which the world is predictable with sufficient knowledge, and that is the spatio-temporal. A calculator given the state of the universe at a certain number of instants or at one instant with the law of its change could, given sufficient powers, calculate what the spatio-temporal condition of the world would be at any given later instant. But he could not on our interpretation predict what qualities would be evoked by the complexes he predicts in Space-Time, unless he lived to observe them. arise. CHAPTER III THE EMPIRICAL PROBLEMS How the Qualities are the empirical as distinguished from the problems non - empirical or categorial features of existences, the brand of their finitude, or rather (since we must provide for the possibility of infinites with quality) of their being less than the whole of Space-Time. Qualities are to be noted and registered but accepted without the pretence of accounting for them. All that philosophy can do is to show that they correspond to and are identical with the spatio-temporal configurations which are their ultimate basis ; and, taking over from the sciences what can be learnt as to the actual order which exists among them, to exhibit, as the attempt has been made in the preceding chapter to exhibit, the way in which the higher quality is identical with a certain complexity in the existences of a lower order of quality. This account of the relation of what is strictly empirical to the non-empirical is one portion of the second of the two departments of philosophy which were described in the Introduction. The first department was to describe and account for the categorial features of things. The second department was to consider the relations of empirical things to the non-empirical, and their relations to one another which arise from their being complexes of space-time, and related to one another consequently on being contained within the one Space-Time. Empirical facts and laws are the subject of the so-called special sciences. Whatever questions arise from the generation of empirical existences within the matrix in which they 74 ch. in THE EMPIRICAL PROBLEMS 75 are, not lost, but contained, fall to the special science of philosophy. One of these questions has now been answered, however imperfectly, in the philosophy of quality. The larger question remains. Its interest resides to a great extent in the position which is to be assigned to minds. Minds are one set of finites, the highest we know, whose life or ' minding ' is experience. But their relations to other finites should be, if they also are in the end complexes of space-time, nothing but illustrations of universal relations, which hold between finites as such, in virtue of their spatio-temporal nature. Accordingly the prerogatives of mind, which seem at the first blush to place it in a unique position, will appear to be illustrations of more fundamental characters in which all things share alike. The answer to the question what knowledge is and how it is possible, will be to show that given a finite with the distinctive character or quality of mind or consciousness, knowing falls into its place in a common scheme. The so-called theory of knowledge becomes an incident in metaphysics and not the foundation of it. Some of these relations will now be enumerated. The The consideration of them I call the empirical problems. [uted"" I. The first and simplest relation is that all finites are merely connected together within the one Space-Time. They may be successive, or co-existent with one another, but they all belong together. In order to use a word which covers both cases, I shall say they are compresent. Such compresence involves directly or indirectly con- nection by way of causality. When one of the finites is a mind, and the other of lower level, the compresence is the relation described as consciousness of an object, or in general cognition (ch. iv.). II. Finite things are substances, and as such are volumes of space-time with a determinate contour and internal configuration. That is to say, they are deter- minate volumes of space-time which are the scene of movements possessing their appropriate qualities, and they persist throughout the succession and interplay of 76 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE „k. in these movements through a finite time, and have a beginning, a history, and a death. The spatio-temporal volume or contour is that which unifies all its qualities into a connected whole. There are therefore three con- stituent c elements • to be distinguished within a thing. First, its space and time. Second, the processes with their qualities which take place within it. Third, its permanent plan of construction or configuration. Con- sidered in relation to a percipient (I use this word to cover a mind engaged in any mental operation whatever, not merely that of perception proper) the first is the place, date, extent, and duration of the thing. The second is the sensible qualities of the thing. As transitory or momentary these are the percipient's sensa or sensibles. The sensible quality as we have seen is itself a substance or thing within the thing whose quality it is, it is a continuum of sensa or sensibles. The third, or plan of configuration or spatio-temporal pattern (itself a pattern of qualities), is the object of thought or conception. It is clear that these elements are not separable : there is no finite space-time which does not consist in movements and which has not its universal plan of configuration. But unless there is a percipient, these movements and this plan are not sensed or thought. To call them sensa or thoughts is to speak of them in their compresence with a percipient (ch. v.). Furthermore, each movement or let us say process or act of the thing, though itself transitory or momentary, being one act of the thing does not, or at least may not, leave the whole unaffected in its internal character, but the next act may be affected by the past act, or the thing may acquire a disposition in virtue of its history. This is the case, for instance, with the arrangement of the molecules in a permanently magnetised bar. In the case of percipients, this is the fact of retention of past experiencings, or reproduction. III. A thing affects another with which it is corn- present differently according to the latter's relative position in space or time or its intrinsic receptivity. In conse- quence it presents to the second thing only a portion of its ch. in THE EMPIRICAL PROBLEMS 77 whole character. For instance, a thing which is luminous on one side only, like a dark lantern, illuminates objects on that side but not objects on the other side. Again, a platinum crucible may be unaffected by acids contained in it which might enter into combination with a glass vessel. Flowers may blush unseen. It depends on the nature of the second thing how much of the first thing affects it. But the first thing is still the spatio-temporal unity of all its characters. In relation to a percipient, this is the simple fact that all experience is selective and depends on the position in space and time, and on the sensibility or other receptivity of the mind. An object wears partial aspects to the percipient on different occasions, and the thing perceived is collected from many experiences which are synthesised. The varying aspects of a thing are then called its sensible appearances ; and it is hardly possible to speak of the relations of things in general to one another in this regard without using the language of human experience. The table presents a different aspect to the fireplace and to the I wall. The glass vessel is sensitive to acids which do not affect the platinum crucible ; and the like (chs. iv. and vii.). IV. Since Space-Time is continuous, things are not cut off from one another, and a thing itself contains other things, and is part in turn of a larger complex. Thus the room in which I write contains chairs, and walls, and air, and me, and is also part of the house. At the same time fairly distinct lines are drawn in nature (in Space- Time) which make it artificial to speak of me together with my chair as a thing in the same sense as I am a thing or the chair is a thing ; just because we can be parted from each other. Now the characters which belong to anything intrinsically are those which are contained within its own spatio-temporal volume. These are presented to any compresent thing as the * sensible appearances ' of the thing. But the thing owing to its combination with something else may affect a compresent thing (A) . differently from when it is alone. Thus when the stick is half immersed in a pool, the light proceeding from the stick to a lens (the lens of the human eye is only a 78 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. m particular case) produces an image of a bent stick, because the lower half of the stick is a stick in water and not in air. Thus the aspect which the stick wears is not intrinsic to the stick in air. Again, it may happen that if A has a defect or is unlike in any way to things of its kind, and is thus abnormal, the thing will not produce on A its standard effect but a distorted one ; as for instance if a hammer strikes a cracked metal bell, or a 'dud' shell buries itself in the ground without exploding. When A is a percipient we say that the sensible appearances of the thing which is masked by the co- operation of some other condition do not really belong to the thing ; that they are not its sensible appearances but its ( mere appearances.' When the abnormal character of A affects the result, the appearances are illusory appear- ances, and A is the victim of illusion in his apprehension of the object (chs. vii. and viii.). V. The processes within a substance are in direct or indirect causal relation with one another ; the thing acts in a determinate way. In mind mental acts are also connected causally with one another, and the mind is subject to determination like all other things. But the mind enjoys its own life and the causal interrelation of its states is enjoyed as freedom (ch. x.). VI. Every finite is a part which subsists within Space- Time, and so far as it retains its own individual character it is accommodated or adapted to its surroundings in Space-Time. Such accommodation means the return of a separate thing out of its relative isolation into participa- tion with the whole. In respect of minds, this adaptation to other minds which surround it and to the world of other things is the foundation of values — truth, goodness, beauty (as well as the special case of economic value). Unvalues — error, badness, ugliness — rest on the failure of adaptation and consequent impermanence of the thing in its evil form (ch. ix.). These are some if not all l of the relations (whether internal or external) among things which arise from their belonging to the one Space-Time. They are not primary 1 See later, ch. ix. F, p. 312, for a possible seventh problem. ch. in THE EMPIRICAL PROBLEMS 79 categorial characters of things, for they presuppose the existence of things as empirical, that is as possessing quality. They arise out of the participation of things in Space-Time, and they are thus not empirical characters. They may be called derivative universal characters. Now it would be feasible, however difficult, to carry the inquiry further in detail along these general lines, and to exhibit in each case the corresponding features of mental life. But the procedure would be intolerably artificial. Already we have found it difficult to present the data without metaphors derived from human experience. In particular the last two problems, those of freedom and value, are almost unmeaning without prior reference to ourselves — the problem whether freedom is a unique privilege of man or, as will appear, a common feature of all finites when regarded from their own point of view ; and the problem whether values are confined to us or have their analogues lower down in the scale. Accordingly in the statement of these last empirical problems I have been obliged barely to name the general grounds of the rela- tions in question, without attempting to formulate it in such fulness as was possible with the other three, leaving the sequel to make the statement plausible. It is just because our minds are but one set of things amongst others, and at the same time are, in this connection at least, so much more familiar to us, that all the problems arise for us naturally in reference to our own experience, and traditionally are always so treated. Accordingly I shall treat these problems, in what remains, as they present themselves in mind, leaving the reader to translate the results back into the simpler general form, and return hereafter, so far as may be necessary, to things in general. I shall thus expound the general relations in their illustration by mjmd. Moreover, while the treatment still remains of the nature of* a sketch, it will be necessary to enter into some detail as to the nature of the mental life ; partly because though in psychology and the sciences of values there is a large amount of results which are accepted, there is great doubt and disagreement as to the fundamental ideas of these 8o EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. m sciences — the middle propositions, as Bacon called them, are a vast and growing field, but the elementary concep- tions are open to revision ; partly because the mind has not generally been regarded from the point of view of these general metaphysical problems ; partly also because I am much more familiar with the subject-matter of these than of the other sciences. CHAPTER IV MIND AND KNOWING A. The Cognitive Relation The first and simplest relation between finite existences, Cognition under which name are included not merely things in the JJ8an ordinary sense but components of them or aspects or o^com! parts of them, is their compresence within the one Space- &o££'i Time of which all alike are differentiations. The behaviour of finites to one another in this relation of compresence is determined by the character of the finites. The plant lives, grows, and breathes, and twines around a stick. The material body resists, or falls, or sounds when struck, or emits light when touched by the sun. The mind knows. Mind is for us the highest order of finite empirical existent. A mind is the substantial continuum of certain processes which have the conscious quality. These processes are experienced in their con- tinuity with one another, and are acts of the mind which is the substantial totality of them. They are identical with certain neural processes which the quality of consciousness or mind marks off from less highly fashioned vital processes ; and while they therefore have a distinctive rank of their own, and are experienced by the mind as mental processes and not immediately or directly as vital or physical ones, they constitute through their basis in life and matter, and ultimately in Space-Time itself, one set of existents in the general matrix. When- ever a mental process exists in compresence with some existent of a lower order, it is aware of that existent which vol. ii 8l G 82 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk.ui is its object. It experiences itself as an enjoyment, and it is compresent with its object which is contemplated. Let knowing stand for all kinds of apprehension ot objects, whether sensation, or thought, or memory, or imagination, or any other. In the compresence of a mind with a lower finite, that is, a piece of Space-Time of a lower grade of quality, the mind in virtue of its conscious quality is aware or conscious of that object. It knows or has cognition of it. A and B are any two finites, which are therefore compresent with one another. Let A be a mind and B another finite, distinct from that mind and lower in order. Then A's compresence with B means that A is conscious of B. Cognition then, instead of being a unique relation, is nothing but an instance of the simplest and most universal of all relations. The object contemplated, unlike the enjoyment, is some existent which is non-mental, some part of the whole world of Space-Time, but distinct and separate from the mind A or its act of apprehension. But according to circumstances the apprehension of the object takes different forms. The case of easiest com- prehension is sensation. Let B be a patch or point of red and A, as before, the mind. B acts causally on the body of A and excites a mental process ay a process of vision, which for the present we may describe as a process appropriate to B ; which means that the process would be different if B were a patch of blue br a hard surface or a sound. That is to say, while the processes in the different cases would have the identical quality of consciousness, they would differ in respect of their categorial features, in a manner to be considered here- after. The two compresents are B and the mental process #, which may be called by anticipation an act of the mind A because it is continuous with the other mental processes which are united in the mental sub- stance or thing A. B is here the sensum and a the act of sensing. The name sensation is unfortunately used sometimes for the sensing, sometimes for the sensum, and sometimes for the total situation, outside of which they never do as sensum and sensing exist. I cannot THE COGNITIVE RELATION 83 hope to avoid following the bad example of common usage, but I shall endeavour not to do so except when the context leaves no room for misconception. Now such a relation as exists in sensing a sensum is strictly comparable with the relation of two compresent physical finites, like the floor and the table, which are in causal relation. The difference is that one of the finites here is not merely physical but mental as well, or rather it is mental for itself and physical as well. But the compresent object does not always evoke images and the mental act by a causal action. When 1 imagine a memory- red patch the mental act is evoked by some precedent mental act or perhaps merely by some stimulant of the brain, a pressure of blood or some chemical affection. Still an object B is now before the mind or compresent with it, that is to say, an object not compresent in sense so as to act- causally upon A's sense organ but resembling one which has so acted on A in the past. When I have memory there is, as before explained,1 the additional modification in the mental process and its compresent object which makes the object not simply a red patch but a red patch I have experienced before, that is, which belongs to my past. Thus the object compresent with my mental act being the object appropriate to it may be absent from my senses. Still it is distinct and separate from the mental act of imagining and the image or ideatum belongs somewhere in the world of Space-Time. There is nothing in the relation of two material Analogue*, finites comparable with this situation. But a material thing is not alive and still less conscious. On the vital level and certainly before we have imagination or memory we have acts on the part of the living being which are anticipations of some external thing which is to complete or fulfil them. The plant grows towards the light. The hungry animal goes in pursuit of prey, without any forecast in consciousness, so far as we can judge, of what it wants. Its movements through the jungle 1 Bk. I. ch. iv. vol. i. pp. 113 f. 84 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE are prompted by internal causes but are adapted or ppro^e to tZ real prey which is there to be found The currents which lowly organisms create in the water with their cilia bring food into the mouth, but without it would seem even the vaguest consciousness of any object, if we are even justified in attributing to a paramoecium consciousness at all. Thus on the one hand when the tiger sees and is conscious of the antelope, he jumps, but he also makes the preparatory movements appropriate to the finding of an antelope and then when one comes he jumps. The organism is so adapted to the world in which it lives that it not only is affected causally by it but from internal causes initiates actions adapted to the external reality. Even in ourselves we can detect these uneasy or restless movements which have no definite object (or at most we are conscious only of ' something or other ' to which our movement is directed) but which yet are adapted to attain their real fulfilment, like strugglings to get rid of oppression in the lungs into a freer air, or the unquiet movements which attend adolescence. To understand the significance of the objects of ideation we must refer to such movements as these, which are pre-adapted to real objects in the external world. Let the movements issue from mental acts, and the object to which that act is appropriate and of which we are conscious as an idea or ideatum is a non-mental one distinct from the mind. It may take many different forms : it may be a bare something or other ; it may be an object * such as ' has been experienced in sensation before, like an imagination of breakfast ; it may be a memory, that is an object of the past as it presents itself after the lapse of time, ready to be identified with a present percept of the same thing, as when we say this is the man I met yesterday. On the other hand, the object may have no actual existence, just as the tiger may be disappointed and find no food ; or if he ' misjudge * the distance or be old, he may miss his kill like Akela in the Jungle Book ; or it may not occur to sense in the same form as it exists to imagination, may be a sheer ch. iv. a THE COGNITIVE RELATION g5 illusion, a mere imagination. Yet, however unreal it may be, all the materials are in the non-mental world out of which it is built, or, to put the matter otherwise, reality provides the basis of the imaginary object. This will become clearer when we deal with illusion and error in detail. Always the mental movement is correlated with and adapted to some non-mental object, which has the characters of sensible experience (is spatio-temporal, has colour or life, etc.), as those characters appear in the image. There may be no golden mountain in reality but at least there are mountains and gold. It is the combination of mountain and gold which is fictitious, and yet a mountain must be of some rock or other,' only perhaps not wholly of gold. Thus on the one hand a mental act has compresent with it the non-mental object, distinct from mind, which is appropriate to it. And on the other hand all our images are taken to be not only external but real or true until further experience shows us that there is no thing or substance to which they belong in the form they assume for us. From our side, all our objects, sensible or imaginary, claim to be real. Ideas are, in short, the aspects which things removed from our senses by distance of Space or Time wear to our mind owing to its capacity of dispensing with sensible presence ; and this capacity carries with it the liability to create combinations which have no counterpart in that form in the real world. Thus as no finite existent can affect our minds directly without evoking its appropriate conscious act, so no conscious act can exist without its appropriate external object in the spatio-temporal world.1 Imagining an object is comparable to the physical act of turning round to see something behind our backs. Difficulties are left over to interpret in respect of mere imagination and error.2 But we dare not take the difficult cases as our guide, and, 1 In coming to recognise this principle I was much helped by a remark made by a speaker at a discussion in the Aristotelian Society. 2 Below, chs. vii. p. 193, and viii. p. 215. 86 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE s*. iti because we may err, declare that our objects alike in imagination and sensation are mental. We must begin with the plainer cases, those of sensation, where the non-mental object acts on the mind, and of veridical imagination, where we need only observe that the world is in Time as well as Space and we may be compresent therefore with objects removed from us in time or absent from our senses. The link of connection between sensible and ideal non-mental existence which enables us to see that in both cases the object is equally a non-mental or physical reality is found in perception. There the mental process is part sensing, part ideation, and the object part sensed; part ideated. In the familiar phrase, half of our percepts are seen, half comes out of our heads. Yet the percept is one external object. The shifting phases of perception itself demonstrate this truth. I have seen and felt and smelt an orange at one and the same time. Later I see the orange, and its feel and fragrance are ideal ; or I feel and smell it in the dark and its colour is compresent in idea. What was before a sensum has become ideatum, and what was before ideatum is now a sensum. Ideata and sensa declare themselves equally non-mental exist- ences, with the same right to be recognised as such, by thus taking one another's places. The cognition of objects is therefore a case of the compresence of two finites when one of these finites is a mind and the other one at a lower level of quality. A mind in any mental act or process is conscious of the appropriate object in so far as the act and the object which are appropriate to each other are in compresence, no matter how they are brought into this relation. The act of mind is the cognition, the object is the cognitum, the cognitive relation is the compresence between them. It is therefore only an ambiguity like that noticed in the case of sensation by which cognition itself, the mental act, is sometimes described as a relation. The relation is indicated in speech by the word of, which is the <of' of reference in distinction from the ' of* of apposition used when we describe an enjoyment as the consciousness of ch. iv. a THE COGNITIVE RELATION 87 the mental process or act.1 Such consciousness is identical with the act of mind, which is or constitutes the consciousness and is not its object. The object is some existent distinct from the act of mind. Moreover, while there can be no act of mind without its object, any more than a body can breathe without air, it remains to be seen whether the object does not exist in the absence of the mental act. Clearly it cannot be an object to a mind in the absence of mind, but does it owe its existence to the act of mind ? The answer we shall see is that it does not ; it exists or rather it may exist, as for example a sensum, in the absence of mind. These and other questions are deferred for the moment. But, waiving further details, we have reached a broad Compari- general result. On the hypothesis that mind is one ™ jf^" finite among others, albeit the highest in its empirical direct level of quality, we have found that the relation of "Pre- cognition is what in the Introduction was declared to be the deliverance of direct experience ; that in every act of cognition there are two separate entities or finites in compresence with each other, the one an enjoyment, the other what in relation to that enjoyment is a contemplated object. The enjoyment of the mind's self is at the same time the contemplation of an object distinct from it and non-mental. To know anything is to be along with it in vSpace-Time. Consciousness is indeed empirically unique, as being confined to a determinate order of empirical existents. But to be conscious of something else is not unique. It is the one term of the relation which has the unique flavour and not the relation itself. What direct experience, interpreted without the prejudice derived from some supposed singularity or privilege of mind, exhibits to the unprejudiced inquirer, has now 1 Above, Introduction, vol. i. p. 12. The word consciousness is similarly ambiguous in ordinary language. I use it for the quality of the mental act or the mental act itself. But it often, perhaps most commonly, stands for the relation of the mind to its object. This usage is adopted by Mr. C. A. Strong in his recent Origin of Consciousness (London, 1918). It leads however to the inconvenient result, either that we are not con- scious of our own minds, or else that our minds are objects to us. 88 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk m been exhibited as a corollary from the simple proposition that all finites are related to one another by compresence. The mind does not stand above things and itself ; but in being itself— enjoying itself in certain ways — it is conscious of or aware of or knows non-mental entities appropriate to its enjoyment. No one will, I trust, suppose that I imagine myself to have in this way demonstrated a proposition which was otherwise an unsupported statement of observation. I have only exhibited the same fact in its place in a scheme of interpretation, and this is the only demonstration of its truth which the circumstances admit. On the contrary, to pretend that it had been demonstrated would be manifestly circular. For the hypothesis that mind is one thing amongst other things in the empirical world of finites, though it does not presuppose the actual result that cognition is the com- presence of a knowing enjoyment with a contemplated finite, does presuppose that there is no mind above both empirical mental acts and physical things to which they are both alike objects or, in the Lockeian language, ideas. The interpretation of knowledge is therefore but an item in the system constructed on that hypothesis. Knowing is accounted for as the work of a purely empirical mind. The result of a theory confirms a simple result of inspection. At the same time the outcome is more significant than this admission implies. For suppose we had assumed that there was something called mind which could survey things and its own acts, so that in a non empirical sense not only mental acts but physical things were mind-dependent, a candid examination of these mental objects or ideas would have exhibited all the features we have described in the world of things. They would still be differentiations of Space -Time. The empirical mental acts as connected in the substance, mind, would still do all the work of what we are familiar with as knowing, and thus in the end the all-observing unique mind would be seen to be otiose. All which makes us thinking beings, all which gives colour and richness to our world of things, would be there as much in ject itself. ch.iv.a THE COGNITIVE RELATION 89 the absence of this supposed unique mind as -in its presence. The consilience of the result of our hypothesis as Mind never applied to knowing with what we may learn by direct an.obJ inspection of the cognitive experience at once indicates l° USC certain problems and helps us to shorten the inquiry by reference to the Introduction. Thus it follows at once that since the object is distinct from the enjoying mind, the mind can never be an object to itself in the same sense as physical things are objects to it. It experiences itself differently from them. It is itself and refers to them. All appearances to the contrary rest upon a mistake of analysis. Thus I may at this moment have in my mind the memory of how I felt on some past occasion. But I do not make that memory of myself an object. It is a partial enjoyment linked up with my present enjoyment (also partial) of myself. Just as I contemplate some aspect of a physical object, say its past condition, as a portion of its whole history, so I enjoy a partial condition of my enjoyed substance, my mind, along with the rest of the enjoyments which as linked together and contained within my own enjoyed space- time constitute myself as enjoyed. The arrival of reinforcements was the reason why the enemy was over- powered ; here is a fact of the external world included in a larger complex of external fact. Seeing my friend reminds me of how I used in former years to rejoice in his society ; here is an enjoyed fact included in a more comprehensive enjoyed fact. Introspection has already been discussed.1 I do not in introspection turn my mind upon itself and convert a part of myself into an object. I do but report more dis- tinctly my condition of enjoyment. A mind which broods over itself in dangerous practical introspection abandons itself to the enjoyment of itself because of the subjective interest of that employment. Introspection for psycho- logical purposes is enjoyment lived through with a scientific interest, and introspective psychology is the more 1 Introduction, vol. i. pp. 17 ff. 9o EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. m accurate report of our mental acts than we need for the practical purposes of life. Most introspection is indeed retrospection and has been thought therefore to be obviously a case of self-objectifying. But it is in fact, as just before observed, enjoying or re-living our past. The reason why we use retrospection so much is that in memory the enjoyed condition is free from those practical urgencies of the present moment which take our attention from ourselves and turn it on to the object with which we are concerned and make the accurate record of what we are enjoying difficult or impossible. On the other hand it is a sheer mistake to suppose that it is by intro- spection that we know the images with which we are conversant in imagination or the objects which we remember as the objects of our remembered mental acts. The image of a tree is no more examined by intro- spection than the perceived tree. Both are objects of extrospection. It is only the act of imagining which we can introspect. Still less do we introspect when we observe our bodily condition in the organic or kin- aesthetic sensations. These sensa are objects to the mind, not enjoyments, and, as will be seen hereafter, are non- mental like colours or figures in external space. Thus introspection may be called observation but observa- tion is not necessarily the observation of external objects.1 The select- The mere compresence of a finite existent with the minT" °f mmd accounts for the mind's consciousness of that object. Problem The object and the corresponding mental act vary together, and to every difference in the one there is a corresponding difference in the other, not in respect of the quality of consciousness but in respect of its categorial characters. But not only are finites compresent with each other but they are related to each other selectively. Applied to the special case of relation between physical finites and a mind, this proposition means that the objects of which the mind is conscious are partial revelations to the mind 1 In the above I am necessarily repeating in a shorter form the remarks of the Introduction. III. ch.iv.a THE COGNITIVE RELATION 91 of things.1 This was also the deliverance of our inspection of experience when to simple inspection is added reflection on the results of many connected experiences. Things are, on our hypothesis, pieces of Space-Time within which are contained those movements and that configuration or pattern of their combination, which are the phases of the history of the things and the universal character which the things possess. According to the condition of mind, into which it is thrown by a thing or in which for other reasons it happens to be in respect or the thing, the object of the mind will be a different partial aspect or feature of the thing. I may see an orange as a patch of colour but may be too far off to smell it. I may see a flower but may for lack of interest fail to count the number of its leaves. I may perceive it but at best I only perceive it partially. Or the thing may be corn- present with me as that object which is the image of it, or the thought or general plan of its construction, or the memory of it as I saw it yesterday. The mind enjoys itself at any moment only partially ; equally the things which it contemplates are contemplated selectively as partial objects. In common language, we are said to apprehend the thing of which we are aware only in the partial aspect or feature which the mind has selected. Thus we are said to see the orange and not merely the patch of yellow colour of a certain shape, which is, strictly speaking, all that we apprehend in vision. We do so because many experiences of the thing, called orange, are synthesised in our mind in the course of our experience, that is, we become aware of them as all contained within the volume of space-time which is the substance of the thing. The object before our mind is nothing but the finite and distinct existewt which we apprehend with the 1 The distinction of an object from a thing as being a partial apprehension of the thing is the same I believe as is drawn by Mr. H. Barker in his contribution to a symposium in Proc. Arist. Soc, 191 2-1 3, N.S. vol. iii. 'Can there be anything obscure or implicit in a mental state?' p. 258. 92 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. m character which it bears upon its face— its face value — a coloured patch, a smell, an imaged orange, a thought orange, a colour qualified by a touch which is revived in idea. Experience enables us to connect all these objects together and be aware of them in their combination as belonging to the thing to which they all in some sense belong. We then say or can say that the orange reveals itself under the form of these different objects. The synthesis or combination spoken of is not to be under- stood as a creative procedure on the part of the mind, except where the mind creates, as in imagination, a combination not presented in nature. The synthesis is the union in the thing cognised of the various special features of it which have been cognised piecemeal, and whose substantial coherence the mind comes in experience to recognise. The clearest instance of such contemplated synthesis is found in perception where sensa are contem- plated by the mind as combined with ideal elements. The act of perceiving is a synthetic enjoyment ; the perceived object or thing, the perceptum, is a contemplated synthesis, which as will be seen is founded on the reference of the separate elements of sense and idea to the same bit of Space-Time. Things and We have therefore to distinguish between objects objects. which are the finite existents revealed to mind in any act of mind and those groupings of objects within a cer- tain spatio-temporal contour which are known as things. Sometimes the distinction is called that of the contents of mind and the objects respectively, but, for certain reasons already touched on and to be explained more fully, this usage seems to me undesirable and entirely confusing. Now in the simpler cases, there is no difficulty in the proposition that a thing, described as the space -time which exhibits at any moment and from moment to. moment different features united in a sub- stantial unity, contains these partial features, and that they are selected by the mind according to circumstances, the selection being understood not as necessarily an active one, as when it is prompted by a purpose, but as varying ch.iv.a THE COGNITIVE RELATION 93 from passive acceptance or affection upwards to fully active selection. The orange contains its colour and smell and shape. Nor is there any real difficulty in main- taining that the sensum orange-colour being distinct from the sensation of it and being a movement within the thing, with the yellow quality, exists in the absence of any percipient. When the percipient is there the orange is revealed to him as this patch of yellow colour. Nor in maintaining that the remembered orange, if only the remembering be free from falsification, is actually contained in the history of the orange, and is in the same sense the orange revealed to memory after the lapse of time. But the selectiveness of mind extends further than these simple cases. For not only does the mind falsify by the introduction of objects which do not belong to the thing ; that is to say, being in a certain condition it apprehends in the object elements corresponding to that condition, whiph it may thus be said to impute to the object ; but according to the nature of the mind and its mere position in space and time, things wear to the mind varying appearances. The colours may look different with distance, or with colour blindness in the percipient. Even the spatial form varies, as in the varying appearances of the penny when it is seen from the front or sideways or end on. The question then arises, and it is a different one from the present, which of the varying appearances of things, which objects presented to the mind, belong really to the thing ; the question, not of the non-mental character of objects but of their reality or truth. It is the misfortune of a systematic exposition that it cannot answer all things at once, and this question must be delayed till its proper place. We must, however, follow the safe rule of beginning with the simpler facts and accounting later for the complex ones. But while we can, if our hypothesis of the nature of things or substances be correct, affirm that a thing is a combination of certain objects which it reveals to mind, we can also safely at this stage affirm that it is the foundation of all of them. Later on we shall see that, like the bent staff apprehended in water, the variable appearances of things which seem 94 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. m not to be contained so obviously in them as the colour and smell in an orange, are appearances of the thing not taken by itself but along with some other thing or circumstance. The partial revelation of a thing to mind in the form of objects which belong to the thing merely means in the end that no object, nor even a thing, is given alone, but, because it is a part of Space-Time, coheres in varying degrees of closeness with other objects and groups of such objects connected together by the categorial relation of substance, that is, belonging to the same volume of space-time. The thing which is partially revealed in its objects, whether of sense or memory or thinking or imagination, is thus of the same kind of existence as the objects themselves. One object may suggest the others which participate with it in the one substance : that is, it means the others and may be said, though only loosely, to refer to them. Moreover, no object is apprehended except as being the whole or a part of the space-time which contains them all. Thus even the patch of yellow is seen extended over the space which is part of the orange. No object therefore is apprehended by itself but points to other finites as well. It is spread over the space which is apprehended with it.1 But the space and time in which it is contained and the other objects which it suggests in virtue of experience are all of them on the same footing as regards the mind which apprehends them. In the act of knowing the mind refers to its object as something non-mental, and it may and does refer to that object as part of a larger whole which is also included under the general name of object. There is thus no thing which lives as it were behind the objects which reveal it, no thing-in-itself which is itself unrevealed except through these partial objects. If the objects are physical, so is the thing. It is because the mind selects (actively or passively) from the total thing parts of it, which it contains or of « The space it is apprehended as spread over is the perspective from SSTSl^Sc Vlew of £ 8pace "^ * *■ W s- ch. iv. a THE COGNITIVE RELATION 95 which it is the foundation, that the objects of mind are thought to owe their esse to their percipi. All that they owe to the mind is their selection, that is their percipi. But their essey their existence and their qualities, they have as being finite existences in Space-Time, and thus non- mental. Were it not for the selecting mind they would not be noticed, and would not be objects to a subject. But they do not owe to the subject their being but only their being apprehended by the subject. They exist apart from the subject before the subject can select them for contemplation, always under the proviso that the subject selects them truly without introducing extraneous material also non-mental. And so far as they are there, and in the form in which they are there, they are there whether they are contemplated by a mind or not. Agreeable as this result, derived from a consideration Alleged of the general relation of selectiveness of finites to one cognition '" another, is to what we learn from simple inspection of to some- experience helped out by reflection on the history and \^6 pre varieties of experience ; it contradicts a doctrine sup- ««tation. ported by high authorities (like Mr. Stout and the late O. Kttlpe1), that objects or, as they are then called, presentations point beyond themselves to a source or ground, and are immediately apprehended as pointing or referring to that ground. The presentations are our guide to the nature of the ground or condition of them. Thus, since the source or condition is given with the presentation or object, it must be said to be given in experience. But at any rate that experience is on this showing of a different order from the experience of the presentation or object. Sometimes it is said that it is thought which informs us or refers us to the thing (which may include the whole of reality) which conditions the presentation. Thus, to take a simple sense-datum, it is rightly held that if the mind is aware only of its own sensations, it could not transcend them so as to know independently existing things. Consequently, to quote 1 Die Realisirung, Bd. i. (Leipzig, 191 2). 96 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. m Mr. Stout,1 " we must assume that the simplest datum of sense-perception from which the cognition of an external world can develop consists not merely in a sensuous presentation, but in a sensuous presentation apprehended as conditioned by something other than itself." It is not easy to discuss this doctrine shortly with fairness, especially apart from the consideration of the variability of sense-appearances which we have deferred. But I am more anxious to point out what is its relation to my own result, and what are the really true considerations which, as I think, it presents in a mistaken form. In the first place, if we are said in sensuous presentation to be aware of or to refer to something not a presentation which conditions it, the thought in question is not the thinking which is concerned with universals or concepts. Strictly speaking, though I do not think this has always been admitted, concepts should be in the same class with presentations and should be like them real appear- ances of the source or thing which conditions presentations. Such they obviously are for me, since they are, as con- figurations of space-time, in pari materia with sensa or images or percepta. The difference of the two senses of thought is made clear by Mr. Kttlpe when he insists that the thoughts we think are to be distinguished from the things we think of, for we may think not only of universals but of particulars or even of a sensation.2 This statement is greatly to be welcomed, for it clears the way to an understanding of the real issue. The thought which tells us of a thing or condition or source different from the presentation but revealed by it is the experience in the mind of a reference to something not the mind In the same way, to revert to a distinction indicated before, the meaning of a word may be either the ideas which it conveys, that is the facts which are contained in its logical intension, or it may be the actual things to which the word is applied—its extension. I may mean the prisoner, where meaning is the intellectual substi- tute tor pointing to him ; or meaning may be what is * Manual of Psychology (London, 1913, ed. 3), p. 4,2. 2 Loc. cit. pp. 82 ff. ch. iv. a THE COGNITIVE RELATION 97 suggested by a word or a symbol or any part of a complex which leads on continuously to the rest of it, as the first words of a line mean for me the rest. Now, so far as thought is the act of reference to something not in the mind itself, undoubtedly we can have no act of mind without such reference. The experience that we have of referring to something non-mental is the experience (and I have shown before that it is experienced in enjoyment) that we are compresent with an object distinct from ourselves. If we call this experience an act of thought, every experience contains a thought-reference to some- thing distinct from our enjoyment. This is ,the essence of our own result. But for us the reference is to the object, that is to the presentation itself; for the theory under considera- tion the reference is to something beyond and behind it. For that theory the presentation is still psychical though it is the revelation of its underlying ground or condition. Though it is not subjective like the feeling of interest it is yet psychical. In a later paper Mr. Stout has compared the relation of the sensible to its condition with that of an image of a sensible like a black mark to the sensible itself. " In the very act of directly apprehending the image I think of or remember the sensible itself. I am not merely cognisant of the image but cognisant of it as standing in a peculiar relation to the previous existence of the primary sensible."1 This analogy is very instruct- ive for the purpose of understanding the theory, but it appears to me to be a misstatement of the experience of remembering the original sensible.2 What I have in my mind is the image of the black patch, that is, is a black patch more or less blurred in the way in which images differ from percepts, and along with that the note of pastness and that warmth or intimacy of connection with myself which assures me that it belongs to my past. This is all that I can find in the remembering act, and this is the experience of having had a thing before me 1 Proc. Arist. Soc, 191 3-14, N.S. vol. xiv. (Symposium: * The Status of Sense-Data'), p. 384. 2 Above, B.k. I. ch. iv. vol. i. pp. 113 ff. VOL. II 98 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE in the past. The original sensible is not in my mind at all. But if I again see it I can identify the black mark as what I remembered a moment before. It is some such other experience which has been imported into the experience of the memory image when it is alleged that that image actually refers to the sensible. If the sensible had been in the mind at the time there would not have been a mere memory but a recognition. But if it was not how could it be referred to ? We have therefore a mistaken description of memory in which something known about the object is imported into the actual object of acquaintance. It may be added that we may have an image of a black patch without any memory at all, and here it is still clearer that if we say we refer to a sensible of the same sort we are not construing our experience as we have it but importing something else into it which is known from a different experience. Based as it appears to be on some such misapprehen- sion, the whole statement that in presentation we refer .to its condition is open to the old objection brought against the Lockeian doctrine, which it resembles, that our ideas are copies of their originals. How can experi- ence warrant a reference to this something conditioning presentation which we never have experienced and which is only a symbol for the non-mental ? For this condition is not in the same case with the vague * something or other ' which we have often referred to as playing so large a part in our experience. That vague something is merely an object awaiting further definition. But the supposed condition of presentation cannot be further known for it is not known at all. I do not merely mean that it is not known explicitly ; that is irrelevant. It stands not for anything experienced or any part of such but merely for a postulate that although the presentation is psychical it must be brought into relation with external reality. I am compelled therefore to conclude that the doctrine is a misstatement of either of two things which are both true. Either it stands for the truth that every mental act does refer as such to a non-mental object, in which case the object ceases to be a mere presentation and the ch. iv. a THE COGNITIVE RELATION 99 reference is to the object itself. Or it stands for the truth that any object of mind points to or means other objects combined with it in the spatio-temporal unity of the thing and that any mental object is from the beginning spatio-temporal and implies a piece of Space-Time within which it belongs and which is apprehended, as we shall see, not by sensuous experience but by a simpler experience still. Even a sensum like blue is never mere blue but a patch of space-time filled with that quality. This space- time in which all the qualities are contained is the ' identifiable element in experience which is probably / intended when presentations are said to imply a ground which is not mere presentation. But this space-time in which a colour is found is part of the presentation itself. There is thus no reason to look for grounds behind or beyond objects or presentations. The object is itself a / space-time occupied with movements apprehended not as movements but in their qualities. All that we need to do is to distinguish between the apprehension of the quality as quality and the apprehension of the space-time which it occupies. This distinction is indeed of the last importance, but it is not the distinction of a presentation and its ground or condition. Certain features of the mind's selectiveness remain to Aspects of be described. A minor aspect of it is the following. s^tiye' Every finite is compresent with all other finites, being part of the one Space-Time. But a finite A is not necessarily compresent with a percipient finite B in respect of the distinctive character of B. Thus let B be a mind. A is compresent with the mind B only so far as it can evoke an act of B as such, or in any way corre- sponds to such an act. Thus I do not see a thing behind my back ; though if I have reason for doing so I may imagine it or think of it there. In the second case it is compresent with my mind ; in the first it is not com- present with me as a mind. On the other hand it is still compresent with me, in so far as I have a body, for it attracts me, or at the very lowest it is compresent with me as a portion of Space-Time. Behind my back ioo EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. n it evokes no mental response, for I am not, under those conditions, susceptible to it. But since my mind is also a living material spatio-temporal thing, it never fails to be compresent with me in some capacity of me. Thus I may not be conscious of all the things which I have the means on appropriate occasions of perceiving. But the complementary proposition is also true that there may be qualities in the world of things below me in order of quality, which I may not be able to apprehend in that form at all (though I can apprehend them in their spatio- temporal character), because my body does not possess the appropriate organs. Thus our senses do not necessarily exhaust the sensible qualities of things. Colour is revealed to me because I have eyes, while it is not revealed to the plant as colour but only as something which affects the chlorophyll in the plant. Or I hear the sound of the tuning-fork, but the sound may be revealed to a tuning- fork which it sets in sympathetic vibration only as a vibratory material affection of the source of the sound. There is a more important aspect of the matter. Mind is selective (like any other finite) in the sense that it singles out for its special reference the object it is compresent with. But every object is connected with other objects, with some more closely than others, and being a piece of Space-Time it always is surrounded by the rest. The object is but a salient feature in a mass of which the mind is conscious in various degrees of distinctness. Some of them are united with the object of attention within its piece of Space-Time. Some of them are qualified objects in the remainder of the medium, and always there is at the extreme margin the suggestion of a beyond, c some- thing or other ' which is really there and which is present to us in the feeling we have of what we afterwards call, in the language of reflection, the finitude of all we distinctly apprehend. On the side of the enjoyment, too, we never have the single act appropriate to the object, but an act linked up with other acts, themselves distinct or indistinct as the case may be. To be aware of a thing and enjoy the contemplation of it is also to be aware of or enjoy ourselves as substantial, so that the Cartesian < I ch. iv. a THE COGNITIVE RELATION 101 think therefore I am ' is true not in the sense of an I unlike in kind to its acts but of an I which is their substantial unity. The connected enjoyments may be as in ordinary perception distinct, but around our enjoyment of the largest tract of nature or of thought there is still the vague mental functioning, which is our apprehension of the infinitude of things not ourselves. Our definite and particularised enjoyment is a fragment from, this larger mass, as its object is a fragment from the infinite world, which includes the external world and our enjoyment as well. It is indeed only so far as we recognise ourselves as part of the one whole, enjoyed in a smaller part, contemplated for the rest, that our vague sense arises of our finitude, our sense of stretching out in enjoyment beyond our own limited portion of Space-Time which we enjoy ; only so far, that is, as our enjoyed space-time is realised as part of and continuous with the whole of con- templated Space-Time, that we realise what the vague sense of something beyond means, and can express in the language of thought the experience that things and our- selves do not merely make up by aggregation the infinite \y whole but are detached portions of it, which betray their dependence on and continuity with it by the feelers which they put out to grasp it. It is the consciousness of our finitude and of the finitude of things which has led some to declare that we see all things as in God ; and it is one natural spring of the religious sentiment. At any rate it is as much a fact of our experience (and a fact of reality independent of our experiencing of it) as the more pungent and practical experiences of our daily intercourse with finite things, and ourselves, and one another. To leave these further speculations, it is doubtless this feature of our experience which makes some writers say, like Mr. Bosanquet,1 that mind envelops the whole world like an atmosphere. It is not true as these writers think that minds which are but one set of empirical finites are in a peculiar sense connected with the universe, they only 1 B. Bosanquet, The Distinction between Mind and its Objects (Manchester, 191 3, Adamson Lecture), p. 27. Compare the present writer's * Basis of Realism ' (Proc. British Academy, vol. vi.), section 7. 102 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. Ill know more of it and in greater wealth of colouring than inferior finites. But it is true that our enjoyments expand in correspondence with our objects, as we pass from a small room to a large one, to take a trivial illustration, and that our mind pursuing this process takes in the whole, summarising the indistinct fringes of its own enjoyments and of the world of external things, in the thought of an infinite. The infinite then is, however apprehended, prior for the common mind to the finite as it was declared to be by Descartes and his successors. Corollaries: Certain corollaries may be noted which confirm the kind?ri°U8 results of. simpk inspection. One has been already of com- described in the Introduction. Compresence is the most elementary of all relations, and all that knowing as such implies is the compresence of a mind and an object at a lower level. The mind and the object are but two existents amongst others, or if we designate the enjoyed by capital and the contemplated by small letters, it is the compresence of A and b. But the relation of compresence between A and b also obtains between two physical objects a and b and between two mental enjoyments A and B. It goes without saying that if ab is known or contemplated there is a corresponding enjoyment AB, and if AB is enjoyed there is a corresponding object ab. This is no more than an elaboration of the centra] proposition. What we specially need to note is that a thing which is enjoyed and one which is contemplated may stand in the same categorial relation to each other as two things both of which are contemplated or both or which are enjoyed. An enjoyed existence is a real existence and its nature is not affected by its being enjoyed in relation to an object contemplated. In other words, the complexes Ab, ab, and AB are on precisely he same categorial footing. The only difference is in the character of the existences involved. When in a relation ab one of the terms is changed to A, the relation of causality between b and a may still be a relation of causality between b and A : A" then is an existence ch.iv.a THE COGNITIVE RELATION 103 which enjoys itself, being a mind, and it knows b. Thus the relation of the mind to its object b the table is precisely of the same order as that between the floor \ and the table. Only the floor is not conscious, and \ consequently is only affected by the table so far as it can be. From this we can pass back to consider lower levels (2) Exten- of existence than mind, seeing that knowing is nothing jfon to but the empirical form which compresence assumes when levels. one of the partners has the empirical quality of conscious- ness. The same relation as exists in knowing an object exists as between any existent and any other which is on a lower empirical level. Just as objects are to our mind revelations, partial revelations, of the thing from which the object is selected ; so to life, to a living existence, things are revealed in their material characters, and to a material thing things are revealed in their primary characters. How much of what belongs to the lower level shall be revealed to the level above it depends on the c susceptibilities ' of the higher existent, on the machinery it possesses for accepting what is revealed, on its c organs.' Thus the secondary qualities of matter are lower than life, but it does not follow that a plant must be aware of colour as colour. It has no sense-organ appropriate. Yet in so far as light affects the plant the plant has the revelation of light so far as that is possible, though in what form I find it difficult to say. In the same way a man may be partially colour-blind and see no difference between red and green ; or totally colour- blind and see no colours at all but greys ; or tone deaf, and the like. It is almost impossible to speak of the relations between lower levels of existence except in terms of mind, which though the highest empirical finite existent is only one finite amongst others and illustrates something in the relation of finites which is universal and not peculiar to mind. Let us then use 'knowing' in an extended sense for the relation between any finite and those of a lower empirical order, and let us describe the empirical quality of any kind of finite which performs to it the (3) Higher fxittents than mind. 104 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. m office of consciousness or mind as its * mind/ Yet at the same time let us remember that the ' mind ' of a living thing is not conscious mind but is life, and has not the empirical character of consciousness at all, and that life is not merely a lower degree of mind or con- sciousness, but something different. We are using * mind ' metaphorically by transference from real minds and applying it to the finites on each level in virtue of their distinctive quality ; down to Space-Time itself whose existent complexes of bare space-time have for their mind bare time in its empirical variations. Using then the terms appropriate to mind in this metaphorical fashion we may say that any finite 'enjoys' itself and ' contemplates ' lower finites or has < know- ledge ' of them. They are revealed to it so far forth as it has organs for apprehending them. Hence properties which belong to the lower finite may be unrevealed in their distinctive quality, but they are revealed in the character which belongs to their equivalents on a lower level still. Thus in my example of the floor and table the floor certainly does not ' know ' the table as exerting pressure, it does not even know it as material (I return to this presently), but in some lower equivalent form as a persisting set of motions, as, say, accelerated towards it according to the gravitational law. At the same time each finite is related towards other finites of the same level as minds are related to one another. The material floor is assured 'of the materiality of the table. Thus each level has its specific ' enjoyment,' and what it contemplates ' is what from the nature of the case can be revealed to it, and so far forth as it can be revealed. We might have started with a hypothesis as to lower levels m this fashion and then treated mind as a special case, iiut the hypothesis would have assumed the analysis for u7pnr:Lakble°Wlng ^ *"* W ^ P*»* '"* \t,J*ulrd CO™luslo»> which * of less importance in itself than as illustrating, the meaning of the relation of ttr^nd8 wh £U°Wing' • A, high^ °rder °f ™» than mind, whether conceived as finite, what I have ch.iv.a THE COGNITIVE RELATION 105 called an angel, or as an infinite God, would contemplate consciousness as consciousness contemplates qualities of a lower order. Consciousness enjoys itself in us, but for the angel it would not be enjoyed but contemplated. For such a being there would be no doubt that the relation of mind to its object is only an example of the relation of any other finite to a second finite ; and the notion that things depended on the mind except for the selection from them of the mental object would to him sound as extravagant, as it would sound to us if the tree should plead that the soil it lives in depended on the tree for its existence or its character. Just as the tree selects from the soil what it requires for its nutrition, and in growing reacts to the nutritive elements of its soil, so for the angel's contemplation mind selects what can feed it in the things which surround it and these are its objects to which it reacts in the conations whose purely speculative character is cognition. More precisely consciousness is contemplated by an angel in the way in which life which is next lower to us is contemplated by us ; that is, it is known for him in the first instance as the consciousness which belongs to his, the angel's, own c body,' whatever that body is. We also know life first in ourselves ; and the further description of our knowledge of life outside our own body is left to a subsequent chapter.1 This leads us to a final point which is of great (4) The importance. The plant selects from the soil ; but the 3eJendent phosphates are already there, and it does not make them, on the Mind is equally a reaction to external things and what it selects for its object is present in the thing or in some other part of the universe. So far is the object from being dependent on the mind that, on the contrary, the mind is, at any rate for its original material, dependent on the object ; just as the silver must exist before it can be used as a shilling and be impressed with the king's effigy. Thus the higher grade of finites grows out of the lower and enjoying itself contemplates the lower in turn. Hence although mind cannot be and act without 1 Below, ch. vi. pp. 174 ff. 106 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE things from which to select its objects, neither the things nor the objects are affected in themselves by the presence of mind except so far as the mental conation alters them. What they are before the practical and alterative action takes place does not depend on the mind. So far as it is purely cognitive such alterative action is suspended. It follows that though for mind things are a condition, the presence of mind is not a condition of the existence or quality of things. All that they owe to mind is their being known. It follows that even sensa exist in the absence of mine or any mind, much more things of which sensa are only passing acts. The actual things and their acts which are called sensa because we sense them are irrespective of our mind, since they were before there were minds. The gleam of colour and the act of pressure are not noticed in their quality till there are beings with the appropriate apprehensive machinery. But they exist in their native qualities, some of which possibly even we do not perceive. Nor would there be any difficulty in realising this truth were it not for the interference of our mind with its objects and the interference of one object with another, which have yet to be considered. That difficulty may then as I hope be removed. ch. iv. b MIND AND BODY 107 B. Mind and Body Consciousness has been treated in the above in accord- Experience ance with a previous chapter as the quality of certain neural °n knowing processes, and the conscious process as identical with the neural one. But neural processes or mental ones, being conations, issue in certain changes or movements of the muscles and viscera, by the first of which the organism reacts on the stimulating object. We have now to consider what part is played in the act of knowing by these 'somatic* reactions and generally by the body as distinguished from the central nervous system. The mental partner in the cognitive transaction enjoys itself as a conscious process, and consciousness is in fact the enjoyed innervation of the appropriate neural process. It is the enjoyed beginning of a process which terminates in somatic changes. It might be thought that such enjoyment introduces once more the alleged sense of innervation felt by us as a sense of discharge of nervous energy, when we will a bodily movement. The alleged sense of innervation so interpreted has been discredited. But the enjoyment of which I speak resembles it only superficially. For the c sense of innervation ' was believed to be a sensation, only a central not a peripheral one, and unlike all other forms of sensation. For us the enjoy- ment is not a sensation at all in that meaning of the term 'sensation.' In the sensation of colour there are two partners ; one is the sensum colour, the other is the act of sensing it which is an enjoyment wherein we con- template the colour. The sensing is the beginning of the process which issues in certain movements of the eyes or other movements, and may be said to be the enjoyed innervation of the neural process which ends thus. In a motor sensation, the sensum is the movement of the muscles, and the sensing is the enjoyed innervation, 108 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. hi principally that which proceeds from the kinaesthetic centre, wherein we become conscious of a muscular move- ment when it has been performed. For it is agreed that muscular changes are sensed like visceral ones or objects of the special senses, as the stimuli which provoke the consciousness of them. Part of the difficulty in under- standing the nature of knowing is this misunderstanding which confuses an enjoyment which is properly described as an enjoyed innervation with the so-called sense of innervation. Bodily changes, whether visceral or muscular, are always contemplated ones or objects, and the awareness of them always accompanies the awareness of an external object. When I see a colour I have, besides the enjoy- ment of seeing and the colour itself com present with it, the contemplation also of movements in the eye, or other connected movements. It is in fact through such move- ments as those of the eyes when I turn to the light or fixate it that I become aware of my eyes and the colour as two physical objects in relation to one another in the physical world. 1 must have my eyes open to see at all, and accommodate them or converge them in order to see in certain places, and more than that, the colour is revealed to me in the act which issues in these or other movements. But the contemplation of the outward reaction of seeing is a different mental act from the consciousness of the colour and succeeds it. The movements of the eyes issue from the seeing conation, and then are apprehended in a motor or kinaesthetic conation whose neural process and equivalent enjoyment are distinct from that of seeing. It is not only sensory processes which are thus accompanied by the added consciousness of motor and visceral changes. In all experiences, however much they involve ideas, we have these secondary acts of contempla- tion of the somatic issues of the primary consciousness. Imagining a man issues in certain movements which may be actual, or if only anticipated in idea always tend to be actual, that is to be such movements as would actually occur if the imagined object were present. Sometimes they are movements, say of the eyes, round the contour ch. iv. b MIND AND BODY 109 of the object, sometimes they may be movements of speech, and there are indeed psychologists who regard speech as the distinctive somatic issue of imaging. It is the same with remembering and thinking, thinking being in a special manner the beginning of speech. Whenever I am said to make myself an object of mind, it is never the self as subject, the mind, which I make an object — it can only be enjoyed ; it is always the bodily part of the person which is thus made into an object, whether perceived or imagined. In remembering my past state of myself, what I contemplate in the past is my body as it was when the remembered event occurred ; my remembered state of mind or enjoyment is not con- templated but enjoyed, and as we have seen enjoyed in the past. Thus in the transaction called knowing the partners are on the one side the neural act with its quality of consciousness or mind, on the other the object of which the mind is conscious in this act ; the bodily or somatic element in the transaction is incidental or sustains the primary transaction ; as the processes of fixation of attention sustain the attention. The mental response is what we have called an enjoyment, meaning by it that when we see a colour we are conscious of the colour or are aware of ourselves as seeing it. If, as observed already in the Introduction,1 in order to understand enjoyment we seek for something which can be an object to us like hunger or thirst, or even pleasure and pain, we can find nothing such in our experience, and because we do not look in the right direction we may declare that enjoyment, or an act of consciousness, is a fiction. Those who do so look at their mind from the outside and do not, as it were, put themselves into the place of their own minds. But I have now to take account of a view of the Thetemfc- /- . • 1 • 1 ^.i_ ^S™ vlew transaction of knowing to which the present one is in ofknowing. general spirit closely allied, but which dispenses with or rejects the notion of consciousness as a quality carried by 1 Vol. i. p. 20. no EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk.hi the neural responses to the outside world — a view which, if it can be justified, is vastly simpler. It goes in psychology along with the method of c behaviourism * which rejects introspection as a primary method. We are concerned with its metaphysical conceptions, which have been set out recently in their extreme form by Mr. E. B. Holt.1 According to this view we have the environing world of things provoking specific2 neural responses, and these responses select from the environ- ment those portions or aspects of it to which they correspond. Whether the objects are sensations or memories or imaginations or thoughts or even volitions, the case is the same. These are all of them portions of a mass of objects selected by the neural response itself from the world. The neural response is therefore compared to a searchlight which illuminates a certain portion of the outside world ; or with a variation of the metaphor it is said to determine a cross-section of the world, as though the neural- response acted like a plane which should cut the world across and lay bare a certain surface. On the one side is the neural organism with its response, which is the cross-section of the organism by the plane ; on the other the cross-section of its environment. The total cross-section of the environment is conscious- ness or the mind, and its parts are, in relation to the whole, sensations, memories, and the like. This is the transaction of knowing. There is no consciousness lodged, as I have supposed, in the organism as a quality of the neural response ; consciousness belongs to the totality of objects, of what are commonly called the objects of consciousness or the field of consciousness. Conscious- ness is therefore "out there" where the objects are, by a new version of Berkeleyanism. The objects and the totality of them are, it may be added, determinations of a neutral stuff which is not Space-Time, but into the nature of which 1 need not enter. Obviously for this doctrine I wuB' Ii°It' The, C°ncept °f Co»"'«>usness (London, 1014) Up specific response is not to the sun as sun but merely to his light ch. iv. b MIND AND BODY 1 1 1 as for mine there is no mental object as distinct from a physical object : the image of a tree is a tree in an appropriate form. The knower is thus the cross-section, of which the nervous system is the mere machinery. Strange as the doctrine may seem, it is in reality so simple as almost to compel assent. There is no need in it for enjoyment, and all the difficulties of that conception are avoided. Compared with its account of remembering and expecting, the account which I have given of the nature of remember- ing and how we enjoy ourselves in the past and future, seems to myself intolerably complex. No one who feels inclined to dismiss this searchlight doctrine as impossible and does not rather find it natural, or who differs from it without misgiving, can be said to have faced the real problem presented by knowing. Take the sight of a colour or a fire. Strip yourself of the notion that the colour is in any sense a creation of the mind though selected by it, realise that the red is just what it shows itself to be and that there is no such element as our consciousness which enters into its constitution ; and then ask yourself whether in knowing red there is anything more or less than the fact that the neural response has selected red from the universe of things, and whether the sight of red means anything more than that this red is included in the whole cross-section of objects which is consciousness or mind itself. If I am unable to accept a doctrine which goes beyond its short- my own but is so simple and apparently so close to facts, comme- and to which I find myself perpetually being drawn back and persuaded to adopt it, I am bound to state the reason why. It is that the doctrine fails to account for a vital feature in the cognitive situation, as we experience it, namely, that in being aware of the fire, the fire is before me> or it is / who see it, or it is in a sense my fire. This is easy to understand if the response to the fire is an act of consciousness, for then not only is there a fire, but the response is not merely something which is there alongside the fire which it selects as its object and so is for itself, but something which experiences itself. For every act of 1 1 2 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. m consciousness is then self-consciousness, not in the sense of containing a reflection on itself, for this is just what is denied by calling it an enjoyment, but in the sense that whenever we know, we know that we know, or that knowing and knowing that we know are one and the same thing. Now if consciousness belongs not to the neural response but to the cross-section itself which it makes, as a totality, how can any object be my object ? And yet experience says that it is. The only possible answer that I can see is that the self for which the fire is my fire is my body as presented to me in organic and motor and other sensations. This is always a part of the total cross-section at any moment, and it remains the permanent centre of reference, within the total which is consciousness, to which the other details of the cross-section may be said to belong. There is red, and there is a body, and both are contained within the mind or are parts of consciousness. Moreover, the colour depends on the eyes, for it appears when they are open, and disappears when they are shut. This means that consciousness possesses colour through the eyes, but not that / see the colour.1 We may learn also from physiology that red causes a specific movement in my nervous system ; and since the cross-section is in time as well as space, I may introduce into it the thought of the neural response which I do not sense at the moment but only introduce by reflection. Even this does not account for my seeing red. It connects red with the neural response in the cross-section. But to say that the cross- section contains my seeing of red is to import into the cross-section itself the theory that seeing happens when there is a cross-section containing colour and there is a neural response outside that cross-section. We cannot say that the neural response as in the cross-section is equivalent to seeing the red in the cross-section. That 1 We should learn also that the colour is related differently to my body and to the light, without which also it would not appear in consciousness. But still this would not mean that it is / {i.e. my body) which possesses the consciousness of the colour. On the contrary my body is possessed by the consciousness. The consciousness which sees is not mine m the same sense of • mine ' as the body is mine. ch. iv. b MIND AND BODY nj would be to suppose that the neural response as in the cross-section not only is a seen or thought movement but itself sees. Or to put the matter otherwise, the neural response in the cross-section is a thought or image and the red is a sensum, but the first is not the consciousness of the second. It is only the cross-section as a whole which is consciousness. But it is not myself. On the other hand, my body which is myself is not conscious. On the view of the text there is no such difficulty, for from the first the colour is object to a conscious act of vision which is connected continuously by experience with the consciousness of open eyes as the condition of it', or of directing the eyes as the outcome of it. The same thing may be put, perhaps more clearly, thus. Instead of myself, suppose I am observing another person. I should observe the red and his neural response to it. Now I should observe that he is alive, and is behaving like a superior kind of plant. But how should I say that he has a field of consciousness of which the red is a part ? I cannot say that, because the totality of my objects is mind or consciousness, the totality of his objects is consciousness. For while I am aware of myself as a living thing with a field of consciousness, I am aware of him only as a living thing, making living responses which are indeed the same in kind as mine. We should be inventing once more the conception of a foreign con- sciousness. I could only attribute to him consciousness, if consciousness means not the field of objects known to me in my specific responses to it, but any field of objects to which anything responds specifically. The plant has consciousness in this sense equally with him or me ; but so too has the material body. Consciousness then becomes the name of any field of objects to which any thing whatever responds specifically. It becomes a mere name for compresence. We are back at Leibniz, but without the soul ; Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. The difference between creatures is that their conscious- ness is large or small, articulate and detailed, or inarticulate and blurred — Leibniz would say distinct or confused. The idea of consciousness becomes universal but otiose. VOL. II i 1 14 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE And how do we arrive at such a conclusion, which is of course not that of the doctrine in question but is forced upon it ? Only by starting with the idea of consciousness as the field of objects to which I make specific neural response and then eviscerating it of this specific relation to myself which it has in my original experience of what consciousness means. I am compelled then to agree with Mr. Santayana, when he suggests l that consciousness is in fact the search- light itself. It is a quality of the creature which has it, as life is of the creature which has life, or materiality of matter ; not of the objects which are illuminated by the light.2 That field of objects, as will later I hope be made 1 In an article on Mr. Holt's book entitled ' The Coming Philosophy ' in Journal of Phil. Psych, and Sci. Methods, vol. xii., 191 4, p. 457. 2 My purpose is anything but polemical, but to set my own less simple but as I think more faithful view of knowing for comparison against Mr. Holt's simpler but as I think too simple one. Still less is it to review Mr. Holt's book. But I fancy I discern in it the intercrossing of our two views. Thus the spirit of the theory requires us to say that life as in a plant is a particular sort of complexity of the 'neutral' elements and consciousness a still higher one. Now, one part of the conscious cross-section may be a living plant. But the life of the plant as in my cross-section is not the objects which are a cross-section to the plant, but a property of the plant as an organism ; so that it would seem life belongs to that organism ; why not then consciousness to the animal or human organism ? On the other hand, in one place (pp. 205-6) the plant is said to be " conscious of that to which it specifically responds." This is a different view, which would make consciousness not a character of a certain cross-section in a conscious being but would make life a sort of consciousness. We cannot stop with life, for every- thing responds' specifically to its environment, and consciousness would be a name then for any cross-section of the objects of any being whatever, and then consciousness or mind would lose its place in the hierarchy. But in that case the differences between the members of the hierarchy — that is, in so far as they are material, or alive, or conscious — would seem to belong to the things themselves in so far as they are material or plants or animals. Mr. Holt's doctrine that the hierarchy is a scale of complexity of elements made of neutral stuff is one with the general spirit of which I heartily agree. But my agreement does not go further. His neutral stuff is not spatio-temporal, but its elements are apparently first and fundamentally concepts of identity, difference, and number, and then secondary qualities. He constructs his world in the first instance out of categories. But I have said enough in Bk. II. to indicate how impossible I find this procedure, or to agree with Mr. Holt's fundamental doctrine en. iv. b MIND AND BODY u5 evident, is a perspective or revelation of the real world of things ; and whether the objects are percepts or ideas, whether connected or disconnected, whether the revela- tion is true or false, the scene unrolled before us is. the same in kind as the scene presented in sense. Yet the relation of these objects among themselves is one thing ; their emergence into our view is another, and- is differently experienced, and it is this order of their occurrence which is our mental history, and is enjoyed and not contem- plated. It is ours, whether forced upon us or due to our initiative, and it consists of mental acts. To treat consciousness as the field of objects is like saying that breathing is the air, as altered in its chemical constitution by the breathing. Life exists in the intercourse of the living thing and its surroundings, and it is neither equivalent to its products nor exists without them. In like manner, consciousness exists in the intercourse of the conscious being and things, and is neither equivalent to the objects it selects, nor can exist without those objects. that propositions are active, which I could only understand if they are taken to be relations of fact as in Space-Time and not as thoughts with which we can begin a deduction of the world. Hence it is that his 1 neutral mosaic ' seems to me unacceptable. Space-Time is neutral in the sense that is neither matter as such nor mind as such but these are complexes of it. But Space-Time is not a mere thought but really a stuff. CHAPTER V MIND AND ITS ACTS Mental acts The partners to the transaction which is called the relation responses 0f COgnition are the act of mind and the non-mental to object Qkject jke various orders of non-mental finites were described briefly so far as was necessary for metaphysical purposes in a previous chapter. All that was said of mind was that it was the substance of mental acts or processes. It is time now to describe these processes more explicitly, which we could not well do before, because the description of them is intimately dependent on distinguishing them from their objects. At the same time it was not possible to take over from the relevant science of psychology any well-understood and accepted statement of the nature of mental processes, for the foundations of psychology are at present involved with the theory of knowledge, treated as an independent science and not, as here, as a chapter of metaphysics. There is no mental act but is correlative to its non- mental object ; the mind enjoys itself only as there is an object contemplated, which contemplation is the very act of enjoyment. A sensory object brings the mind into compresence with it ; an ideational act of mind puts the mind into compresence with its object, brings the object as we say before the mind. These facts have their analogues in the lower empirical levels. Mind stands nearest in the order to living organisms, and we have seen that vital actions either respond to external stimuli, or when they are provoked internally may relate the organism to some specially appropriate external thing, as 1x6 ch. v MIND AND ITS ACTS n7 when the drosera secretes the sticky substance which is to catch the flies on which it feeds. These specially preparatory processes may be peculiar to life and mind. But throughout finite existence there is no act which is not related to some other finite ; as I understand, within the atom there are direct acts of initiative in the emission of rays which thus in a manner bring the atom into relation with other physical things. However this may be, how- ever far down analogies to ideation may exist, every action either is the effect of something outside, or alters the relation of a finite to what is outside. The mental act is thus the conscious response to some non-^mental -existent finite which is its object. I use the word response in order to avoid the word reaction, which it seems forced and unnatural to apply. For the organism is commonly said to react upon some actual or causal stimulus, and we should hardly describe the search for the absent food as a reaction upon the food, but rather as a reaction on the internal stimulus of depletion which sets the organism on its search. In the same way we cannot say that my remembering of a past event is a reaction upon the event remembered, for that event no longer acts causally upon my bodily organs. The recollection is evoked by and is a reaction to the internal stimulation, whether it is physical or mental, which suggests the recollection. In a stricter sense, however, the language of reaction to the object is unexception- able. Though the internal stimulus causes .the process of recollection, the form or pattern of the process is deter- mined by relation to its object. For it is an acquired neural disposition whose character is defined in the main by the past actual or sensory experience. It is only the strangeness of the notion of reacting to a past or future event which makes us stumble, because we are possessed by the prejudice in favour of the actual (to use Mr. Meinong's phrase), and think that past and future are not real because they are not sensory. In truth, re- membering and expecting are the reactions that are possible to a past or future object. At any rate mental acts belong to the class of vital reactions. But to avoid 1 1 8 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE nc m all these intricacies let us call the mental act the response to its object. What is essential is that there is no mental act without its appropriate object, and that this object is a distinct existence from the mental act, and may, as we have seen, exist without the mental act. Mind made In the next place, since the object is an existence ^nations, distinct from the mind and only selected by it, there is nothing in the mind (with a possible reservation to be made on behalf of feeling *) but acts. ' Act ' in this usage is equivalent to process and does not imply the special activity which is felt in certain mental processes or acts like desire or endeavour or willing. It includes passive acts of sense as well as activities of volition. The term conation is commonly restricted in its usage to such active processes ; but in a more extended sense every mental act is a conation and is nothing else, except for the possible addition of feeling. It is equally legitimate to use the term employed by Mr. Ward 2 and to identify consciousness with attention. The word * conation ' has the advantage, for it carries with it the meaning of practical action, and all mental action is primarily practical. Now, cognition is not a separate kind of action from conation. It is not even a separate element in a mental act which can be distinguished from a conative element in the act. Cognition is nothing .but the conation itself in so far as it is compresent with and refers to an object. We do not in perception have an act of cognition which leads to an endeavour towards the perceived object. The object is there and excites our sense and with it the suggested elements of ideation. This mental excitement, partly sensory and partly ideational, is a conation which issues in certain external bodily actions appropriate to the object. As issuing in such actions the act is conative. But this conation is itself that consciousness of the object which is called the perception. In behaving in certain manners towards the object we perceive it. And just as 1 Discussed and dismissed below, pp. 122 ff. 2 See his discussion in Psychological Principles, ch. iii. ch. v MIND AND ITS ACTS n9 the animal goes in search of food, so in the act of prepara- tion for the taste of the orange we forecast it in idea. Thus the perceiving act is nothing, but the perceptual, or impulsive conation itself,1 in so far as that conation which is partly touched off by the external thing itself, say the orange, partly by the supplementing mind, refers us to the object or the perceptum. Illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely. We do not first perceive the apple to be a round red-cheeked thing which is edible, but we are aware of it as edible in and by the act in which we seek to eat it, which it provokes in us. In performing the mental act which ends in holding our hands so as to catch the cricket ball which is coming to us in a certain direction, we are conscious of the direction in which it is coming to us ; we do not first cognise its direction and then adjust our action to that ; it compels us to act in a certain fashion and we thus become aware of it. Simple sensation is a reflex act of attention evoked by the sensum (that is by the thing in so far as it contains the sensum), and referring to it. According as the sensum is red or green or sweet, it evokes by the light from it which acts on the retina, or the liquid containing it which acts on the tongue, a different reaction, which is the consciousness or the sensum. In so far as the conative act refers to its object it is a cognition. The cognitive element, therefore, of a mental act is, to use a paradoxical expression, not anything distinctive of the act as a process taking place in the mental substance itself, it signifies rather that the mental act refers to a cognitum. Thus the sensory conation is correlated with the sensum, the impulsive conation with the perceptum and the like. It is because in our mental acts there is an object revealed to us that we speak of the act as a cognition and not as a conation. The reason why the cognitive aspect of the conation, 1 The whole discussion is founded on Mr. Stout's treatment of perception in connection with impulse or instinctive action ; one of the greatest contributions that have been made to psychology {Manual, Bk. III. chs. i., ii.). I am responsible for my own use of Mr. Stout's work. 120 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk.hi Practical for it is nothing more than an aspect, not something theoretical existent which differs from the conation, comes to be conation.8 separated from conations, is this. Conations are of two kinds. Primarily conation is practical, and it issues in movements which tend to alter or destroy the object or at least to affect our relation to the object. Thus the per- ceptual conation of perceiving an apple is primarily one which issues in movements of seizing and eating the apple. Or the outward movement may merely remove us from the object, as from a wolf, or bring us nearer to it, as to a fire in winter. But besides such practical conation, the issue of the conation may be suspended, as in merely watching the object. Here too the conation issues in movements, but they are not directed to interfer- ing with the object but to sustaining our attention to it, that is to maintaining the conation as a mental process while inhibiting its normal reaction upon the object. Some- times the outward movement is switched off into speech or other gestures. Such conation is to be distinguished from the other kind of conation as speculative or theoretical. Ultimately it grows out of the inhibition of the practically directed issue of our mental acts. We do not stretch out our hands to the stars in the childish impulse to possess them, but observe them with a telescope ; nor cower in terror under a solar eclipse, but observe the edge of the sun. When we have resolved neither to hate nor love mankind but to observe them, we have changed from the attitude of practical to that of scientific study of man. Thus speculative conation, or cognition, is isolated from practical conation by diversion or suspension of the practical movements which alter the world. We learn to alter ourselves and leave the object alone. But though we call the second speculation or science or knowledge, there is no difference in the mental act so far as it is directed towards the object. The difference lies in the whole interest of the mind, which in the one case leaves the conation to its normal course, and in the other inhibits its normal issue or diverts it into speech, or to the suggestion of fresh conations which have their objects in turn, that is, leads it on to -a train of ideas. ch. v MIND AND ITS ACTS 121 It is of the last importance for psychology as well as for metaphysics to recognise that the object is cognised in and with the conation, and that we do not first cognise and then act, but know in acting. But our acting may take divergent courses. We do not do because we know ; but we know because we do, and we end by knowing without doing. Yet our mental action, whether speculative or not, remains to the end a doing. Thus of the two, cognition and conation, we must abandon one or the other, if we are attempting to describe what our mental acts are in the mental substance. Either, because there is an object which we cognise we must call mental action nothing but cognition (I defer feeling), and then conation merely marks the fact that all such mental process issues in movement of some sort which may be purely external, non-mental, bodily move- ment ; and always sooner or later after even the longest train of ideas does end in such movements. Or we must maintain that the mental act is a conation, which is something mental, and not merely physiological, and then cognition is simply the reference of this act to what is non-mental, that is to the object without which it is meaningless. I prefer the latter alternative as a statement of the truth. For it lays stress on the practical character of mind and brings mind into line with all other finites, like life and lower orders of being, the essence of whose life is to be movement. The word c cognition ' of itself suggests passivity, or at least is far from appropriate to a process whose being lies in its outward direction to a non- mental thing. Practical action becomes an accessory of • cognition ; whereas in truth cognition taken alone is an outgrowth and arrest of practice. I shall therefore say that mental action is conation, and that cognition is the aspect of it which I have thus so often described. But cognition has no claim to be regarded as a separate element in any mental act ; it is not another sort of mental attitude from conation. The real distinction lies in the two different subclasses of the one class conation. Cognition is then nothing but conation as considered in its objective reference. Perceiving is seizing without 122 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. ht its practical motor issue. Expecting is reaching out in speculation to the future ; remembering, as has before been indicated, is reaching backwards in speculative desire to the past. Judging or the apprehension of a judgment or proposition is willing in its mere objective reference : when I will to go to Glasgow, the object of my will is the proposition I am going to Glasgow ; when I judge the earth is round I am willing so to treat it, in a case where the outward issue of my willing is speech or the setting in motion of a train of free ideas. To this particular illustration, the identity of judging and volition, we shall have occasion to return.1 Greater detail is out of place in a metaphysical inquiry. It is the business of psychology and I have endeavoured elsewhere to supply a sketch of a psychology so conceived, to which I can now only refer.2 Feeling. This result would be simple and satisfying were it not for feeling, which is commonly regarded as a third element in all mental process with cognition and conation. The claim of cognition has now been dismissed. But what is to be said of feeling, that is of pleasure and pain, and whatever other kind of excitement we may reckon under this head ? What feeling is, is without doubt the obscurest elementary question of psychology. Feeling is certainly not a categorial character of mind but an empirical one, and it is certainly closely connected with conation ; so that it has been linked together with conation under the name of interest, and set against the second element of cognition.3 Some have even gone so far as to regard feeling as what is distinctively mental, to which conation, if its existence is admitted at all, becomes secondary. The metaphysical probabilities are against such a doctrine, which cuts off mind from its alignment with other things. As an independent element in the analysis of a mental 1 Below, ch. ix. B, p. 248. 2 ' Foundations and Sketch-plan of a Conational Psychology,' Brit. Journ. of Psychology, vol. iv., 191 1. 3 G. F. Stout, Groundwork of Psychology (London, 1903), ch. Hi. ch. v MIND AND ITS ACTS 123 process or even as a mere toning of cognitive experiences as it is often represented to be, there seem to be insuper- able difficulties in the way of insight into its real nature Feeling so regarded seems to repeat the characters of the sensory process to which it is attached, except for the disputable feature of differences in quality ; it has intensity, duration, and at least some degree of localisation. Its " parasitical " nature seems to be thus clearly indicated. The most satisfactory conception of it upon these lines treats it as arising somehow in the course of a conative process, according as the conation, or the underlying neural process, moves smoothly to its end or is obstructed. In sense-feeling pleasure attends the mental return to equilibrium after the mind has been disturbed by the sensory stimulation ; pain means impediment to this return. The theory is founded in its modern form largely on the pleasure and pain experiences of mental functions higher than sensation, such as the pleasures or pains of gratified or disappointed expectation, the pleasures of harmony or pains of disharmony in aesthetic com- position, or the simpler pleasures which arise from harmonious blending of two colour sensations. The theory in respect of simple sense-feelings is an extension downwards from these higher integrations. On this view feeling still is parasitic to conation, and conation would still claim to be the dominant feature of mental life.1 But many considerations tell against this conception and suggest that the clue must be found, if it can be found, in the sense-feelings themselves instead of the higher feelings. In general sense-feelings appear to follow the character of sensations. They are localised, sometimes very imperfectly, but sometimes quite definitely' in certain organs of the body. Sometimes indeed they' are so diffused that we are apt to regard them as being purely psychical rather than bodily. Yet there is little but their want of specific character, I mean that pleasure and pain belong to any kind of sensation, to mark them 1 In previous papers I have followed Mr. Stout in this view and have called pleasure and pain modalities of conation. But I think now that I have been mistaken. i24 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk.hi off from the order of the organic sensations, such as hunger and thirst. These might at first sight seem wholly psychical, but we have no great difficulty there in distinguishing the bodily affection of hunger from the psychical awareness of it. In the same way we can dis- tinguish pleasure from the consciousness of it.1 Thus the direct experience of pleasure and pain seems to fall in with what is suggested by the theory that there is nothing in mental acts but consciousness or conation, namely, that feelings are objective experiences of the order of organic sensa. Such sensations as I shall point out in the next chapter are experiences of the bodily life, as distinguished from the body as a merely physical thing, and the suggestion both of the facts and of theory is that pleasure and pain are not mental modifications but characters of life of which the mind has awareness, as it has of every- thing which it contemplates, and that the mind does not enjoy them, however strained the technical expression may seem in this connection. According to this a plant has pleasure as a condition of its living body just as it has hunger and thirst ; but it is not conscious of them, for they are phases of its life and unlike us it 'enjoys' them in the extended sense of that word. What the conditions of bodily life are which constitute pleasure and pain remains to be discovered. It by no means follows that there are pleasure-localities 2 (which are certainly only hypothetical), comparable to the pain- 1 The distinction of pleasure from the consciousness of it is insisted on by Mr. G. E. Moore, quoting Plato in support, in Principia Ethic a (Cambridge, 1903), ch. iii. § 52. 2 In a well-known article, • Uber Gefuhlsempfindungen ' (Ztft. f. Psck. u. Phys. d. Sinn. vol. 44, 1906), Prof. C. Stumpf has proposed the doctrine that pleasure and pain are neither the feeling-tone of a sensation, nor a separate element in one, but an independent class of sensations, of which bodily pain (Schmerz) is one example. He does not assert that pleasure is in all cases peripheral ; it may sometimes have its physio- logical basis in central processes " which come in as accessory effects of modifications of the circulation in the brain " (p. 22), and even where they cannot easily be dissociated from ordinary sensations like those of sound and light, they are central accessory sensations (Mitempfindungen). The doctrine may need to be revised and modified, but though in previous papers I have ventured to regard it as unlikely, I believe now that in ch. v MIND AND ITS ACTS 125 localities which are known to exist. Still less that pleasure and pain are combinations or groupings of visceral or other bodily sensations. I have been careful only to say that pleasure and pain are of the order of vital sensations. It may be that pleasure is a character of the organism in so far as any function of a sense-organ goes on in harmony with the bodily welfare ; and pain or disagreeableness correspondingly. This would make pleasure and pain a fact of " integration " as Mr. Watt supposes.1 But how such a life-condition of welfare or the reverse is conveyed to the conscious centre I do hot know. The recent dis- covery by Messrs. Head and Holmes that lesions of the optic thalami intensify pleasure and pain2 and also the emotions seems to imply some such arrangement for reception of pleasure and pain. All I am concerned to suggest is that pleasureableness and painfulness are not mental conditions as such but objects of them, and in themselves bodily or vital conditions of which we are conscious. If this is so, the higher pleasures like those mentioned above are greater complexities of more elementary feeling. In all probability then feeling is not a constituent of any mental act, nor a mere feeling tone of the act, but is an independent act with pleasure or pain for its object.3 We have thus no reason to alter the conclusion that the processes of which mind consists are the highly complex movements carrying the quality of consciousness, which are described as conations. The one and distinctive quality of mental acts is their u consciousness. What then are the contents of the mental treating pleasure and pain as objective and not as subjective, it is in the right direction. The conception is not extended by Mr. Stumpf to emotion. (See on this also an earlier article on Emotions in the same journal, vol. 27, 1889.) 1 H. J. Watt: 'The Elements of Experience and their Integration' {British Journ. of Psychology, vol. iv., 191 1, § 10, pp. 184 ff). 2 Brain, vol. 34, * Sensory Disturbances from Cerebral Lesions/ ch. ii. pp. 124 ff. 3 Any previous expressions in this work (such as in Introduction, vol. i. p. 23) which seem to imply a different conception must be corrected accordingly. 126 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. ra The con- act or enjoyment, and in particular what is it in the mental tents of the act which corresponds to or refers to the quality of the empiricat ' apprehended thing or selected part of the thing, with the tions"™"8" intensity which goes with that quality, the loudness of categoriai the sound, intensity of the pressure and the like ? When characters, j ^ w^t ^ contents 0f a mental process are I am using the word in the same sense as when I ask what a glass which holds water is made of and what is its shape and size and thickness. In another sense the water is the contents of the glass which holds it. But though the non-mental object is distinct from the mental apprehension of it as the water is distinct from the glass, the object is clearly not contained in the mind in this sense. Some- times, as we have seen, the object of the mind is dis- tinguished from the thing of which it is the partial revelation, as being the * content* of the mind. The only use of such a word is to indicate the selective action of the mind in determining its revelations of things. But it is an undesirable usage, for it is bound together with a mistaken theory and it conveys the idea that the object is still in some sense psychical. c The contents of the mind ' is good English for what is really in the mind, and objects are not there. What is in the mind is whatever features can be discovered in the enjoyment. The question we are asking now is what are the mental features which correspond to the qualities and their intensities or other features which are contained in things. We are not asking for an account of the various ways in which things, with the distinctive qualities they possess on their respective levels, are apprehended, according as we merely sense or perceive or imagine or remember them or make judgments about them. All this description is the special business of psychology and does not fall to our office. Such differences in the way of our apprehension of things may be called the < formal ' element in the mind's operations, as distinct from the 'material' element, whereby the mind is aware of the character of non-mental things.1 It is in sensation that x I note this difference after A. Messer (Empjindung und Denhen, Leipzig, 1908, p. 50), who however describes it, following W. Husserl, ch. v MIND AND ITS ACTS 127 we meet these material features of our experience in their simplest form and we shall confine ourselves here to sensation. But the material features reappear in every form of mental activity, as e.g. when we remember a dog with its shape and colour and smell combined in a certain fashion or arrangement, or imagine a mountain of gold. Moreover, it is in the higher formal processes that it is easiest to verify the truth that all cognition is conative process, for in these we have various material elements combined, and it is easier to enjoy the process of holding these elements together in the mental transition from one to another (as for example in perception) than to be aware of the conative character of simple sensing. The question what is the conative feature which corresponds to the material elements of our experienced world, is different from still another question, what are the kinds of mental acts by which we apprehend in turn the different orders of empirical qualities ; which will form the subject of the following chapter. At present we deal with the i material ' side of mental life. Now the contents of the mental act or process are those which it possesses as a process, simple or com- plicated. They are thus empirical determinations of categorial characters, or in other words certain empirical determinations of Space-Time. It is these spatio-temporal features which make the difference between one mental act and another according to the object it apprehends. The sensing of green differs not from that of blue in quality, for sensings have no quality but consciousness, and the so-called quality of the sensing is really the quality of the non-mental sensum, blue or green or sweet. It is thus some empirical determination of a categorial feature of the mental process which is enjoyed differently according to the quality of the sensum. It is some determination of enjoyed space-time. In a previous chapter 1 said that according to the char- acter of the object we are vaguely aware of a difference in place and time and more particularly in enjoyed space as that of the quality and the matter of the mental act. I cannot obviously adopt the name quality and so I speak of the formal element. 128 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. m (for we are obviously aware of the occurrence and dura- tion of our mental acts in time). These vague deliver- ances are supplemented by reference to the contemplated space of the brain where we have reason to believe that our mental processes are located. We may say then that we enjoy our acts of sensing, as they vary with the quality of the sensum, as the direction of our enjoyment in mental Space-Time, and this direction is identical with the locality and direction of the underlying neural pro- cess. Such a description is open to the quite intelligible misapprehension that the process is supposed to be in some manner directed upon the sensed object, whereas direction of the mental process means the actual move- ment within the neural space which is enjoyed as direction in the identical mental space.1 It is possible, however, to explain the situation without the misleading word direction, but employing the same thought. Zm oraf0" Necessarily any exacter answer to the question must mental at present be largely a matter of speculation or hypo- ofrtrheate .thesi^ . But lt has been suggested by Mr. C. S. Myers quality of in an important paper that the so-called 'quality' of pTobiemii. the sensation depends on the type or pattern of the neural reaction to the quality of the stimulus.2 I adopt the word < pattern ' or < type of neural reaction ' as a less vague and more accurate alternative for its 'direction.' In my interpretation the meaning of the two descriptions is the ^same, but I hasten to add that in adopting Mr. Myers's hypothesis I do not father on him the view that there is no quality in sensation or that the object has a quality irrespective of the mind. 1 See above, Bk. I. ch. iii. vol. i. p. no and note. 2 "A sweet taste corresponds with one type of reaction, a bitter taste with another; similarly with the sensations of colour and pitch, different types of reaction are evoked from longer or shorter waves. . At bottom differences in type of movement must be the cause of differentia- tion m the quality of sensation ; it would be of no advantage for the organism to experience different qualities of sensation, unless those differences were serviceable in promoting different types of response." {Bnt.Journ. of Psychology, vol. vi. <Are the intensity differences of sensation quantitative?' II. § i.) 7 ««««* 01 ch.v MIND AND ITS ACTS 129 I am assuming that the neural reaction or response includes the whole process of afferent, central, and motor parts, and that it is not possible to correlate sensation solely with the afferent part of a sensory reaction to a stimulus. The neural correlate of a mental process is (as I believe, with my insufficient instruction, to be good physiological doctrine), not separable into parts but a whole. Indeed I gather that in Mr. Myers's view it is of the two rather the movement or behaviour of the living being which is the essential feature of the reactive type. The mental act then, I assume, corresponds to the transition along the whole arrangement, as that transi- tion proceeds from afferent to efferent tracts. Perhaps it is the juncture between the two which is of chief importance, for it is there that the motion along one set of nervous elements is switched off into the other. Mr. McDougall has indeed put forward the well-known hypothesis that consciousness is situated at the synapsis or juncture between neurones, and with this the above statement is consistent. Thus the type or pattern of reaction would be the physiological plan of connection between incoming and outgoing process.1 Supposing this to be correct, the mind in the act of sensing enjoys in the space-time of the mind this configuration of movement, which issues in certain physical movements of the limbs or other organs, and the difference in acts of sensing according to the quality of the object sensed is not a difference in any quality of the mind, but in this empirical character of the place and time of the act. The enjoyed categorial determination in its empirical form is identical with the contemplated pattern of reaction which the physiologist can observe or suppose. And this result appears to me to be merely a more accurate statement of what we can very roughly discover 1 Compare the theory of the late H. Munsterberg {Grundziige der Psychologie (Leipzig, 1900, Bd. i. p. 531). "Sensation In the sensory terminus (centre) depends in its quality on the spatial relation of the afferent path " ; with which the above agrees in correlating quality with the spatial relations of the^ neural process, but disagrees in not confining the spatial relations to the afferent path. VOL. II K 130 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE „k. m in our enjoyment by simple inspection of more compli- cated acts of mind. This enjoyed spatio-temporal pattern or direction of sensing I shall speak of as the ' intrinsic extension * of a sense-process (both in space and time) in order to distinguish it from the extension or extent of sensation which we experience when a sensation is prolonged in duration or when we experience a mass or group of like sensations. The alleged c extensity ' of sensation, or its voluminousness is, we shall find, a character which attends a number of sensations, but is not intrinsic to them but to the space they occupy. The ' protensity ' of sensation is nothing but its continuance, that is, again, a continuous repetition of the sensation in time. Any act of sense has its place in mental time and space ; but what determines its empirical difference from other sensings is more particularly the enjoyment of the spatio- temporal pattern or direction. The sensing may be momentary or prolonged. But even so far as it is relatively momentary, it still has its pattern which is the intrinsic extension. How, it may be asked, if sensing is a spatio-temporal pattern, can it be enjoyed otherwise than as an extent ? Even if it exists but for a moment, does it not occupy its pattern and is not this an extension and spread out, if only in lines and not in area or volume ? The answer takes us back to the more elementary and fundamental considerations of a previous portion of this work. The pattern is not spatial merely but spatio-temporal, and its neural basis is not merely anatomical but physiological. The consciousness of sensing does not at any moment fill the whole neural structure of afferent, central, and efferent parts. Let us suppose that a sensing is purely momentary, which it never really is. It occurs then at some point-instant (or group of such) ; let us think of the point-instant at which the afferent process passes over into the efferent one. But that point-instant has a past and a future. It lies on a line of advance or it is the point at which complex lines of advance are continued into another complex. It is the pattern of the sensory ch.v MIND AND ITS ACTS 131 process which determines where the past and the future of the process are. The present moment of sensation is the point-instant where the direction of the future is determined by the past. Thus that moment of sensation sums up or * integrates ' the character of the whole pattern. The difficulty arises as said from thinking of the pattern as merely a geometrical one ; it is in fact a plan of motion. The intrinsic plan of reaction which gives the sensing its determinate character is therefore not to be conceived as a stationary plan like an architect's ; it is a scheme of transition, and hence in this respect the idea of c direction ' not only cannot be dispensed with in supplement to that of ' pattern ' but is in fact the more expressive designation. The locality of the sensory act is included along with its direction or pattern, for certain patterns of reaction occur in determinate places in the neural structure. The dis- tinction between the intrinsic space-time of a sensation (i.e. a sensing) and its extent , will occupy us more largely in the following chapter. It corresponds to that between the quality of blue which belongs to any point whatever in a blue patch irrespective of its position, and the whole extent over which that quality is spread. We have extent as distinguished from intrinsic extension or direction wherever we have many processes going on in the mind at once, whether they are homogeneous, as in the vision of a coloured patch, or heterogeneous, as in any complex apprehension like perception or imagination corresponding to an object of complex qualities variously arranged. The pattern of configuration in any existent we have The seen to be its universal. In any sensory process (or in JEJJU^ any other mental process) there are the categorial feature sensation. of existence as a particular and the categorial feature of subsistence, or existence as a universal. The same distinction is found in the object or sensum. As to sensing, its particularity depends on the particular time of its occurrence and its particular locality within the large sensory neural region devoted to that species of sensing, 13* EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE „K. in e.g. within the occipital area of vision ; on variations of intensity ; and on any variations of whatever kind which leave the pattern unaltered.1 Psychologically this means that any sensing process is one of a certain kind and its object one of a certain universal quality. From the beginning of psychical life the universal and particular are united ; and this is a recognised commonplace of the subject, and is illustrated at any length in the charming transference which children make of words learned in connection with some particular object to any object which is reasonably like it in kind. In other words, though sensing is not thinking there is no sensation without its universal or thought. What thinking does is merely, as in conceiving, to contemplate the universal in the object, by itself, and detach it from its particular surroundings as a separate object of attention. Thinking is the corresponding mental act which apprehends the universal as such, and we have already verified the existence in consciousness of the distinct awareness in enjoyment of the plan of any complex. When we think a colour, e.g. blue, we in like manner enjoy the pattern of blue, which is intrinsically a spatio-temporal complex, however simple. Thus thinking is only one of the formal varieties of mental process, it adds no question in respect of the material side of the mental action, except the question whether thinking possesses also intensity, which is another material feature of sensing.2 iT^L We have now to ask what spatio-temporal or categonal character is enjoyed as the intensity of the sensing, in correspondence with the contemplated intensity of the stimulus. The answer is still more speculative than that we have just given to the question what corresponds in the sensing to the quality of the sensum. Mr. Myers suggests as the ground of variation in intensity of sensing the number of the nerve fibres, 1 See below, ch. vi. p. 164. 1 The above appears to say the same thing as Aristotle's dictum that TOL^t)™ partlCular t6S* Tl' but Perception is of such and such (rov ch. v MIND AND ITS ACTS *33 afferent and efferent, which are called into play in response to the intensity of the stimulus, so long as the type of reaction remains unaltered. It is the moreness or lessness of a reaction of the same type.1 While the quality of the sensation depends on the pattern of the reaction, the intensity depends on the extent of the lines of the pattern. Another physiological hypothesis put forward by H. Mlinsterberg2 regards the intensity as due to the quantity of excitement of the nerve fibre, or fibres, supposed to be the afferent ones. This implies that as is commonly believed a fibre can respond more or less to different degrees of stimulation. I imagine that greater excitement within a fibre would mean a larger use of nervous elements, the greater stimulus breaking down elements which resist the lesser stimulus. The other hypothesis is based on the view that the response of a fibre does not vary with the amount of stimulation, but is of the c all or none ' kind, that is, the fibre either responds uniformly and completely or not at all. This question is one for physiologists to settle. Mere refer- ence to the number of fibres involved, while simpler, presents obvious difficulties, for it would seem to imply a discontinuous scale of intensities of sensation ; and whether this is so or not is one of the vexed and very difficult questions of psychology. A purely psychological hypothesis had already been propounded by Prof. Franz Brentano, that sensory intensity is the measure of the 1 density ' of the sensation (that is the sensation on its objective side) in what he calls the space of sensation (Sinnes- or Empfindungsraum). That is, he imagines the sensation (I must not call it the sensum, for that carries with it the implications of my own view, but I may use the non-committal word sense-datum) to be stippled over the sense-space, leaving gaps, and the denser the stippling the intenser the sense-datum.3 On the subjective side 1 C. S. Myers, loc. cit. II. §§ 5 ff. 2 H. Miinsterberg, loc. cit. p. 531. 3 Thus, though he does not allow colours to possess intensity, but only brightness, a pale red is less bright than another red because the red is stippled more sparsely in the first case than the second. The refer- i34 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. m there is correspondingly more or less of the sensing, positive sensing mixed up with privations of it. The intensity is in either case the ratio of the full and void, and obviously the intensity is precisely the same on both sides. We may adapt the idea of density thus pro- pounded and give a spatio-temporal interpretation not merely to the intensity of the object but to that of the sensing, falling back on the more physiological aspect of sensing. The spirit of the hypothesis is the same as that of the physiological ones I have described. For on the view of Mr. Myers the maximum available extent of the pattern is occupied more or less densely and the idea applies obviously to Mtinsterberg's doctrine. But in using the notion of density whether in the physio- logical form or not, a proviso must be made. Density, being a ratio, is enjoyed in the mind (or contemplated in the object) not as an extensive quantity or as merely a matter of number, but as an intensive quantity. In accordance with the abstract description of the category of intensity given in a previous chapter, the intenser sensing occupies a greater space in the same- time. But the space-time so occupied is enjoyed together and as a whole. It may be resolved into numerical parts, but this is something true about it and not what we are acquainted with. We are not to suppose (taking Mr. Myers's hypothesis) that the difference between one intensity and another is the mere addition of the n+uh fibre to the n fibres of the less intensity, as if it were merely a matter of adding another unit. For the n+uh fibre only comes into play when the n fibres are already used. In other words we cannot suppose that this n+uh fibre, call it fibre *, might indifferently have been one of the n fibres which made up the lower intensity. We must suppose that within the available maximum extent of the nerve, the fibres are called into action in a certain order according to the intensity of the stimulus. In the same way when fresh doses of manure are added 2%i\\^TSUC^\ZUr #"***+& (before cited, Bk. II. cu. vi. /i, vol. l. p. 276), ch. 2. MIND AND ITS ACTS 135 to land we cannot say merely that more bits of the soil come to be fertile, as if the fertility depended on numerical addition of bit to bit, though it can be so expressed. The last bit of production by the soil is only brought into play through the last dose of manure and is therefore not as it were a unit which might have occurred indifferently anywhere in the process of reaching this stage of productiveness. Fertilities form a scale each member of which is a unitary whole, and the unit in such a scale is the unlikeness of one member of the scale to the next higher fertility. Only indirectly by correlation with the amounts of manure can the scale of fertilities be measured by units in the strict sense, as a line is composed of inches all exactly alike. Similarly, though the intensity of the sensing may be resolved into or correlated with greater or less number of the conscious excitements in the sensing, it is not the mere numerical difference which makes the greater intensity, for the numerical difference must according to Weber's law be at a certain rate or ratio in order to produce differences of number that are appreciated as differences of intensity. In other words, the numerical or extensive formulation of the intensity is but the extensive equivalent of the intensity. Thus the brightnesses in the illumination from a number of candles may be represented as depending on the density of illumination by separate candles, but that density is experienced not as an addition of units but as a whole. Each member of the scale is an individual, not resoluble in the intensive experience into units ; though so expressible. We do not enjoy the supposed neural stippling as a number but as intensity.1 Sensation, we saw, whether the sensing or the sensum, Hm^ contained a universal as well as a particular, the universal \nlt*Q™ty> being the grouping of its elements, or the plan of their construction. The higher mental acts up to thinking are more complex groupings of sensory or ideational elements and involve universal plans. Now, it is clear that think- 1 See above, Bk. II. ch. vii., for the discussion of intensity as a category, of which the above is an illustration and partly a repetition. 136 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk.hi ing being the explicit consciousness of the universal whether taken by itself as in bare conception or (as in fact it always does occur except by an abstraction) as a component element of judging or inference, is the con- sciousness of a plan and is itself a plan of mental action and has in this sense a kind corresponding to the kind of the universal in the object. The thinking process whose object is dog is different in kind (though not in quality) from the thinking of cat or house. But does thinking possess intensity ? Mr. Brentano in the same chapter answers unhesitatingly no, for there is no possible variation of density in either the thought or the act of thinking. The answer is clearly correct so far as we have pure thinking or pure thought or a universal. A plan of grouping has no intensity ; as we have seen, the category of universality does not communicate with that of intensity. But the plan is such as to admit intensity in the particular or individual cases of the universal ; it includes intensity but has none. The same thing is seen to be true of the thinking. It is the consciousness of a custom of mind or disposition, and a custom has not intensity, though it may be more or less lively in the sense that the mind may possess a greater or less readiness to act along the line of certain customs, a greater suscepti- bility or suggestibility in respect of them than of other customs. The object of such custom is the imageless thought or universal. Still at the same time thinking is a particular mental act and can no more exist without some particularity than a sensation without its universal. Some point d'appui is needed for our thinking. It may be and perhaps most commonly is a word ; it may be a particular illustration of the thought in perception or image ; it may be some heterogeneous percept or image. Intensity belongs to the thinking in so far as it is clothed in particular circumstance, and it never can dispense therewith in fact. But this intensity is not intensity of the custom. There is a custom which allows for intensity in its elements, but no intensity of the custom. Only, just so far as the particular circumstances to which the custom is attached are faint or MIND AND ITS ACTS 137 intense must the thinking have the intensity which appertains to them. Hence in an imageless thought any part of the thought may at any moment take on the particularity of an illustration. It may, if I may judge from my own case, be difficult to prevent it from straying out of the imageless region of thought, and then it becomes endowed with intensity. Plans of mental action are in fact the transitions from element to element, and though transitions may be swift or slow, lively or dull, that is not a feature of the transition itself in so far as it is the consciousness of the grouping which is the universal. Apart, then, from the intensity which belongs to thinking indirectly as related to some particular, thinking has not intensity. The intensity of thinking, which as we have seen is speculative willing, is either a name for the effort of attention which it involves and which arises from its particularising circumstances and which largely also consists in bodily experiences of a sensory character ; or it attaches to belief, with its emotional character, which may vary from languid acceptance to * intense ' conviction. Thinking is in fact on the same footing as sensing. In sensing it is the particular with its intensity which is salient and the universal in it is not detached. In thinking the universal is detached but it still remains attached to some particular and thereby has intensity. So much then by way of suggestion towards a more Summary, exact description in terms of space and time of the kind and intensity of sensing. These are its material contents, its pattern and its density. All its other contents are equally spatio-temporal, and have no quality but that of being conscious and so enjoyed. Of its so-called 1 extensity ' and localisation more remains to be said in the following chapter ; but these and its duration and date plainly belong to its space and time. A sensation has other categorial features : it is a substance, stands in relation to other sensations, etc. In particular it has order, and we have noted the application of the idea of order to the various qualities within any modality of sense, I38 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE like the pitches of tones. As for the liveliness or obtrusiveness [Eindringlichkeii) or impressional intensity, as Mr. Stout calls what Hume described as vivacity, it appears to me at present to be of the formal rather than the material order of characters of sensing ; and the other categorial features of relation, substance, and the like, call for no remark. And since the higher mental acts of perception, etc., are but groupings of simple elements of sensory or ideational kind in a spatio-temporal plan, we have the result that the only contents of mental acts of whatever kind are empirical determinations of purely categorial characters, and have no quality but that of being conscious and enjoyed as such. Above all, the object of consciousness is^ in no real sense the so-called * content ' of it. secondary Here appears to be the place for reverting to a InfthV deferred problem, and defending the thesis that secondary mind. c qualities do not owe their character to the mind, but only owe to it the fact that they are seen or tasted. It is difficult enough, in consequence of philosophical tradition, to maintain the position that colour or heat reside in the external things themselves, when the necessary physical conditions are fulfilled, such as the presence of light ; and the position is still more difficult when the proposition is extended from colour or heat to taste or smell. But at least to think of a material process carrying the quality of colour is no harder than to think of a neural process as carrying the quality of mind — facts which we have to note and accept as the way of the world — or than it is to think that in hunger we are sensing a bodily or vital process called depletion. We are so apt to think that in this last case the mind is in a manner hungry, whereas the mind is only aware of a vital condition called hunger. But now that we have attempted, however hypotheti- cally, to identify what the process of sensing a quality is as in the mind, and find it to be a pattern or type of response enjoyed by the mind as direction, which varies with each type of quality sensed, the theoretical difficulty ch. v MIND AND ITS ACTS 139 belongs rather to the philosophical theory that colour or taste owe their being to the mind. This theory, while it has no support in unsophisticated thought which does not ask such questions, receives no support either from physics or physiology, which deal with the facts of sensation, the one by inquiring into its physical conditions and the other its neural conditions, but do not concern themselves further. Indeed it may be supposed that the notion would never have arisen had it not been in the first place for the difference between qualities proper and the primary characters or c qualities ' of matter ; and secondly, for the interpretation of images as the work of mind. If it is true that the image of a red rose is mental, then since it includes the colour red, that colour is mental as well, and may be equally mental when it is perceived. But when the imagining is distinguished from the image, and when further we can say what corresponds in the imagining to the quality of redness, the notion that the colour is in any sense a creation of the mind in its co-operation with physical movements proceeding from the external rose ceases to be even plausible. There is in fact something unintelligible in the idea that out of heterogeneous material the mind could fabricate a colour or taste or smell. The only thing which makes such a notion plausible is the variability of the sensible qualities of things as the conditions vary which affect the perceiving mind : the disappearance of taste or smell with a cold in the head, the confusions of the colour-blind, the purple of the hills at a great distance ; matters which await discussion in a subsequent chapter (ch. vii.). But when we have abandoned this conception, a more secondary insidious one sometimes takes its place. The mind ^f*™ indeed, it is said, does not create colour, but colour owes sense- its existence to the physiological organism ; it does not organ8, depend on the mind but upon the eye.1 In what precise sense this is understood has not been definitely explained, and two alternative interpretations are possible. On the one interpretation, colour is an affection of the eye which 1 B. Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, pp. 78 ff. i4o EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE the mind apprehends ; on the other, it is a product of the action of the eye on the light, comparable to the peptones produced by the action of the gastric juices on food, or the uric acid secreted by the kidneys as the blood is strained through them, or the carbonic acid generated in the air of the lungs. In neither of these ways can secondary qualities be held to depend on the bodily organism. On the first alternative, which has probably not been consciously entertained, colour is an affection of the body, and in particular of the eye, which the mind apprehends as it apprehends depletion as hunger, so that in vision the eye, to adopt a convenient Aristotelian phrase, is in a manner coloured.1 All the sense qualities then would be of the same order as hunger and thirst. But these are felt in the body and localised in the same place where we learn to localise the stomach or throat, and consequently we feel them in the stomach or throat ; whereas colours and smells are not localised in our bodies but in coloured and fragrant things. Our plain experience is that we do not see colours in our eyes, but only with our eyes and *V the rose or apple. Further, if we are aware of colour as an affection of the body, why is it more difficult to suppose that we see it in the rose ? It will not do to say that chemical effects produced in certain substances in the eye are sensed as red though not red in themselves. For then we revert to the notion that it is the mind which apprehends as red what is not red at all. The alternative analogy of the colours and tastes of things with the products of vital processes, such as digestion and respiration, is open to even greater objections. In the first place it also assumes that the mind is a passive spectator of the results of the interaction between the body and the external thing, and like the first alternative fails to account for the localisation of the sensible datum in the external thing. Moreover, it would appear to exclude from the physiological participants in the interaction between organ and stimulus the neural process itself. For if it is true that the mental and the 1 "Eottiv ws K€Xpw/xaT terra t (De an. iii. 2). ch.v MIND AND ITS ACTS 141 neural process of sensation are identical, if the mind does not participate, neither can the neural process. What participates must be the non-neural processes in the organ ; for example, the action in the rods and cones before the neural elements of the retina are excited. The bodily- organ which enters into the transaction which creates colour is comparable therefore to the blue spectacles which are not themselves seen but colour the world blue. But the comparison breaks down. For the blue spectacles do not account for the world's appearing coloured, but only for its having the blue tinge. The spectacles being coloured add their colour to things which already have colour ; much as the intervening air makes the mountain look purple. The supposition is therefore irrelevant ; and it leads also to the strange conclusion that eyes which are adapted for seeing things serve only to distort their true characters. This leads us to what is the fundamental difficulty in the notion. It supposes that out of physico-chemical substances, the external thing and the bodily organ, life can create a new quality of colour which is not itself physico-chemical. Whereas for experience life reacts on such substances and produces substances higher or lower in structure but chemical substances still ; it may- transform their colours if colours already exist, but it does not create a new thing, colour. This objection is fatal if the theory meant merely that the colour of a thing is a quality which it receives in the course of living reaction upon it. I am inclined, however, to think that in treating colour as dependent on life in a way in which it is not dependent on mind, there is lurking a notion that the creation of such products is the business of life, while it is not the business of mind ; that life consists in such production while mind does not. In truth, life is a set of processes, of breathing, digestion, and the like, whereby ingested material is transformed into excreted material, and the organism regulates the production of these changes with supreme delicacy. But these trans- formations are only changes of material substances into other material substances ; life does not consist in these i42 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE transformations, which are the incidental results of life. It consists in the bodily movements or processes by which they are brought about. Life does not reside in the air which the body takes up and breathes, but in the actions of its parts by which the composition of the air is affected. But, so understood, cleared from the misconception that the living body is a machinery for transforming matter from one shape into another, life is in all respects parallel with mind, and the production of secondary qualities by mind no more difficult to under- stand than their production by life, and no advantage is gained by the substitution of the physiological organism for mind. In fact, the modification of ingested substances by the body has its exact parallel in mind in the process by which the mind adds to the objects which are presented to it in sense ideas, that is ideal objects, corresponding to acts of imagination or reproduction.1 In neither case is something new created which is of a different rank from the subject-matter which either life or mind operates upon. We are compelled then to deny that either mind or the living sense organs give to secondary qualities their being, and to affirm that these reside in the material things themselves. We have to accept the fact that besides the categorial element in things there is also the strictly empirical element of quality of which the secondary qualities of matter are an example. At the same time these two elements are not disconnected, for quality is carried by particular complexities of the a priori founda- tion of all things, Space-Time, whose fundamental features the categories are. Miraculous we may call the exist- ence of quality if we choose. But it is at least a miracle which pervades the world of things. The relation of the secondary qualities to matter is not stranger than the relation of life or mind to that which carries them. On the other hand, to attribute the secondary qualities to the work of mind is to believe, in a miracle which is unique and does not conform to the ways of things. 1 See later, ch. viii. pp. 213 ff. CHAPTER VI THE WAYS OF APPREHENDING CATEGORIES AND QUALITIES All our experience of external things is provoked in us The through the organs of sense, and since we have no c*UC8tlon- enjoyment of ourselves which is not the contemplation of a non-mental object, all our experience whether enjoyed or contemplated is provoked through the sense-organs. The most complicated objects or enjoyments are resoluble into elements of sense, or its derivative ide'a, and their groupings in some empirical plan, and from beginning to end these experiences are qualified by categorial as well as empirical features. Moreover, not only do our categorial experiences come to us through the medium of sense, but those senses are the organs for the secondary qualities of matter. I speak at present of the special senses and not the organic and kinaesthetic ones. We do not see or feel or otherwise experience Space or Time except through vision or touch or some other appre- hension of secondary qualities. The primary qualities which are empirical differentiations of Space and Time never reach our minds, as Berkeley saw, except along with secondary ones. The nearest approach we have to a hint of the separation of them in our experience is found in the fact that a thing may be detected further to the side of the field of view or with a fainter intensity, when it is moving than when it is at rest. But though our experience of Space and Time is thus provoked in us through sensation it does not follow and it is not the case that they are apprehended by the senses. We have first to ask how the mind apprehends Space and Time 143 i44 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE Bit. hi and with them the categorial features of things. The apprehension of the primary qualities offers no particular problem when once we know how Space and Time are apprehended, and in fact we only immediately apprehend Space-Time and its fundamental characters the categories in their empirical determinations. To apprehend Space- Time as such, and as a whole, and the categories as such, we have to add reflection to our immediate apprehension. intuition of We were content in an earlier book to distinguish Space and categorial from empirical characters as belonging to all existents alike. They were enjoyed in minds and con- templated in external things and existed equally in both. But now that minds are seen to be compresent with things and thereby to have cognition of them, we can see further that not only are the categories features of both minds and things, but that the mind enjoys itself cate- gorially in contemplating the corresponding categorial feature of the object which it contemplates. Let us confine ourselves in the first instance to Space and Time as such, and for convenience treat them in abstraction one from another. In being conscious of its own space and time, the mind is conscious of the space and time of external things and vice versa. This is a direct conse- quence of the continuity of Space-Time in virtue of which any point-instant is connected sooner or later, directly or indirectly, with every other. That relation was described more explicitly by the hypothesis that the instant performed to the point the office of mind, and that in an extended sense of ' awareness ' each point (to confine ourselves to Space) might be said to be aware of every other in the way in which minds are aware of one another. For clearness' sake let us take a particular case and suppose a line of colour ab which we see. It excites through our eyes a certain spatial tract in the visual region (not necessarily a line or even a continuous tract), and that neural excitement of the centres is the conscious- ness of colour. Call the neural tract AB. The points or other parts of it are, as merely spatial, < aware ' of ab. ch. vi WAYS OF APPREHENDING i4< Moreover, they are aware, in the same extended sense of « awareness,' of the points in ab as being the origin of the whole transaction of light-movements which connect those points with the corresponding neural centres. Thus for example A is aware of a in general just as it is aware of every other point. But it is also aware of a as the beginning of the line of advance which ends at itself. A line of advance, in the pattern of a movement of light, which started from a different point would not at the same moment end in A but some other brain position. Now if there were no consciousness belonging to the excitement of AB, our minds would know nothing of the place of ab. That knowledge would belong to those brain centres merely as points of space ; much in the same way as when something is behind our back, which we do not see, that object is still 'apprehended' not by our mind but by our body. And the knowledge would not be of the order of contemplation but would be comparable to the kind of assurance we have of one another's minds. But AB is a conscious excitement and contemplates the colour ab. Now that consciousness of colour is (or contains) the conscious enjoyment of the spatial tract AB. Thus we have AB conscious and the mind is therefore conscious ofy that is contemplates, the tract ab as spatial and in its locality in space. Though the brain centres are excited only by visual stimuli, the excitation is that of a space already ' aware ' as merely spatial cof its definite connection with AB according to special and definite lines of advance. Lifted into conscious enjoyment through the sensory excitement, that space is now aware as consciousness, or consciously, of the non-mental or external spatial character of ab. To put the matter shortly, a space which enjoys itself consciously or mentally as space contemplates the space of the object, or rather has for its object an external, non- mental, contemplated space, contemplated that is in its form and position in total Space. And as we cognise the colour as a sensum in the act of response to it which issues in movements of the sensory organ or other motor action, so likewise in this response we contemplate VOL. II ,46 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE in addition the place of the colour. According to the place of the colour excitement, these motor issues are specialised ; the eye or hand moves to the right or the left. Yet this specialised response remains a response to the sensory, tactual or visual, excitement and is not, as it were, the response to a place-sensum. It is part and parcel of the machinery for apprehending and sustaining the apprehension of the sensory quality. For our responses to things are practical actions designed to obtain or avoid things in virtue of the qualities they possess. If the eye moved to the right when the illuminated point is to the left the colour excitement would be lost. The specific motor-response in which the pattern of colour- sensing issues according to its place in the brain is still a colour-response, designed to fixate the stimulus, not a place-response. It is only a place-response in so far as it forms part of the visual response, and the appre- hension of the place remains different from the sensing. It is convenient to defer the fuller consideration of the apprehension of Space till we can consider the secondary qualities. I need only note here that according to the present doctrine there is no need for any specific local sign belonging to a visual or touch centre, whether that local sign is conceived to be central in its character or peripheral. The place of the brain centre is sufficient as the basis of apprehension of the place from which the stimulation proceeds. Finally, there is no assumption that the brain space AB in any way resembles the external space aby nor that if ab is apprehended both by touch and vision, the space AB of the visual region at all resembles in shape that of the tactual region of the brain correspond- ing to the same external shape ab. Whatever group of places in any sensory region of the brain is excited to consciousness by the external thing, the enjoyment of that space is thereby the contemplation of the space and place of the stimulus sensed. The places excited in the touch region might be spread out over twice the extent of the places in the visual region, and to a square object there may correspond a fantastically irregular geometrical distribution of brain places ; the result will be unaffected. ch. vi WAYS OF APPREHENDING 147 The shape and extent of the brain affection depends on the sensory arrangements of the brain, not on the shape and extent of the object. The mind therefore does not apprehend the space of its objects, that is their shape, size, and locality, by sensation, but by a form of apprehension simpler than sensation, for it depends for its character on mere spatio- temporal conditions, though it is not to be had as consciousness in the absence of sensation (or else of course ideation). It is clear without repeating these considerations that the same proposition is true of Time ; and of motion in which the space and time elements of external things are inseparably united ; that the enjoy- ment of the date and duration of mental events is the contemplation of the external time and duration of their objects ; and similarly for motion ; and that this appre- hension too is not had without sensation but is anterior to it. At the risk of attaching a new interpretation to a much used and misused word, I shall call this mode of apprehension in its distinction from sensation, intuition.1 We- contemplate Space-Time and Space and Time intuitively and we enjoy it intuitively. Intuition corre- sponds to that " bastard kind of reasoning " 2 whereby according to the speaker in the Timaeus the soul apprehends Space, the matrix of things. Only I repudi- ate the depreciatory adjective "bastard." Intuition is different from reason, but reason and sense alike are outgrowths from it, empirical determinations of it. They are its legitimate children. And as a father may learn from his child, reason may clarify the intuition, as it does in the practical working of the mind in every- day life or in the exercise of philosophical speculation, as the present investigation illustrates in the measure of its 1 I am following Kant's use of the word Ansckauung, as distinguished from sensation (Empjindung) and perception (Wahrnehmung), without the implications of Kant's subjective doctrine of Space and Time. Un- fortunately the word intuition suggests direct or self-evident apprehension as contrasted with indirect. It has no such implication here. Intuition is no more direct than sensation and thought. All our apprehensions bring us face to face with their objects. 2 AoyicrfA<} rtvi vodu), 52 b. 48 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE capacity. It is thus the intuitively enjoyed which is cognisant of the intuitively contemplated. cautions Every sensory act contains in itself, and consequently a?ain,t1 conceals or masks, a simpler act of intuition. lne SST brevity of this statement may lead to certain misunder- standings which it is desirable to remove, even at the cost of excessive detail. How, it may be asked do we know that the place we are aware of as. place is the place of the colour or the touch ? We do but refer the colour sensed to the place intuited, and how is this co-ordination effected ? Now in sensing a colour we have not two separate acts of consciousness whose objects we refer to one another. There is no separate consciousness ot the place, to which to refer the colour ; for the consciousness, or intuition, of the place is only excited so far as we have the sense of the colour. The monad or point-instant by itself has no consciousness ; though it has awareness in the extended sense of that word, which does not imply the existence of mind but only of something which performs the office of mind. Consequently there are not two acts of mind but only one act ot mind, which in its sensory character apprehends the colour, and in its intuitive character apprehends the place of it. We are conscious of a place coloured or of colour in a place. The monad's excitement exists as conscious only in so far as it is taken up into the sensory excitement of the place of the reception of the sensory excitement. To be aware of the colour, and in and by the same act of a place, is to have revealed to the mind the place of the colour. I have deliberately neglected for the present the problem which arises from the variability of the spatial appearances of things, like the shrinking of a plate to sight as it recedes.1 But a general remark may be made here, because of its importance, which follows from those of the preceding paragraph. If in seeing a colour we intuite its place, it is equally true that we intuite the place only so far as we see the colour. Consequently 1 This problem is discussed in ch. vii. pp. 192 ff. ch. vi WAYS OF APPREHENDING 149 whatever makes the sensory excitement in the brain indistinct, by which I mean numerically indistinct, wanting in individual separateness, affects the intuition of the place of the sensum. Such indistinctness may consist in diffusion of the sensory excitement, as when a point of light is seen by the unaccommodated eye as a halo. Or the indistinctness of the sensation may betray itself by confused or diffused movements of reaction of the organ or body. Such indistinctness in the sensory reaction according to the place excited in sensing would mean a corresponding indistinctness in the intuition of the place of the sensum. Minor difficulties may be met upon the same lines. Why, it may be asked, if the brain-patch AB is aware of the lines connecting it with a colour-patch ab^ do we not see these lines as welll as the patch itself? The answer is that the lines of light are not coloured. If a mote is in the way which they illumine, this we do see. Or it may be asked : since the monad taken up into conscious awareness by a sensory excitement knows the place and the spatial characters of the sensum, why then are we aware of a colour simply as colour, and not aware along with it of the movements in the coloured thing as well as of the vibrations of the ' ether.* Locke indeed would have no difficulty in answering that we fail to recognise these movements because of the coarseness of our senses, and that if we were as delicately sensed as the angels we should see them, and the secondary sensations would accordingly disappear. Such an answer lies com- pletely outside our view, because the primary qualities are not objects of sensation at all. But the real answer to the question follows the lines of the previous answers. The vibrations in the coloured body are 'apprehended* by the monad, or it is aware of them, so far as it is purely spatio-temporal. But in order that they should be appre- hended in consciousness the sensory scheme must be present also. Now in seeing colour the sensation is of colour. There is no visual picture of the movements in the body which underlie the colour. Thus the monad which is conscious of the place of the colour has no , 5o EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE consciousness of the constitution of the colour stimulus though it is aware of it in the extended sense of that word.1 The unity Before proceeding further I can now revert to the of mind. problem left over from a previous chapter2 of how we enjoy our mental unity in spite of the unfilled gaps in mental space and time, and with the consciousness that there are such gaps. Hitherto I have been speaking of the intuition of external spaces and times. But the same considerations apply to our enjoyments. I wake up from dreamless sleep to see the light streaming through the blinds and am aware that I am the same mind as enjoyed last night reading Moliere before I slept. Let the present enjoyment be A and the remembered one B. The point-instants of A and B are through the mental excite- ment lifted up into conscious enjoyment of their own mental places and times, and they also have ' assurance ' (in the wider sense) of the intermediate point-instants. It was comparatively easy to see that any mental event contemplated intuitively the place and date of its object and the rest of Space-Time. It is not so easy to see that A enjoys the interval of mental space-time between itself and B. If B were a foreign mind, A would merely have assurance of B's mind and contemplate its place and time. But B is not a foreign mind, and is enjoyed as well as A, and the two point-instants are enjoyed together. Thereby the intermediate point-instants between those of A and B are lifted up into enjoyment, just as before the assurance which a point-instant had of the place and date of the object and all other point-instants was lifted up into con- templation. The assurance which the point-instant A or B, as a mere point-instant, has of the intermediate stretch of space or time modifies the two enjoyments which are together, and these stretches are enjoyed. Only they are not enjoyed as A and B are ; there are no mental events to fill the empty stretches. They enter into the enjoy- 1 For further discussion of localisation see Supplementary Note at the end of the chapter. 2 Above, ch. i. A, p. 25. ch.vi WAYS OF APPREHENDING 151 ment not as memories but as modifications of the present enjoyed event A and the past enjoyed event B ; in the same way as in perception of an object the past experience of it modifies the present object without being an actual memory. The time-gap (and the same is true of the space-gap) is contained in the enjoyment without being filled with mental events. And this agrees with the common apprehension we have of the gap in time, of which all we can say is that there is such a gap, and nothing more. The subsidiary experiences which were mentioned in the previous passage come in to inform us how the gap was filled, if it was filled at all, with mental events. We are merely aware otherwise that there has been a gap between our event A and our memory B and that the gap is mental. This is to enjoy the mental gap and enjoy our mental unity. What is true of Space and Time is true equally of the intuition categories which are but fundamental characters of Space- and enW' Time. Not only have minds equally with external things thencatc- categorial characters, but we enjoy the categorial characters |°rJ8et8~ce of mind in the act of contemplating the corresponding categorial characters in the object. We are aware of ourselves or our acts as having intensity in so far as we contemplate intensity in the object and not without such contemplation ; we are, or enjoy ourselves as, substances in cognising external substances, in thinking or intuition of a number our enjoyment has number. It would be tedious to pursue this proposition through all the cate- gories. Some remarks, however, seem desirable in the case of the two categories of substance and causality, more particularly the second. One point of difficulty is common to both, and may be removed at once. Our mind is always substantial even in a single act, and it is also substantial as a whole. There is a substantial coherence between all its acts, and within this larger whole of mind there are smaller substantial groups of cohering activities. This corresponds to the separation of substances in the external world which itself is, though only in a metaphor, one great substance. It is IJ2 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE experience guided by scientific method which teaches us what objects cohere together more closely ; and m correspondence therewith we learn that acts of mind which may be present as a matter of fact contempor- aneously and do belong together within the one mind, do not otherwise belong together. Thus the various acts cohering together within the substantial experiencing of an orange do not cohere closely with the experiencing of a chair on which I am sitting. In the same way, in causality, some acts of mind lead on by way of causality to others as in ordinary association of ideas, but they are prima facie unconnected with others occurring at the same time, though there is some causal reason in the whole mind for their appearing there simultaneously.1 Experi- ence teaches us to correlate events in the external world with one another as cause and effect and to treat other connections in space and time as not causal but as we say accidental. Similarly with the corresponding mental acts in which the events are apprehended. There is ultimately some direct or indirect causal connection between all finites. But the connection may be highly indirect, causality. Now there is no special difficulty in recognising the truth of the proposition laid down, in respect of substance. But causality offers peculiar problems, and both on its merits and on account of its philosophical history causality is at once the hardest and most instructive of the categories to study in detail. Causality is contemplated most obviously in observing the causal sequence of two ex- ternal events ; and enjoyed most obviously in observing the influence of one thought in our minds over another, as when thinking of Raphael leads me on to thinking of Dresden and the Sistine Madonna ; or as when we actively suppress an idea. Yet it seems at first blush paradoxical to hold that our minds enjoy their own causality in following an external causal sequence, and still more that in influencing the course of our thinking we contemplate causal sequence in the objects. Again, when we are willing an external change and feel ourselves active, the beginning of the process seems to be enjoyed 1 See above, Bk. II. ch. vi. A, vol. i. pp. 276 ff. ch.vi WAYS OF APPREHENDING 153 and the end contemplated. How can the formula apply in such a case ? A little inspection dispels these doubts. Causation, we saw, was the continuous connection in sequence of two events within a substance. In contemplating the action of the wind in blowing down a chimney, we enjoy first the act of contemplating the blowing wind and the standing chimney, and this enjoyment passes continuously into that of contemplating the fallen chimney and the wind passed by.1 We pass in enjoyment through mental processes corresponding to this determinate connection, and though each stage in the enjoyment is provoked from the outside, there is the experience which is characteristic of causation. It only seems strange to say that the first enjoyment causes the second in such a case because the enjoyments are not initiated from within, in which latter case we say without reserve that we are the cause of the next enjoyment. But seeing the chimney fall when the wind blows against it with sufficient strength flows from observing the wind blowing and blowing against the chimney, and arises out of the first act of mind, so long as we continue to observe and our minds are thrown into the attitude of receptivity to nature. The second 'act is the fulfilment of the first when the first is taken in its completeness. When we do not see, we expect, provided we have seen before ; and in fact when Hume declared our experience of causality to be the consciousness of the expectation, he was saying something true and vital, though he used it metaphysically in a different way from ours. We may thus be aware of causality within our enjoyments though no part of the process is initiated by ourselves. We only miss this so far as we take the wind and the chimney by themselves ; but we cannot miss it when we take the two events as a determinate sequence within the substance of which wind and chimney are both parts. Or we may miss it, if we think causality to mean 1 Pictorially this transition of one movement into another is repre- sented by depicting two stages of the movement separately, as in Michael Angelo's representation of God's creation of the sun (another observation which I owe to the late Hermann Grimm). , 54 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE that the observing of the wind blowing against the chimney has some mysterious force in it to produce observation of the fallen chimney, whereas it only means that the one observation is felt to be continued into the other. On the other hand, when I actively suppress a thought like the thought of striking a person who has annoyed me, there is clearly enjoyed causality, but also the non- mental object which comes first, namely, the hindered attempt to strike the man, is in causal connection with the object, the man uninjured. Only here the contem- plated objects are all ideal and may have no sensible correspondent in the perceived world, and the causal relation contemplated is equally ideal. I may call up the spirit of Plato to unfold the habitation of the soul (pardon me, shade of Milton, the abbreviation !), and Plato in my dream tells me his message as he would in reality. When thinking of Dresden makes me think of Raphael, so that I feel my own causality, Dresden is not indeed contem- plated as the cause of Raphael, but Dresden and Raphael are contemplated as connected by some causal relation in the situation which is then my perspective of things, so that there is some reason for their being together and not merely for my thinking them together. Lastly, when, in the mixed variety of causation, I will to strike a man and strike him, I am enjoying causality as the determinate sequence of my perceiving of him struck upon the ideation of striking him ; but on the object side there is the equally causal transition from the external preparation to strike to the actual blow. But here the beginning of the whole enjoying is initiated in mind and the end is provoked by the object. Thus causality stripped of all adventitious notions of power may be enjoyed whether it is actively initiated or guided passively from the object, or half one way and half the other. The consciousness of activity adds to that of simple causality another element, that of self-initiation. "This making and unmaking of ideas," says Berkeley, " doth very properly denominate the mind active." The experience of willing in which an idea in the ch.vi WAYS OF APPREHENDING 155 mind (whether it be a free or a tied idea) results in a causality a. change in the external world, and that of sensation in ^e^d which a mental act is the effect of an event in the external things?" world, introduce us to a fresh intimacy between mind and its object in respect of categories, that is to say as regards the mind's intuitions. Not only is a category enjoyed along with cognisance of the same category contemplated ; but since the mind and its objects are compresent existents, there are also categorial relations between mind itself and the objects. Thus not only does mind enjoy its own space through intuition of its object's space, but the enjoyed and the contemplated spaces both belong to the same Space. The same is true of Time. In the Introduction1 we saw that inspection of experience shows that we are aware of ourselves as in the same Space and Time with our objects. We enjoy our togetherness with them in space and time. The togetherness itself, as we saw, was enjoyed and not contemplated. If we contemplated the object as together with us, we should also be contemplating our minds as the other end of the chain, and we cannot contemplate our minds. The enjoyer and the contemplated are in fact two existents in one Space, and this togetherness is experienced by the enjoyer in enjoyment. (In the extended sense of the word, the object in turn c enjoys* its compresence with the mind, that is with its non-mental basis or equivalent.) Similarly the mind not only enjoys itself as substance through intuition of an external substance, but it belongs to the larger stuff of Space-Time which comprehends it and that external object. In like manner our mind and external things are, as compresent existences, in causal relation to one another, and we enjoy ourselves as causes in respect of the things we affect and as effects of the things which act upon us, as they do primarily in stimulating us to the act of sensing. Indeed, as Mr. Stout has made clear, it is the experience of our manipu- lation of external things which is the immediate source of our consciousness of causality, and I add that we use this experience of causality in ourselves not to discover 1 See also Bk. I. ch. iii. i56 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. hi causality as between things but to interpret it and realise its meaning. Simple inspection of experience assures us that in voluntary or impulsive action we are aware of ourselves as causal in respect of things, or active, and that in sensation we are passive in respect of the sensum ; and once more it accords with the results of our hypothesis. It has sometimes been affirmed that in sensation we must postulate that there is an object which causes the sensation.1 Postulates are to be regarded in metaphysics with the deepest suspicion ; and no postulate is needed for what experience, which is our only ultimate test, asserts. We only need to explain more precisely the nature of the experience. We enjoy our sensing as the effect of the sensum, and this enjoyment has the characteristic vivacity of all sensory experience. To enjoy ourselves as the effect of the sensum is the whole experience we have of the causal relation between the sensum and ourselves. We do not contemplate the sensum as the cause, except in this sense. To contemplate it as cause in the same way as we contemplate it as the cause of some other external event, would be either to contemplate ourselves as effect, which is impossible, or to experience the relation of causality twice over, first as contemplated and then as enjoyed. This is but repeating what was said above of togetherness in space and time. To enjoy ourselves as effect of what we contemplate in sense is the experience we have of the relation of causality where one of the partners is an external existence and the other an enjoyed one. Similarly when we act upon the external world we are enjoying ourselves as cause, not of course of the immediate object of our ideation (this has been commented on already) but of the change we produce in the thing, and when that change is produced we become, in sensing it, in turn effect towards it. At the same time this discussion helps to reinforce the truth of the fundamental principle of cognition that the object is revealed to us and that it is in no sense in the mind. It might be urged that, after all, the effect of 1 See before, Introduction, vol. i. p. 28. cH.vi WAYS OF APPREHENDING 157 the external object upon us is a brain process, and, since that is not known to us in the act of sensing, we are not aware of any causal relation. This objection would be much in the spirit of Hume's famous criticism of the assertion that we are aware of causality in the act of willing. But it is at once irrelevant and helpful. It is irrelevant because the neural effect though not known is identical with the conscious enjoyment which we have. And it is helpful because our ignorance of the neural effect and our enjoy- ment of the corresponding (and identical) act of conscious- ness compel us to see that what we know or contemplate is the object itself directly and not the effect it produces in us. Thus the sensum which is the cause of the sensing is not experienced by the patient as the effect which it produces in him but is experienced in and for itself as what it is contemplated to be, and, in our language, is revealed to the patient. The patient is not cognisant of the effect but is it ; he is cognisant of the object which is the agent. Hume was right in seizing on the problem of causality as the vital question in knowledge. It is reflec- tion on causality which is the best, if not the most obvious way, of approaching the whole problem of the nature of knowing.1 Thus the categories obtain not only as between external finites or between acts of mind, and not only are they enjoyed in the actual contemplation of the same categories in the external world, but they obtain as between a mental and a non-mental finite ; as should be expected in accordance with the whole principle of explanation, which in its turn is attested by direct experience. It must be added that though we only enjoy causality or other categories so far as there are external objects to be known under those categories ; the converse proposition is not true : namely, that there are external things under the categories only so far as there is corresponding en- joyment in us under those categories. Finites below the level of mind and before the emergence of minds in the order of empirical history stand in categorial relations to 1 For the above see Mind, vol. xxi. N.S., 191 2, "On relations, etc." § 7. pp. 323 ff. matter. 158 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE itm one another though there is no mind to know them. Only they are not consciously experienced. Apprehen. Of the primary qualities of matter nothing further •ionof neecj be said in this connection. They are empirical determinations of Space and Time and motion, and are apprehended by intuition. But the answer to the question by what kind of mental act we apprehend the materiality of matter, which as I have supposed includes its mass and energy, is one of great difficulty. The question is not of the reality of matter. Matter is not the only reality ; the mind too is real and is not apprehended as material ; for the materiality of the material basis of mind is not a categorial character and is not carried up, like those characters, into the enjoyment. But if I am right in thinking that materiality is really an empirical quality of a certain level of existence, though resoluble like all empirical qualities into modes of Space-Time, we have to identify the apprehension of it amongst our modes of mental action. It is, I think, apprehended in the sensation of resistance offered to our bodies. The sensum which we are aware of in feeling resistance is a complex one. Primarily resistance is one of the kinaesthetic sensations and closely related to the organic ones, and it has for us another interest as well as the present one, namely, in its connection with life.1 But in the sensing of resistance I not only sense my own body but also the opposition to it of something or other which resists. That something or other is the materiality of the foreign object. The sense of resistance is not so simple as the sense of motion in my joints or that of hunger or thirst. In them I sense my body alone, and as we shall see as a living thing. In sensing resistance I sense the strain in my body, and I sense it not as something material but as a determination of my * life ' ; but also I sense the something which resists. And the whole situation is mediated through touch, which, however, only lets resistance in to our minds as colour or touch itself lets in categories like Space and the rest. The significance of the sense of resistance seems to lie in its 1 See below, ch. vi. p. 175. ch. vi WAYS OF APPREHENDING 159 thus supplying the link of connection between one very intimate thing, my living body, and another and foreign thing, matter. Inertia as commonly understood implies on the part of matter resistance to any attempt to change its condition, whether of motion or rest. Having learnt in the case of our living bodies what this resistance of a foreign body is, and through the mediation of the secondary sensation of touch, we understand what the- inertia of a material body is as displayed in its relation to another body not ours, when that situation is revealed to us by sight and not by touch. We have then an illustration of how something experienced directly in one experience may be used to interpret a different but allied experience. For it would follow that if matter is apprehended in its materiality by resistance felt through touch, sight does not itself reveal materiality, but a seen object is cognised as material through reference to what is learnt, not indeed by touch but by resistance provoked through the medium of touch. This agrees with our common experiences. For when we see colour we do not see materiality but colour. It is true that colour does as has been described reside in matter, but as colour it is not matter. The materiality of what is coloured is not carried up into the higher level of empirical existence which is colour. In identifying the sense of resistance as containing the apprehension of materiality, I am having recourse to a form of sensation which in older theories of knowledge and of psychology played a large part, but has fallen now into something of discredit. There is no peculiar revelation of reality, it is urged, which is conveyed to us by this kind of sensation. And it is quite true that the resistance of a thing when we touch and push it no more teaches us the reality and independence of the thing than any other sensation. It is only one instance of how we . come to be aware that there are things to which we must adapt ourselves, and which we have to humour, so that if we desist we lose them, as I should lose the table if I continue to move my fingers on in the direction of its edge beyond the corner where the 160 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. m edge turns at right angles. This happens to me equally with colour where if I turn my eyes away I lose the colour. But, to repeat myself, I am not suggesting that the sensing of resistance has any prerogative to inform us of reality ; but only that it informs us of the empirical quality of being material. If I am right it does supply not a peculiar but a special revelation of that. Apprehen- The primary qualities are apprehended by intuition 8ion of but through sensation. The secondary ones are appre- paiitiek hended by the specialised empirical forms of spatio- temporal mental response of the special senses. We have seen that each act of sensing has its intrinsic extension which is the pattern of the response. Correspondingly the sensum has its intrinsic extension, which is its extensive pattern in the external thing, but it is not apprehended in the act of sensation as extensive but as the quality of the sensum, blue or hot or sweet or hard, intrinsic The place of the sensum and that of the sensing are, to speak strictly, not part of the intrinsic extension but are intuited, and are extrinsic to the sensation in so far as the sensation has sensory character. Hence it is that while in the sensing the pattern is purely spatio-temporal, in the sensum it is a quality, but the place of the sensum (not necessarily or indeed ever a geometrical point) is apprehended, as all purely categorial characters are, in correspondence with the enjoyed place of the sensing. The intrinsic extension of sensation is thus to be dis- tinguished from the extrinsic extension of sensation, which is what is commonly called its extension, but does not belong to it in virtue of its quality (that is, its occupying space according to a certain pattern) but in virtue of its occupying a space in the sense of greater or less repetition of that pattern in space. The greater or less extent (to describe the extrinsic extension by a special word) of sensory experience depends on the greater or less space which it fills, that is to say on the multiplicity of the sensory objects or enjoyments. A blue thing is blue as a whole because the blue material processes are spread over the area of the thing when it is subject extension and extent ch. vi WAYS OF APPREHENDING 161 to the action of the light. And as we have seen the blue does not fill the whole area but is stippled over it in more or less density, leaving room for those processes which are sensed with other sense -'qualities.1 A single point of blue colour is nothing but the smallest area filled with that quality, and the place of such a point is thus the minimum sensibile of extent which is coloured blue. The whole extent of the area is seen coloured because the sensory qualities which provoke our intuition of their places are not finely enough delimited from each other. Under the microscope this discrimination may occur and the blood which seems red to the naked eye is seen as a yellowish extent in which red corpuscles are seen separately. At the same time such undistinguished sen- sation of a coloured area is possible because the space of the area is itself continuous and is so apprehended in our intuition. What is true of the sensed colour and its extent is true also of the sensing of it. A larger area of vision is a larger extent of enjoyed space in the neural region engaged, and the separate points of vision are not enjoyed separately because, as we-must suppose, the excitement provoked by sensation in those points spreads over the intervening places. The place of a sensed minimum forms the transi- intensity tion between the intrinsic extension and the extent °/8( of sensory experience. The place is the lower limit of the extent. At the same time, even the minimum sensed has intensity, and intensity seems at first sight to belong intrinsically to a sensation as sensory. It is probably referable as we have seen to the spatial density of the sensum, that is the filling of the place in the same time. The notion of density was illustrated by Mr. Brentano by the paling of the red in brightness when red points are scattered sparsely over an area otherwise black.2 And within a minimum of intuited extent we have accord- ing to the intensity a varying density with which the sense -quality fills it, and this density apprehended not 1 See above, Bk. II. ch. vi. A, vol. i. p. 275. 2 Above, ch. v. p. 133. Brentano, Untersuchungen, p. 14. VOL. II M intuited. 162 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk. m numerically or extensively but taken in at once in the act of sense and integrated in the actual external fact as the intensity of the sensum, to which corresponds that of its sensing.1 It seems very difficult to separate the intensity of a sensation from its quality. Yet, to speak strictly, the in- tensity of the sensation is not sensed any more than its extent is sensed. We must hold, however strange the conception may be, that it is only the quality which is sensed ; while the intensity is an intuition. But so close is the intimacy of the quality and the intensity, that the intensity which is the density even of a point of sensation appears to be and is commonly assumed to be a feature of sensation on a level with its quality. It is the intensity of a quality, whether that quality be blue or sweet or life or motion. In some cases a change of intensity is- even confused with one of quality, as sounds of increasing intensity seem to rise also in pitch. Some writers have gone so far as to say (for instance, Mr. Bergson) that intensities really are qualities and every difference of intensity a difference of quality. This seems however not to be in accordance with inspection of experience, which distinguishes quality clearly from intensity. When we turn to theory we can and must separate the two different integrations of Space-Time which underlie quality and intensity respectively. Quality is the integration of an extensive pattern. The apprehen- sion of it is an enjoyed extensive pattern enjoyed as an extensive whole, but in the sensum what is contemplated 1 When the whole hand. or arm is plunged in hot water the water seems hotter than when only a finger or a finger-tip is immersed. This fact is of a different kind from that in the text. There the intensity or bright- ness is lowered by leaving unexcited places. Here we have a larger extent of the same density of stippling confused with a greater intensity. The fact is a further illustration of the truth that intensity is dependent on an extensive condition. The larger extent of the heat besides being felt as larger appears to be taken in as a whole and to be equated with a greater density of the heat. There are other illusions which are perhaps cognate. To the touch a line of points feels shorter than a continuous line of the same length. Oddly enough this is an 'illusion ' opposite to that of vision, for as is well known a line of points looks longer than a continuous line of the same length, at any rate within certain limits of length. ch. vi WAYS OF APPREHENDING 163 is quality. Intensity is the integration of the frequency with which that pattern occupies its space-time, and is apprehended both in the sensum and the mind as such an integration, which in both cases is spatio-temporal and has no quality, though it attaches to a quality. To point this contrast of the two integrations ; consider the pattern of a sound vibration which carries the sound in its appropriate pitch, as compared with the amplitude of the vibration which is the intensity of that sound. The greater amplitude means that in the same time there is more of the vibration, or it occupies more space in the same time. The less intense sound leaves part of the space of a greater amplitude unfilled and may thus be brought under the conception of less density. Thus quality is a purely empirical integration ; intensity is a categorial one, though of course it has its empirical variations, just as Space or universality has. Hence, intimate as is the connection between intensity and quality of sensation, so that there is no intensity of a sensum unless there is quality, intensity is and remains purely spatio-temporal. The intensity of sensation be- longs with its extent and duration and not with its quality.1 But because intensity belongs even to the minimum extent or duration of a sensum, it is the connecting link between the purely sensory element in the sensum, its quality, and its categorial characters or primary qualities, place, extent, date, duration, to whi'ch intensity properly belongs. These characters though revealed to the mind through sensation are apprehended by the intuition which the sensing act contains and which cannot be had apart from the sensing. In other words, the sensing act is a conscious spatio-temporal process, a specialised form of intuition, which in respect of one of its elements, the pattern of response, is aware of the quality of the sensum and performs the sensory function proper ; in respect of its other elements is purely intuitive. It is the intuitive 1 There is therefore no extravagance in the suggestion sometimes made (as by Messrs. Munsterberg and Brentano) that the intensity of different orders (or modalities) of sensation, e.g. touch and sound, may be compared and equated. sensum. 164 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE elements which give the sensing act its particularity, or individualise it ; even as their objects individualise the quality of the sensum. The current statement of psychologists, that sensations possess quality, intensity, extensity, etc., fails to distinguish the different levels to which these two sets of characters belong. It fails also to distinguish between sensing and sensum. For though the sensum possesses quality, blue or sweet, the sensing possesses no such quality but only that of consciousness.1 Extent of Leaving intensity let us return to the extent of a sensory object, like a patch of blue, which is an extended multiplicity of sensa. When a sensum is said to have extent it is always such a multiplicity. The extent is extrinsic to the quality of the sensum, which has its own intrinsic extension. It follows that when I see a blue patch I see its blue quality, but I have intuition of its extent. I do not see a blue which possesses an extent but I intuite an extent of space which I see blue. I do not apprehend an extended colour but a coloured extent. The extent is not a property or character either of the mental act of sensing in its sensory character or of its object. It belongs to the act or object of intuition. An important consequence already mentioned more than once follows, not so much for psychology as for the theory of knowledge. If we suppose that our colours are extended and our touches also, we are faced with the problem of correlating the Spaces of vision and touch. They are in that case, as Berkeley rightly held, distinct Spaces, and they do but get connected by custom, though it is difficult to understand how. Now if extent does not belong to colour as such, 1 I add a note on order. Both the sensum and the sensing possess order in respect of any of its characters. The order in quality of the sensum is its place in the series of qualities, e.g. if it is a sound, in the series of qualities called pitches. The corresponding order in the sensing is that of the patterns of response. These are without sound quality and it is in respect of the sensings of sounds, not of the sensa themselves, that Mr. Watt's proposition is true, that pitches are not differences of quality but of order. Thus the order of quality in sensation belongs to the sensory side of sensation, not to the intuitive side. (This repeats a note on a previous page, vol. i. p. 265.) ch.vi WAYS OF APPREHENDING 165 but colours are seen in their places within an extent, and the like is true of touch, it follows that when we apprehend the same object by sight and touch we are apprehending the same extent, and in the one case seeing its colours and in the other feeling its pressures, and these objects though they do not ultimately occupy, microscopically, the same places do all fall within the same area or volume and macro- scopically coincide. There are not two distinct spaces which have to be connected by custom or otherwise, but one space which is the scene of different qualities. What experience does is to correlate colours and touches (and the same thing applies to all the other sense qualities) with one another as belonging to the same space, and this is what our experience of things actually enables us to do.1 Instead of having a variety of different Spaces which we never can make one, except by assuming some Space not given in experience which is the condition of all these various Spaces, our intuitive apprehension of things supplies us with the identical framework of a piece of space, within which the sensible qualities of the things are found. Extent remains a categorial feature of experience, varying of course in empirical differences, and not sensed. It still remains true that what is sensed has its intrinsic I spatio-temporal characters, but these are sensed as quality, and not as extended, nor even as having position or place. Hence the necessity of distinguishing the intrinsic exten- sion of the sense-quality as such from the extent (including the place) of the whole sensory experience. It may be added that with proper changes the same account has to be given of the duration and date of sense experience. This analysis of the connection between sensation and History of ( intuition of any space is at variance, though not by any '«ten81ty-' means so sharply as would at first sight appear, with the current doctrine that sensation besides quality and in- tensity possesses what is called extensity. Were it not for the established use of the word, I should have liked 1 I am once more neglecting the variation of spaces in our sensible experience. 1 66 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE BK. m to give the name extensity to the intrinsic extension of a sensum, which is not contemplated as such but as quality, and reserve c extension ' for the intuited bigness of a sensory object which arises from the plurality of simple sensa, and is the space in which they are contained. At any rate if the above account be true, sensation as sensory has no extensity as in the commonly accepted doctrine. That doctrine was historically inevitable in view of the failure of the English attempts to derive the percept extension from combinations of touch or colour with motion, and of the resembling theory of Herbart, and in view of the change wrought in the state of the dis- cussion by Lotze's theory of local signs. For Lotze the experience of Space itself was an a priori one : the mind had a native tendency to view its sensory objects as contained in Space. The local signs were needed as indications to the mind so as to assign the various sensory objects to their different places in this Space. His account of them varied in the history of his thought : at first they were mere physical neural processes, apparently noted by the mind unconsciously ; but in the end they were described explicitly as sensations, which attended an ordinary sensation in virtue of the place at which it affected the sense-organ of touch or sight. Still, through- out, they remain indications for discriminating place and not experiences of place. Space itself was given to the mind by the mind's own habit. In the justifiable revolt against explaining our experience or any part of it by mental habits, as a method of stating theoretically that we have to accept Space, for instance, as given to us and can offer no further account of it, what could be more natural than to empty this spatiality of experience into the elements of experience itself and declare that our sensations possessed extensity? The doctrine of the extensity of sensations is the inevitable outcome of Lotze's teaching. But the variability with which the local signs have been treated in different expositions of the doctrine of extensity since Lotze is enough to indicate how indistinct the whole doctrine is. Mr. Stumpf dis- penses with them altogether. For James they appear to ch.vi WAYS OF APPREHENDING 167 be purely peripheral sense-characters. For Mr. Ward a local sign is the relation of any particular sensation to the presentation-continuum as a whole with its property of extensity. Each presentation has or may have two or more of such local signs, so that each presentation possesses extensity as well as quality.1 Similarly for Mr. Stout the local signs blend together into extensity and a local sign is a differentiation of extensity. These variations in the doctrine, which is much altered from Lotze's, suggest to me that extensity is being all the while regarded as something different from sensation and only connected with it independently ; and that is why I said above that my own statement is not so sharply different as it seems. To add to the indistinctness, on some of these theories experience of motion (either kinaesthetic sensation or sensation of external motion) is regarded as an integral constituent of the experience of extension as developed from sensory extensity, and by some (e.g. James) is treated only as a help towards exacter experience. The earlier doctrine of Mr. Stumpf is free from these Place a* perplexities, and it will be helpful to touch briefly upon *££$. of it. For him every sensation possesses four elements or as sensation. he calls them " partial contents " 2 : quality, intensity, time- character, and place. These are "psychological parts" of the sensation. Local signs have no part to play in this analysis. Moreover, he suggests, not of course with the same implications as the present doctrine, that the neural counterpart of the place which is a psychological part of the sensation is the place of the sensory excitement and nothing more.3 What is meant by calling place a partial content of sensation is that quality and place are insepar- able from one another, there is no quality which has not extent and no extent without quality. But they are distinct elements and vary independently : the colour 1 See Art. Encycl. Brit. ed. ix. p. 54- Psychological Principles, pp. 147 ff. 2 Ueber den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung. Leipzig, 1873, pp. 106 ff. 8 Pp. 149 ff. 168 EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE »k.hi of a patch may remain the same though the patch varies in size. At the same time " the quality participates in a certain fashion in the change of the extent," for the colour diminishes with the extent till, when the extent vanishes, the colour vanishes too. My only quarrel with this statement is that it fails to mark the difference of mental function in the appre- hension of quality and place (and the other partial contents). Both alike are of course contained within the sensation taken as a whole, but they are contained differently. For the purely sensory function is provoked by the quality of the sensum as its stimulus. But the place of the sensum is not- a stimulus ; the attempt to make it one lay at the bottom of the conception of local signs. Accordingly the place is not a sensory but an intuitive character, and distinct from it to a much greater degree than is suggested by the statement I am considering. The remark quoted that quality in a way participates in the extent proves only that where there is no extent there is no quality. Doubtless it is because quality and place are treated as " contents " of sensation, and not as objects of the sensing, that this distinctness of the sensory and intuitive functions in sensation is minimised. Remarks My inquiry is not primarily psychological and I perception am concerned only to identify the apprehension of Space nSn, and t0 plaCe lt;> m its relation witn sensation, in a scheme of the modes of mental apprehension corresponding to different levels of existence. Accordingly I am not to discuss those details of how spatial perception is elaborated, which are supplied in such invaluable fulness in recent treatments of the subject.1 But I will allow myself the luxury of commenting upon two matters which fall perhaps outside my scope. The one topic is that of the part played in space-perception by motor or kinaesthetic sensations; they cannot be elements of extension as integral components of it. The case of sensations of motion in things outside us (e.g. a shooting star or a flying 1 Cp. Mr. Stout's chapters in Manual, ed. 3, Bk. iii. pt. ii. chs. iii., iv. sensations. ch.vi WAYS OF APPREHENDING 169 bird) is different. Motion is intuited and Space is only the framework of motion, and though we apprehend the motion through sight or touch yet the material derived thus may and must be integral in the direct perception of Space, for it is of that order. But kinaesthetic or motor sensations do not tell us directly of anything outside our bodies which we are contemplating, but only of ourselves, and even then they do not inform us of material motion but of motion within a living thing — vital motion. In exploring with my finger the edge of an object, my finger gives me changing sensations of the touched object and it gives me motion in my body, but the motion does not belong to the body touched. Hence all that such motor sensations can do for space-perception they do not directly but through their correlation with places and extents other- wise known. Their sensa are not ingredients of the extent of place, but they may enable us to refine our apprehension of those places and extents. This would apply to Lotze's attempt to identify the local signs of the eye with sensations of movement or strain in the motor arrangements of the eye. They are not fitted to be local signs, for they tell us of the place of the eye not of the coloured point seen by it. Hence, unless that position is otherwise known, it is difficult to see how this motor sensation could discriminate sensations as belonging to various places in external Space. For the sensations from the thing seen are seen by the mind as external in space to my body, but the motor sensations are felt as in my body. They could not therefore serve as the sign of difference of locality of the sensation. My other remark concerns the attempt to treat local Local signs signs as purely peripheral, I mean as tactual or visual JJJJjJ" in some shape or form. This was Lotze's own view as to the tactual local signs ; they were the differences in the feel of touches according to the nature of the underlying structures in different places of the skin. He found no such differences in the retina, and accordingly looked elsewhere for the local signs of the eye. James apparently treats them even in the eye as different feel- ings at each retinal point. Now it is gravely doubtful 1 7o EMPIRICAL EXISTENCE bk.hi whether there is anything like fine enough discrimination supplied in the skin in this way for the purpose, and these different colourings of the touches admit a much simpler interpretation. For the skin not only explores but is explored and is a particularly interesting object of exploration. The different touch experiences from different parts of it serve the same purpose as different colours on a surface, which enable us to see the contours more easily than if the colour were uniform. A body is more easily felt when the surface does not give us uni- form touch sensations. Supposing the eyes could see each other, there might be similar variations in the retina, and that they cannot is perhaps the reason why no such differences have been discovered with any certainty. We must conclude that local signs which are really signs, that is are non-local experiences, cannot do the work required ; and that the only local signs which can do the work, namely, central consciousness of the place affected, are not signs at all but are direct consciousness in intuitional form of the place and extent of the external object. Though I have said nothing of the third dimension, I am assuming that the Space we cognise by intuition is three-dimensional, and the places stimulated in the brain and therefore the places enjoyed in the mind as well as the places in the external thing are places in three- dimensional wholes. Fortunately I am not called upon to raise the question of the optical machinery for appre- hension of the third dimension by sight. Apprehcn- The next level of existence above that of the secondary .ion of iifC. quaiities 0f matter is life, and the quality of life is apprehended in ourselves by the organic and kinaesthetic sensations. In these, as in the special sensations, the act of sensing is distinct from the sensum ; the one is an act of consciousness, the other a process of life. The sensum is not sensed through the organic or motor sense as material, which it also is. For this it must be sensed through other sensations. Yet it is as much non-mental ch.vi WAYS OF APPREHENDING 171 as the objects of the special senses. To verify this and at the same time to realise that the object's life and not any- mere form of matter, compare in series the sight of an external motion, the sight of one's own moving arm, and the internal sensation of the movement which takes place at the joint. For the visual impression of the moving arm we may even substitute the visual imagination of the movement as taking place at the joints. Now it is the living motion which the motor sensing contemplates ; in the other cases it is material motion which is contem- plated, though in the one case located in the body, in the other located in the external world, outside the body. Pass from this simpler experience to the organic sensa- tions. My object in the sensation of hunger or thirst is the living process or movement of depletion, such as I observe outside me in purely physiological form in the parched and thirsting condition of the leaves of a plant, which thus lives through its thirst or c enjoys ' it, but is not conscious of it, and does not contemplate it as we do our thirst ; or the object may be the vital movements implied in suffocation or nausea ; or I may have that intensely disagreeable sensum of the laceration of my flesh in a wound, which in its vital quality we speak of as physical pain. In all these instances of motor and organic sensation what we have to do is to separate the consciousness from the object and to recognise that the object- process has the empirical quality of life, which distinguishes it from a primary movement (or from a secondary quality) in matter. The separation is not easy to perform. For we tend to take the hunger as a whole including its conscious character, while at the same time we correlate it with a part of the body in which it is felt. We are the more apt to do so