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THE PRESENTATION 
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THE PRESENTATION 
 OF REALITY 
 
 BY 
 
 HELEN WODEHOUSE, D.PHIL. 
 
 Author of The Logic of Will-, Lecturer in Philosophy 
 in the University of Birmingham 
 
 Cambridge : 
 
 at the University Press 
 
 1910 
 
NA/fc 
 
 (Eambrtoge : 
 
 PKINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 
 
NOTE 
 
 SCATTERED passages in this Essay have appeared 
 ^-^ in an article called " Knowledge as Presentation," 
 in Mind for July, 1909. The appendix to Chapter VII, 
 "Professor James on Conception," was published in The 
 Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method 
 in September, 1909. My thanks are due to the editors of 
 these Journals for permission to republish. 
 
 H. W. 
 
 August, 1910. 
 
 215994 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 PART I. KNOWLEDGE 
 
 I. KNOWLEDGE AS PRESENTATION 3 
 
 II. CONTENT AND OBJECT 13 
 
 III. THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. I . . .26 
 
 IV. THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II . . . .31 
 
 V. THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. Ill .... 52 
 
 VI. DEFENCE OF THE PRESENTATION OF REALITY IN SENSE 57 
 
 VII. DEFENCE OF THE PRESENTATION OF REALITY IN 
 
 THOUGHT 68 
 
 VIII. ILLUSTRATIVE AND ADDITIONAL : THE APPREHENSION 
 
 OF FEELING . 86 
 
 PART II. ERROR 
 
 IX. Is ANY KNOWLEDGE INFALLIBLE? .... 105 
 
 X. ERROR AND THE REAL 113 
 
 PART III. THE MANY-MANSIONED 
 UNIVERSE 
 
 XI. THE VARIOUSNESS OF REALITY 123 
 
 XII. ASSUMPTIONS 132 
 
 XIII. THE MUTUAL RELATIONS OF JUDGMENT, APPREHEN- 
 
 SION, ASSUMPTION, AND DOUBT . . . .146 
 
 PART IV. CONCLUSION 
 
 XIV. THE PRESENTATION OF REALITY 157 
 
 INDEX . 161 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE theory of knowledge may be fairly considered, 
 from one point of view, as a psychological preface to 
 metaphysics. It is common to urge that there are great 
 difficulties and dangers in the method of approaching the 
 latter through psychology instead of through logic, and 
 it is true enough that such difficulties exist, yet their 
 existence seems hardly to excuse us from endeavouring to 
 open both roads. Complete philosophy after all is bound 
 to the task of connecting and reconciling all our beliefs. 
 It should therefore have nothing to fear from a sound 
 psychology, and psychology itself has much to gain 
 by becoming and remaining, in some part at least, 
 philosophical. 
 
 The following essay is therefore intended for a descrip- 
 tion of knowledge from the point of view of a philosophical 
 psychology. The first part, and the longest, will deal with 
 knowledge in the narrower sense, where we have true 
 judgments about the actual world; the second part (a very 
 short one) will deal with Error, the third with Imagination. 
 I desire to maintain and to illustrate the doctrine that in 
 all cognitive experience we come into immediate contact 
 with objective reality, of the existence of which we have 
 in experience an irrefutable witness; and that on all 
 
X INTRODUCTION 
 
 levels of cognition, sensuous or intellectual, this happens 
 in the same way, namely, by the presentation of an object 
 to a subject 1 . I write on psychology in order to make 
 from it a preface to metaphysics, and desire to keep as 
 clear as I can from writing on metaphysics itself. That 
 is, I shall try to describe the process of knowing reality, 
 but shall always endeavour to put aside if possible the 
 question of the nature and origin of reality. 
 
 Whatever his opinions, a student of the theory of 
 knowledge can have but one sentiment at present towards 
 those who are leading the work in this field. I should 
 wish this essay to express some of the gratitude and 
 admiration which all of us must feel for the work of so 
 brilliant a group of scholars from all nations. My personal 
 gratitude is due in two directions in particular : firstly to 
 the extraordinarily suggestive works of Professor Alexius 
 Meinong; secondly, and from first to last, to everything 
 that English-speaking students connect with the honoured 
 name of Dr G. F. Stout. 
 
 1 With regard to this matter, as to all the rest of psychology, I am 
 indebted for more than I can ever state to the teaching of Dr James Ward. 
 

 w. 
 
 IV 
 
 PART I 
 
 KNOWLEDGE 
 
CHAPTEE I 
 
 KNOWLEDGE AS PRESENTATION 
 
 SPEAKING generally, one may say that psychologists 
 of all schools are agreed on the doctrine that cognition 
 is an indispensable and fundamental element in mental 
 life, which means, in non-technical language, that every 
 conscious being in every instant of consciousness is partly 
 engaged in knowing. So much we may take to be non- 
 controversial, but the next step unfortunately takes us 
 across the border in a moment. The present writer 
 desires to take the side of those who maintain that in 
 every instant of consciousness the conscious being knows 
 something. We maintain, that is (to return to the 
 technical form), that the fundamental relation of life 
 involves the presentation of an object to a subject. 
 
 Expanding this doctrine, we maintain that even from 
 the vaguest beginnings the process of consciousness has 
 two sides. On the one hand it is reception some- 
 thing comes to me. On the other hand I am active in 
 reception, and I respond in feeling and striving to that 
 which I receive. Naturally it is long before I learn to 
 
 12 
 
4 KNOWLEDGE AS PRESENTATION 
 
 describe ray life in any such terms: nevertheless from 
 the beginning I find something present with me, " some- 
 thing there " ; and I try to get more of it or to get rid of 
 it. At every moment I receive and respond, I desire and 
 am answered or resisted, I seek and find. 
 
 What I find is the only thing that is capable of being 
 found, namely the real world. My finding of it, my 
 coming upon it and against it, is the event of the pre- 
 sentation of reality, and this is all that the phrase need 
 mean. What meets us is the real, and this meeting, this 
 having it before us in our conscious life, this finding it 
 under our eyes, is presentation, or cognition, or knowledge. 
 It has been said by an ingenious writer that to have a 
 presentation cannot be to know an object, since the 
 presentation itself is an additional reality requiring to be 
 known 1 . With our sense of the term this objection does 
 not hold, since " to have a presentation," for us, means 
 simply to have something presented, to find something, 
 to come up consciously against the real world to know 
 reality. 
 
 There would seem to be something curiously artificial 
 in accounts of experience which leave out this aspect of 
 direct meeting with something real. Professor James 2 , in 
 an early essay, describes cognition as a feeling which is 
 taken to be in some way self- transcendent. We suppose, 
 he says, that there must be a reality outside to resemble 
 the feeling's quality, and we deny the function of know- 
 ledge to any feeling whose quality or content we do not 
 believe to exist outside of that feeling as well as in it. 
 
 1 H. A. Prichard, " The Psychologists' Treatment of Knowledge," in 
 Mind, 1907, p. 50. 
 
 2 " On the Function of Cognition " (Mind, O.S. x.). 
 
KNOWLEDGE AS PKESENTATION 5 
 
 Now the feeling itself cannot discover whether or not such 
 a reality exists. Its own quality is the only quality it 
 grasps, and its own nature is not a particle altered by 
 having the self-transcendent function of cognition either 
 added to it or taken away. The function is " accidental " ; 
 it falls outside and not inside its being. 
 
 It is scarcely fair to criticise this passage at present 
 because its form of statement has so evidently been 
 determined by remembrance of the existence of error, 
 and of that we shall have later on to give our own 
 account. But we are justified even here in observing how 
 artificial the description appears at first sight to be. Had 
 it not been for the consideration of error, it is likely that 
 no one would ever have thought of separating an event of 
 knowing from what is known, or of saying that to see a 
 thing is an accidental function of seeing 1 . Professor 
 James's expressions would have been thought to be at 
 least dangerous and misleading. Our own account has at 
 least the merit of simplicity that knowledge is that side 
 of experience on which we meet with reality. 
 
 One-sided and Double-sided Terms. 
 
 Since every mental process in the concrete has the 
 two sides of action and reception, of the subject putting 
 itself forth and the object coming in upon it, it is natural 
 that psychology should bestow its names sometimes upon 
 
 1 Cf. Mr A. Hoernle, "Image, Idea, and Meaning," in Mind, 1907; 
 "'To mean something' is after all a conscious act, and the self- 
 transcension of consciousness inherent in all objective reference is 
 something experienced by us. The fundamental fact... is that in 
 experience we are conscious of reality." 
 
6 KNOWLEDGE AS PKESENTATION 
 
 the sides taken separately and sometimes upon the two 
 taken as a whole. It follows that some common terms 
 refer only to the subject side or only to the object side of 
 consciousness, whilst other terms, or the same terms in 
 other contexts, stand for concrete processes including both 
 aspects, and from this fact some confusion may occasionally 
 arise. "Feeling" for instance in the technical psycho- 
 logical sense is subjective only, whilst " emotion " usually 
 includes some presentation as well \ " Discovery " applies 
 both to the object found and to the activity of finding it. 
 " Decision " may stand for the act of deciding or for the 
 thing decided on or for both together. "Assumption" 
 covers both the deliberate creation of an object and the 
 presentation of it as it is created ; as well as standing 
 for the created object itself. "Knowledge" is sometimes 
 abstract or " one-sided," but is often a double-sided term, 
 and in that case the names of the two aspects it includes 
 are " presentation " and its correlative " apprehension." 
 
 The two Sides of Knowledge. 
 
 Let us for our present purpose take " knowledge " to be 
 concrete, containing in itself the two aspects of conscious- 
 ness, and let us attend for a moment to each of them in 
 turn. 
 
 1. " The content of knowledge " as opposed to 
 " knowing," we may fairly use to represent one side of 
 the process. Knowledge in this sense belongs to the side 
 of the object, and consists in the presentation of reality in 
 consciousness. 
 
 1 The popular use of these two terms is usually just the reverse 
 of this. 
 
KNOWLEDGE AS PRESENTATION 7 
 
 A certain reluctance to allow these contents of know- 
 ledge to fall to the object side comes sometimes from a 
 confusion of the psychological with the physiological use 
 of "subjective." The physiologist is naturally apt to 
 class as subjective everything that is "in the mind," and 
 certainly whatever is known must be presented in the 
 mind. It will be sufficient for our purpose if we point 
 out that this classification would be useless to the psycho- 
 logist ; for his region of interest begins only after the 
 threshold of consciousness has been passed, and therefore 
 his distinction of subjective and objective must fall not 
 between mind and body but within " the mind " itself. 
 The world comes to me in the fields of sensation and 
 thought as an object known, and I in feeling and striving 
 react upon it. This reaction is subjective, but the contents 
 of knowledge are objective for the psychologist, for they 
 constitute the shape in which the object comes to me. 
 
 2. The subjective element in knowing is apprehension, 
 the word being used in its ordinary meaning as the cor- 
 relative of presentation, and not in its etymological sense. 
 It is activity, but of a special and peculiar kind, being 
 the activity of reception only. In apprehending I do 
 nothing to my object. I simply keep my eyes open 
 and see. 
 
 We guard ourselves by this description against more 
 than one mode of expression which seems to be dangerous. 
 One such mode is found in the statement of many idealists 
 that in knowledge we construct reality. This is a brief 
 formulation of what for idealist metaphysics is of course a 
 truth, but in the theory of knowledge it would seem to 
 need expansion and qualification if it is not to be mis- 
 interpreted. Even if the whole world grows by means of 
 
8 KNOWLEDGE AS PRESENTATION 
 
 our interest, of our questioning and seeking and demand- 
 ing : even if nothing can exist except on condition that it 
 is known : even then our knowing is not in any ordinary 
 sense an act of construction or creation. Even in deliberate 
 fiction or assumption, where we do wilfully create the 
 objects that we apprehend, the creation is not the appre- 
 hension. Whatever our metaphysics may be it is most 
 important to keep this psychological distinction clear. 
 Whatever creates the reality that we find it is not the 
 finding as such that creates it, and it is this finding that 
 constitutes knowledge. 
 
 In the same way we must object to those forms of 
 speech which seem to take certain events of knowing, 
 judgment for instance, to be something more than the 
 reception of presentation. It may be wise to distinguish 
 judgment from some other kinds of apprehension, as 
 occurring only after doubt has supervened, or as being 
 concerned with a special kind or level of object, or with 
 connections between objects, or what not. But if it is an 
 element in knowing as such, then it must still be itself a 
 kind of apprehension, a case of "finding something there." 
 We must be suspicious, therefore, of descriptions of judg- 
 ment which make it an "assertion," or an "assent," or 
 a response to an imperative 1 ; because these accounts seem 
 likely to bring into judgment something more than 
 pure knowledge. This would not matter, of course, 
 except that we are so likely to slip back afterwards into 
 thinking of the event so named as if it were still pure 
 knowledge. 
 
 Still more must we object to those accounts which take 
 
 1 E.g. Kickert, Gegenstand der Erkenntniss, 66, and Lipps, Fiihlen, 
 Wollen, und Denken, 187. 
 
KNOWLEDGE AS PRESENTATION 9 
 
 judgment (still not distinguished from knowing) to be a 
 kind of appreciation or an acceptance or rejection. Our 
 knowledge of an object may of course be a result of 
 appreciation, in that we wanted to know ; and appreciation 
 must of course have cognition as a ground. But, if there 
 is any meaning or use in distinguishing right from left or 
 front from back or coming from going, then to know is 
 not the same as to appreciate. The matter is confused 
 by the fact that a prepositional form of words may express 
 much more than a judgment. "That won't do" covers 
 the ordinary judgment "that doesn't fit," " that is unlike " ; 
 and the introspective judgment " that is not what I want "; 
 and the imperative "take it away; let it go"; and the 
 suggestion "let us look for something else." To compound 
 all these meanings and to call the total a judgment, in 
 the sense in which judgment is an element of knowledge, 
 would seem to be a mere blurring of all the distinctions 
 which it has taken psychology so long to make. One 
 becomes suspicious of even so respectable a phrase as 
 "knowledge in the concrete," because it turns out so often 
 to mean something more concrete than knowledge. Cog- 
 nition is no more an independent mental process than 
 conation is; they are two elements in every possible 
 mental process ; and it is darkening of counsel to call 
 them by each other's names. 
 
 Act and Object of Apprehension. 
 
 It is useless to deny that throughout this essay we 
 shall be on controversial ground. From its very beginning 
 our description of knowledge has committed us to dis- 
 tinguishing on every level of knowledge, even the lowest, 
 
10 KNOWLEDGE AS PRESENTATION 
 
 between our act of apprehension or recipience and that 
 which we receive. The acceptance or rejection of this 
 distinction is so fundamental a point in any theory of con- 
 sciousness that it is not easy to argue about it ; I can 
 only say that without such a distinction I do not see 
 how to describe our experience of reality. If cognition is 
 not the apprehension of an object, how can we know 
 the world ? 
 
 It may be that there is a reasonable answer to this 
 question which I have been unable to find, and that the 
 psychologists of a different school are in the right. I 
 urge only that in any case they have no right to treat 
 the question as irrelevant. If I have not misunderstood 
 them, certain writers l tend to claim a curiously isolated 
 position for their psychology, and an exemption from the 
 duty of answering any question which may be supposed 
 to be put to them by philosophers, even by common- 
 sense philosophers. They hold fast to the doctrine that 
 psychology is a natural science concerned with nothing 
 but its own object of study ; that this object of study 
 consists in a series of conscious processes or states of 
 consciousness, into which no distinction of subject and 
 object need enter; and that it is not their business but 
 the business of philosophy to get from such states to a 
 person and a universe. 
 
 Now this would be very well if such writers would 
 confine themselves to so purely scientific a position as 
 that which is taken, for instance, by the geometry of non- 
 Euclidean space. As I understand it, the student of such 
 a geometry may be quite indifferent to the question 
 
 1 Professor Titchener for instance ? See his Experimental Psychology 
 of the Thought-Processes. 
 
KNOWLEDGE AS PRESENTATION 11 
 
 whether such space is or is not in any way actually 
 existent. That question is really left to the philosopher, 
 and the philosopher is left with a free hand to answer it 
 in the way he finds best. But the psychologists of whom 
 I speak leave the philosopher no such freedom. They 
 claim without any doubt to be writing of what is actual. 
 We need not take the non-Euclidean parallels and found 
 upon them our actual experience of space, but we have 
 to take the self-contained streams of consciousness, with 
 no relation of subject and object within them, and to 
 transform them somehow into a society of real people 
 living in a real world ; knowing it, loving or hating it, 
 and seeking their own ends within it. 
 
 If a science dictates to philosophy in this way, the 
 philosopher must make a counter-claim to some super- 
 vision of the science ; and his first request will naturally 
 be that the object should be examined with which the 
 science professes to start. The question will be whether 
 these streams of self-contained feelings are actual at all, 
 and the burden of proof will be on those who assume 
 them. What is undoubtedly actual is the living being 
 who knows things and seeks ends, even if they are no 
 higher than the ends of a jelly-fish. Can a science, which 
 claims to deal with the actual, venture to start with any 
 description of its object which omits all reference to what 
 is sought and what is known ? My own opinion is that it 
 must not; that, as the thinnest tablet must have two 
 sides, so the most elementary consciousness must still be 
 made up of recipience and response. This may be a 
 mistaken opinion, but I insist that the burden of proof is 
 not on its supporters but on their opponents. Unless 
 reason is shown to the contrary, knowing cannot be taken 
 
12 KNOWLEDGE AS PRESENTATION 
 
 as a self-contained feeling which somehow "claims" to be 
 transcendent. Failing reason to the contrary, it must be 
 taken in the ordinary and familiar way as knowledge of 
 something. 
 
 Certain other writers, who have no difficulty in accept- 
 ing this position so far as concerns intellectual cognition, 
 find a difficulty when they come to sensation. In a 
 sensation, they hold, no distinction can be made between 
 subject and object, between sensing and sensatum, recep- 
 tion and what is received. All exists in an " immediate 
 unity." This opinion is so well established that a special 
 chapter must presently be devoted to it. I will only say 
 here that just the same arguments seem to me to apply 
 to sensation as apply on higher levels ; and that therefore 
 even sensation, elementary as it is, must on my view be 
 still considered as knowledge of an object by a subject, 
 and must involve on the one hand the sensing and on the 
 other hand the sensatum. At present at any rate I shall 
 assume that even on the level of sensation the distinction 
 exists. 
 
 Summary. 
 
 Let us conclude this chapter by returning to the text 
 with which it began. Every moment's experience has 
 two elements within it : I meet with some reality, and in 
 that meeting I feel, I bear, and I act. To meet with 
 reality is knowledge. In knowledge is involved on the 
 one hand that kind of recipient activity which we call 
 apprehension: on the other hand there is involved an 
 object known. To the consideration of this object we 
 must now turn. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 CONTENT AND OBJECT 
 
 The Distinction. 
 
 EVERY name that we pronounce, says Twardowski 1 , 
 has three functions ; it is the sign of an act of apprehen- 
 sion in the speaker ; it names a thing ; and it produces a 
 certain content in the mind of the hearer. Meinong 2 says 
 that speech refers to 3 our object and expresses our content. 
 The distinction between act or event of presentation and 
 object presented has already been dealt with. We have 
 now to examine the distinction between object and content. 
 
 The basis of the distinction is the fact that the object, 
 in appearing to us, seems never to have come to the end 
 of its powers. No matter how much we know of it there 
 is always more to be known. There is no end to the 
 questions which we may ask of it or to the answers that it 
 may give. There is always some further way in which it 
 may exhibit itself; always some more of its character yet 
 to be shown. It is impossible, therefore, that the whole 
 object should ever be exhaustively contained in our con- 
 
 1 Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand, p. 12. 
 
 2 Ueber Gegenstdnde hoherer Ordnung, p. 189. 
 
 3 Bedeutet. 
 
14 CONTENT AND OBJECT 
 
 sciousness. Such of it as is so contained may conveniently 
 be spoken of as the content of our apprehension. 
 
 Object might be said to differ from content as the 
 " subject " of a treatise differs from its " subject-matter." 
 The content is as much as gets into the consciousness ; it 
 is all that we are knowing of the object that we know 1 . 
 The content is the present appearance of reality in our 
 consciousness. We have no reason to assume that the 
 appearance must be purely sensuous 2 , and therefore the 
 content must by no means be identified with the sense- 
 image as such. Such images generally, perhaps always, 
 constitute part of the object's means of appearing, and thus 
 form part of the content ; but the imagery will seldom be 
 the whole of what we are apprehending in the object. 
 
 The content is all of the object that at present appears: 
 it is the present expression of the object's character. As 
 to the relation of the object to the whole of its possible 
 contents, and the question whether it should be called 
 their sum or their law or the link between them or the 
 essence behind them, this is the immense and ordinary 
 problem of the nature of substantial reality, and cannot be 
 dealt with here. We shall follow the ordinary custom of 
 using different expressions at different times ; and shall 
 know that none of them can express the whole truth. 
 
 We must insist that the difficulty in this matter is 
 absolutely nothing else than the universal difficulty of 
 conceiving substance or character or idea, or the general 
 relation of universal to particular. The relation of object 
 to content is not even a special case of the difficulty ; it is 
 
 1 In just the same sense Dr Stout contrasts an object with what he 
 calls a "presentation" (Manual, pp. 58, 59). 
 
 2 See below, section on "Imagery." 
 
CONTENT AND OBJECT 15 
 
 the ordinary case ; one might almost say the whole case. 
 The relation of content to object is the same as the relation 
 that " what I see " in a misty landscape bears to the land- 
 scape as such. One might wish to say, and for many 
 purposes one might conveniently say, that this landscape 
 was the sum-total of all that could ever be seen in it. Yet 
 even this is circular. And it is not exhaustive ; for the 
 landscape is more than can ever be seen ; it is, for instance, 
 a result and exhibition of geological forces, and it plays a 
 part in history, and it is a factor in the minds of men who 
 build houses in the neighbourhood. Therefore we presently 
 hesitate to say that it is the sum of its visual appearances, 
 and we say instead that it appears or expresses itself in 
 the visual appearances. And then come further problems. 
 Yet this relation, of a thing to what I see of it, is the most 
 ordinary of relations. Arid the relation of object to content 
 is nothing more recondite than this. 
 
 Hence there is danger in all accounts of the relation 
 which do make it appear more recondite; in those, for 
 instance, which take the content to be a copy or a symbol 
 of the object. Twardowski says that it is like a painted 
 landscape, which is not a landscape at all but a picture. 
 This seems to open the door to a whole army of difficulties, 
 and to artificial and unnecessary difficulties ; for to have 
 a presentation is a much simpler thing than to make a 
 copy ; it is to see. There is danger even in speaking of 
 one special kind of presentation, namely sense-imagery, as 
 a copy, because the word inevitably suggests a reproduction 
 in a different material. When I remember an object and 
 its image comes up, this in a sense is a reproduction, but 
 there is no " material " to change. It is a reappearance ; 
 the object presents itself in its habit as it lived. 
 
16 CONTENT AND OBJECT 
 
 Any suggestion of a symbolising relation 1 seems still 
 more artificial and unmanageable. How can the one 
 possibly be a symbol of the other, and if it were how 
 should we ever find it out ? Unless " cognition " is 
 apprehension of objects, the conception is useless for 
 philosophy. 
 
 Distinctions of Detail. 
 
 The detailed distinctions between the characteristics of 
 object and content which are given by Twardowski and 
 even by Meinong are often not very acceptable for our 
 account of the matter. Twardowski 2 asserts, for instance, 
 that an object of knowledge need not actually exist, 
 but that the corresponding content of knowledge must 
 evidently do so. For our view, I actually exist, and my 
 act of apprehension actually happens I do actually see. 
 As for the content, it and the whole object must exist 
 in some sense that makes it possible for me to see them, 
 but this need not be "actual" existence; for I can see into 
 non-actual worlds. Now beyond this we do not go. If 
 there were something in my consciousness additional to 
 the object it would presumably be an actually existent 
 
 1 As made, e.g. by Lipps, Bewusstsein und Gegenstdnde, p. 33, " we 
 might say that the content is a symbol of the object ; is a sign of it or 
 represents it." Contrast Mr A. Hoernle, Mind, 1907, p. 86. "I hold 
 it to be manifestly absurd to say that the individual mind, with which 
 psychology is supposed to deal, is conscious of signs only and not of 
 their meaning. On the contrary I regard the consciousness of meaning 
 as primary and fundamental, and the distinction of sign and meaning 
 as a product of reflection." For "consciousness of meaning" I should 
 substitute " consciousness of objects," as being for my purpose less 
 ambiguous. 
 
 2 Inhalt und Gegenstand, p. 30. 
 
CONTENT AND OBJECT 17 
 
 something, but I see no reason for holding that anything 
 is there. So long as I am actually seeing an object there 
 would seem to be enough to keep consciousness going. 
 What I see is not a piece of consciousness, and it need 
 not be existent in order that consciousness may exist. 
 Consciousness is the process of seeing, and it exists so long 
 as I actually see. 
 
 Secondly, according to Twardowski 1 , the object and 
 content have different sorts of qualities. A mountain, for 
 instance, is extended even if it is not an actual mountain ; 
 but the corresponding content is not extended. Witasek 2 
 says similarly that a stone is hard, cold and grey, but that 
 my idea of a stone is not. 
 
 I am not sure what these authors would say about 
 perception, which of course for me has content and object 
 like other knowledge (as in the example of the landscape 
 above). Is the percept of a mountain extended ? or is the 
 percept of a stone grey ? The " spirit of language " would 
 probably hesitate a little, but would have not the least 
 objection to saying that we see the one object as grey 
 and the other as extended. Therefore the content of 
 our consciousness, which means the object in so far as it 
 enters our consciousness, is certainly extended and grey. 
 It would appear that the whole difficulty comes from a sort 
 of " introjection 3 ," from thinking that the contents of con- 
 sciousness at any rate, if not the objects of consciousness, 
 must be things that people carry about in their heads. It 
 
 1 Inhalt und Gegenstand, p. 30. 2 Psychologie, p. 3. 
 
 3 Avenarius, in Viertelj.f. wiss. Ph. 18, p. 123, quoted by Munsterberg, 
 Grundziige der Psychologie, p. 22 Psychology is apt to suppose that the 
 tree which a man sees is somehow in him, perhaps in his brain, "Diese 
 Hineinverlegung des ' Gesehenen ' u.s.w. in den Menschen ist es, welche 
 als Intro jektion bezeichnet wird." 
 
 w. 2 
 
18 CONTENT AND OBJECT 
 
 is so hard to be content with their having eyes in their 
 heads. The spirit of ordinary language feels it unlikely 
 that a percept is a thing outside my body in the ordinary 
 world, and is quite sure that an idea is not. Hence, it 
 feels, these must be things "in my mind" as opposed to "in 
 the world," and hence they cannot be extended or grey. It 
 would perhaps be the easiest remedy to say bluntly that 
 my percept is in the middle of the plain five miles off, and 
 that there are no such things as ideas. Contents and 
 objects alike exist outside my body. All that happens is 
 that / see things. 
 
 The same difficulties, I think, occasion and are occa- 
 sioned by Meinong's claim 1 that a content, unlike an 
 object, must be present and must be psychical. I am not 
 quite sure of the meaning of " psychical," but fear that it is 
 meant to rule out "physical"; which of course in my account 
 must not be ruled out. On the other hand, the statement 
 of both Meinong and Twardowski that various contents 
 may correspond to one object and (in the case of uni- 
 versals) various objects to one content, is perfectly sound. 
 
 I am embarrassed, but I think not rightly embarrassed, 
 by the reflection that the distinction between content and 
 object has been originated and worked out chiefly by the 
 writers I have been criticising, and that they might claim to 
 be allowed to use their own terms in their own way. They 
 might; yet I only criticise because in so far as they agree 
 with me the distinction seems to me so good and valuable. 
 " Contents " may be admirable tools if we can keep them 
 free from the taint of the old " ideas," and can remember 
 that the things which enter the mind, and which therefore 
 are partly contained in our mind, are the same things that 
 exist outside our body in the ordinary physical world. 
 1 Gegenstdnde hoherer Ordnung, p. 185. 
 
CONTENT AND OBJECT 19 
 
 The Object of Attention. 
 
 Should we say that it is the object or the content 
 that is presented or apprehended ? Twardowski 1 answers 
 the question by saying that we have a double use of 
 words, comparable to the way in which we speak some- 
 times of a painted landscape and sometimes of a painted 
 picture. I also should say that the answer depends on our 
 use of words, but my comparison would be very different. 
 For me the question is the same as if we should ask 
 whether we were more properly said to see a landscape or 
 to see as much as we did see of the landscape. 
 
 A similar question, " Is it the object or the content to 
 which we attend ? " is interesting because the inquiry 
 brings out an ambiguity in the ordinary conception of 
 attending "to" anything. Mr Prichard 2 says that we 
 attend not to a mental " presentation " but to a physical 
 thing; which is perfectly true but does not answer my 
 particular question, since for me the content is only the 
 physical thing with the limits of my consciousness im- 
 posed. The stream of my endeavour, set towards that 
 thing, is gradually widening those limits of consciousness, 
 and making the content more adequate to the object. 
 Shall we say that I "attend'' to what I see within the 
 limits or to the seen object which is not bounded by them ? 
 The usage is not fixed, but if a choice is to be made it 
 seems preferable to take the second alternative. We are 
 usually interested not so much in what we can see as in 
 what we cannot yet quite see. 
 
 1 Op. dt. pp. 14, 15. 
 
 2 "The Psychologists' Treatment of Knowledge," Mind, 1907, p. 42. 
 
 22 
 
20 CONTENT AND OBJECT 
 
 Content and Object of Introspection. 
 
 It may be urged that at least in introspection and for 
 the general purposes of psychology we attend to the 
 contents of our apprehension, as such. In a sense this is 
 true, for we make the content of a given act of apprehen- 
 sion into the object of another act. Interest and attention 
 are engaged with the question not " What was the fact ? 
 what was there ? " but" What did I apprehend ? " W T e 
 deliberately stereotype the former limits in order to find 
 what we can within them, since our interest lies in finding 
 out what exactly managed to get in. This account accords 
 with Dr Ward's statement that psychology has for its 
 object the whole universe, but the universe as presented to 
 the individual 1 ; and it meets, I think, the objection brought 
 by Mr Prichard that "as presented" must mean "as known," 
 and that no science can treat of things in any other way 2 . 
 Generally speaking, psychology is the only science which, 
 instead of expanding the content of a piece of knowledge, 
 stereotypes its limits because it is interested in their shape. 
 
 Introspection has for its object the content of another 
 apprehension, but we have no reason at all to say that its 
 own content and object coincide 3 . The untruth of this is 
 
 1 Article on "Psychology," Ency. Brit. 
 
 2 Op. cit. t Mind, 1907, p. 36. 
 
 3 Witasek seems to assert this : " Nur dass bei den Wahrnehmungsvor- 
 stellungen von Psychischem der Inhalt mit dem Gegenstande zusammen- 
 fallt" ("Zur psychologischen Analyse der asthetischen Einfiihlung," 
 Z. f. Psych., 1901). Of course if content and object are distinguished 
 only because one is supposed to be in the knower and the other outside 
 him, it is fairly natural to expect that an "inner" object will coincide 
 with its content. Yet how can even such an object remain within me 
 when its moment has passed ? Will it not pass out into the world of my 
 past history ? and so be as much divided from its content as ever. I do 
 not mean to accuse Witasek of these confusions. 
 
CONTENT AND OBJECT 21 
 
 seen at once if we reflect that introspection, like any other 
 investigation, is usually a process of gradual discovery. 
 Only after careful examination can we discover all the 
 overtones in the sound heard a moment ago, or all the 
 links in the chain of association which has led us to an 
 unexpected subject of thought. Only gradually, that is, 
 does the content become more adequate to the object, 
 which implies that at first at any rate the two were far 
 from coinciding. However we fix oar limits, what is 
 within them can develop internally. 
 
 The Limits of Objects. 
 
 We can no more divide the known world into separate 
 objects, except with the help of convention in places, than 
 we can divide the physical world into separate things. In 
 one sense the whole universe is the object in every piece 
 of knowledge ; this is the case at least wherever it is true 
 that to know a bit of the world thoroughly would be to 
 know the whole. We endeavour to expand the content of 
 our cognition until it includes the whole of the object that 
 we wish to know. If this is anything short of the whole 
 universe it will be only because our special interest sets 
 narrower limits to it. We may say that the object is 
 determined by the question we ask, and that the content 
 consists of the answer so far as we know it. If, as is 
 common, we are not quite sure what we want to find out, 
 or if a presentation has come to us apart from any 
 question asked, the limits of the object will so far be 
 undetermined. 
 
22 CONTENT AND OBJECT 
 
 The Parallel Case of Feeling. 
 
 At no moment, we said, do we find in the presentation- 
 continuum all that might be there. When attention is 
 turned in the direction of any content, that content is 
 ready at once to grow and to set itself out in more various 
 detail and to deepen its relations to everything around. 
 The content expands and becomes more adequate to the 
 object. 
 
 Now as it is with the presentation-continuum, so is it 
 with the continuum of desire. The disposition, or tendency, 
 or want, or need, which speaks in a desire, has never in that 
 desire said all that it has to say. No sooner does it gain 
 control over our behaviour than it proceeds to widen and 
 deepen its expression and to write itself out in detail. 
 (This, and not a growth in mere vividness or intensity, is 
 the great change that supervenes when a presentation 
 gains attention or a disposition gains control.) The process 
 may be hindered by the resistance of our materials or of 
 our general environment, just as the development of 
 knowledge may be hindered by the stiffness and narrow- 
 ness of our own intelligence ; but otherwise this part of 
 our self expands itself in our life and works itself out to 
 adequate expression and fulfilment. 
 
 As for the conception of a disposition and its relation 
 to desires, it is exactly as difficult as that of the relation of 
 an object to its appearances, and no more so. The dis- 
 position, like the object, is a substance which appears, or 
 a character which expresses itself. In one, as in the other, 
 the substance is inexhaustible. On the one side, even 
 when the object of our apprehension is a thing so limited 
 
CONTENT AND OBJECT 23 
 
 and definite as is a past content of knowledge, even then 
 our content never really becomes adequate to its object, 
 since there is always more that might be found out about 
 it. On the other side, even when the disposition in action 
 is so simple as is that which persists in carrying out a past 
 resolution, even then no actual conation can ever express 
 that disposition completely, for as its materials change it 
 can take an infinite number of different forms. In know- 
 ledge we can never come to an end of the smallest part of 
 the universe ; in feeling and endeavour we can never come 
 to the end of even the smallest part of ourselves. 
 
 The Place of Truth and of Belief. 
 
 It only remains to add that just as the sphere of 
 conation is the home both of resolution and irresolution 
 and of right and wrong, so the sphere of contents is the 
 home both of belief and of truth. 
 
 The second claim will probably be readily admitted, 
 for if anything is to be true or false it must surely be the 
 contents of our apprehension. Our powers of apprehension 
 are strong or weak, our acts of apprehension are intelligent 
 or unintelligent, our objects are real or unreal, in one 
 sense or another of those words, and our contents are 
 false or true. 
 
 The claim that belief also is a matter of content seems 
 at first sight much more difficult to grant, and nearly 
 every realist writer has in fact ignored it, asserting that 
 belief and the strength of belief are qualities not of the 
 content known but of the act by which we know 1 . Idealist 
 
 1 E.g. Meinong, and perhaps Stout, though he speaks of "attitude" 
 instead of " act." See The Groundwork of Psychology, p. 3. 
 
24 CONTENT AND OBJECT 
 
 writers have usually granted that the modality of a 
 judgment is a matter of content, but have held that the 
 psychological variation in degree of belief, the flickering 
 of belief as it were, is a variation not in content but in 
 act. Nevertheless it would seem that in both cases the 
 difference lies primarily in the content. In the first case 
 that content is more or less limited, in the second it is 
 more or less unsteady : and in neither case have we any 
 choice in the matter: the content presents itself and 
 we apprehend. Consider the following pairs of contrasts, 
 which include both kinds of variation (modality and 
 " flickering ") : " Your opinion of his character is clear 
 and firm ; mine is obscure and wavering." " You believe 
 that he is certainly innocent, but I am not yet fully 
 persuaded ; I can see only that he may possibly be so." 
 " You believe his story, but I cannot be sure myself that 
 it is not a feat of imagination." " That explanation which 
 for you is a certainty seems doubtful to me." " So far as 
 one can see, he has behaved well ; in that I agree with 
 you ; but I urge that we cannot yet see all." These 
 appear to be typical instances of belief and doubt, and 
 I cannot but consider that in each case the contents 
 are contrasted. In the first example the difference of 
 clearness would certainly be admitted to lie in the con- 
 tents, and there seems no sufficient reason for putting the 
 difference of steadiness elsewhere. In the second example, 
 one witness apprehends " that the man is innocent," the 
 other only " that he may be innocent." In the third and 
 fourth, the doubter sees a narrative clearly before him, but 
 cannot yet see whether its connections unite it to the 
 world of fact or to that of imagination ; in this respect his 
 content of apprehension is as yet undetermined. In the 
 
CONTENT AND OBJECT 25 
 
 fifth example, the evidence which to one man appears to 
 be a proof seems to the other to be less than a proof. 
 " The appearance is different " ; what is this but saying 
 that the content is different? 
 
 Acts of apprehension with different contents are in so 
 far unquestionably different acts, therefore I do not mean 
 to urge that in doubt and belief the acts are not different. 
 I urge only that the difference lies primarily in the 
 contents. The activity of every apprehension is (as I hold) 
 identical in its peculiar nature as being an activity of 
 reception only, and just this peculiar nature seems to 
 exclude that variation in degree which is supposed to 
 belong to belief. We cannot more or less receive except 
 in the sense that we can receive more or less ; and we 
 cannot apprehend differently except so far as what we 
 apprehend is different. Thus, it seems to me, the differ- 
 ence between doubt and belief can involve a difference in 
 act only if it rests on a difference of content. 
 
 We shall return to this subject again, and shall be 
 occupied with it at intervals until almost the end of the 
 book. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. I 
 
 THERE are apparently at least three ways in which an 
 object can be apprehended. It can be sensed, or imaged, 
 or, in the broadest sense of the word, it can be thought. 
 The relation which these methods bear to one another is 
 by no means a simple one. 
 
 There seems no doubt, to begin with, that in all these 
 departments the object may be the same. Some objects, 
 it is true, can be presented only in thought and not in 
 sense, but if an object can be presented in sense it can 
 always be presented in thought and can often be imaged. 
 
 Secondly, it seems that in these different fields the 
 object is differently presented, that the content differs. 
 It differs considerably if we compare sense with the most 
 advanced thought. As regards sense and sense-imagery, 
 there is always, in the normal case, a difference between 
 the contexts of their contents, and usually some internal 
 difference as well. Few people have visual images as full 
 or as steady as their visual sensations, and in nearly all 
 cases there is a difference in their position and intercon- 
 nection 1 . Mr Hoernle indeed says 2 that the difference 
 
 1 I neglect for simplicity's sake the important point that most images 
 correspond not to mere sensations but to percepts. 
 
 2 " Image, Idea, and Meaning," in Mind, 1907, p. 92. 
 
THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. I 27 
 
 between sensation and image is " a difference of mode, 
 not a difference of content," but I think he only 
 means to deny that the object (in my language) is 
 different. 
 
 Thirdly, it is usual to say that the act is different 
 in these different cases. Mr Prichard 1 for instance says, 
 " The act of perceiving is one thing and the act of con- 
 ceiving is another"; and Witasek 2 even declares that 
 images and sensations differ not in content but in act. 
 This position is very difficult to maintain. It is usually 
 supposed that we confuse sensation and image when their 
 contents become very much alike, and this should be im- 
 possible if the acts differed independently of the contents. 
 
 A serious objection to the whole theory that sensation 
 of thought and imagery differ in act seems at first sight 
 to arise from the fact that conjunction in one field may 
 produce association in another. It is fairly intelligible (or 
 so we are apt to consider) that to think first of A and then 
 of B should establish a habit of thought-transition, and a 
 tendency to think again of B after we have thought of A. 
 But if to sense is one action and to image is another, then 
 why, when only the sensation of A has been followed by 
 the sensation of B, should we have the slightest tendency 
 to image B after imaging A ? And if thinking is a third 
 kind of action distinct from the others, why should linked 
 sensations leave behind them a tendency towards the 
 linking of thoughts, as seems to happen in the case 
 where we can reproduce the argument of a speech that 
 we have heard although we have forgotten the words that 
 were used ? 
 
 1 "The Psychologists' Treatment of Knowledge," Mind, 1907, p. 51. 
 
 2 Psychologic, p. 75. 
 
28 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. I 
 
 As a matter of fact this objection proves too much. 
 It must be invalid if it proves that the action involved is 
 identical whether we apprehend in sense or imagery or 
 thought ; for we have already admitted that the contents 
 apprehended are different in these three fields, and there- 
 fore the acts of apprehending them must in so far be 
 different in character. What then is the flaw in the 
 objection ? In our present uncertainty as to the details 
 of association, a believer in absolute differences between 
 the acts in question might make a very fair case by simply 
 denying the alleged transference of connections from sensa- 
 tion to imagery or from sensation to thought. It is indeed 
 difficult to produce any clear proof of such transference. 
 One is naturally tempted to instance the reproduction of 
 a heard tune in auditory imagery, but our opponent is 
 entitled to answer that such reproductions as often as not 
 take place in an altered key, with every note changed, 
 so that the habit-tendency in force cannot possibly be one 
 which links the apprehensions of separate sounds. That 
 is, we have no transference here of sensation-links into 
 the field of images. The links which really hold must be 
 those which bind together our apprehensions of the shapes 
 of successive phrases. Now apprehension is a matter 
 neither of sensing nor of imaging, seeing that the shape 
 of a phrase is neither a sensum nor an image, but an 
 " object of higher order." The act in which we apprehend 
 it may easily remain identical even though the individual 
 sensations be changed and even though images be sub- 
 stituted for sensations. The habit-connections hold, our 
 opponent may therefore urge, not first between apprehen- 
 sions of sensa and then between apprehensions of images, 
 but between unaltering apprehensions of objects of thought. 
 
THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. I 29 
 
 Hence, he may say, there is no evidence here for the iden- 
 tity in any respect of the act of apprehending sensa with 
 the act of apprehending images. With our other example 
 of reproducing the argument of a speech it is easy for him 
 to deal in the same way. For we certainly could not repro- 
 duce the argument unless we understood it at the time of 
 hearing the speech, and if we admit that we did understand 
 it we are at once provided, as in the case of the tune, with 
 a series of thought-apprehensions which need suffer no 
 change when the individual sentences are altered. Not the 
 series of sensations but the series of thoughts leaves behind 
 it the tendency to repetition of that series of thoughts. 
 
 In these cases our opponents explanation seems irre- 
 futable, yet I am not convinced that a connection between 
 mere sensations cannot in any case give rise to a connec- 
 tion between mere images. The most satisfactory theory 
 in all respects seems to me to be the following : that 
 the activity of apprehension does differ in sensation and 
 imagery and thought, but only because and in so far as 
 the content apprehended is different. If this is true, then 
 a sense-connection may pass over into an image-connection 
 just in so far as the content (the quality of a sound for 
 instance) can remain unchanged. The bare sense-connec- 
 tion could hardly give rise to a connection of thoughts, 
 because it is impossible that sense and thought should 
 have the same content. This appears to me to coincide 
 with the most probable account of the phenomena of 
 association so far as they are at present known, and to be 
 also the simplest a priori view. Knowledge will then 
 be apprehension, simple reception, throughout, and will 
 vary only in so far as there is variation in that which is 
 received. 
 
30 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. I 
 
 As a matter of language, I prefer to speak in this 
 connection not directly of a difference of act as between 
 the different ways of apprehending, but of a difference of 
 level or field. 
 
 Examination of Certain Levels. 
 
 Taking our three "levels" without further examination 
 to be those of sensation and sense-imagery and of what in 
 the widest and vaguest sense we call thought (of course 
 this includes far more than one " level " if we proceed to 
 count them), we will spend some time in examining 
 various important points in connection with each of the 
 three. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 
 A. SENSATION. 
 
 ONE of the most interesting questions which can be 
 raised with regard to the sense-level is this : if in sensation 
 as in other forms of cognition a real object is presented to 
 us, what is that object here ? 
 
 The question is subtle as well as interesting, and the 
 result of considering it has often been that the existence 
 of any such object has been denied. Sensation has been 
 removed from the line of true presentation, in my sense 
 of the word, and classed as a mere modification of conscious- 
 ness, which we might use to help us in obtaining information 
 about the real world, but which, as it stood, supplied us 
 with no such information. This opinion has been so 
 strongly supported and is so attractive in many ways, 
 that a special chapter 1 must presently be devoted to its 
 examination ; at present I shall refrain from controversy, 
 and only set forth my own opposite view with as much 
 plausibility as I can. 
 
 We may conveniently divide our subject into three 
 parts. In the first place, a sensation may fall in the 
 
 1 Chap. vi. 
 
32 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 
 
 margin of our consciousness and remain there, forgotten 
 as soon as it ceases, and never used in any purposeful 
 exploration of reality. Secondly, it may be used in the 
 course of such an exploration ; in an examination of that 
 physical world which contains our own body and other 
 bodies outside it. Thirdly, for certain special purposes 
 we investigate not so much that physical world itself as 
 what may be called its ways of behaviour with regard to 
 sense ; it is these investigations which supply us with the 
 geometry of notes and colours, and with the science, of 
 music as distinct from the physics of sound. Assuming 
 that in all these divisions a real object is presented to us 
 in the sensation, we have to remember one warning that 
 there will be no profit in any attempt of theory to confine 
 that object to what enters in the content of the sensation. 
 In our original distinction between content and object, for 
 all presentation alike, the object was explicitly not limited 
 by that portion of itself which at the moment had entered 
 our consciousness. In fact it was said that the content 
 could scarcely be conceived as ever being adequate to the 
 object, because we could never grasp in one act of appre- 
 hension the inexhaustible reality of a real thing. In no 
 presentation, sensational or otherwise, can an object enter 
 whole. 
 
 a. Marginal Sensations. 
 
 It is in this first division of the subject that the 
 strongest reasons seem to show themselves for removing 
 sensation from the class of reality-presentations altogether. 
 That which enters in a marginal sensation seems to be so 
 small and unimportant that it is hard to give it the title 
 
THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 33 
 
 of a real object. On the other hand, we have no right 
 to regard the object entering consciousness as if it were 
 limited by that content which is all that has yet entered. 
 An object is not bound to be small or insignificant because 
 these qualities characterise our knowledge of it. 
 
 We must remind ourselves with some care of what 
 exactly was held to determine the boundaries of an 
 object of knowledge. We said, it may be remembered, 
 that in one sense the whole universe might be naturally 
 said to present itself in every presentation, and that, if 
 the object's limits were set anywhere short of this, the 
 fact must be due to the narrow and definite range of our 
 interest. My object of study that about which I am 
 gradually finding out is said to be King Arthur's death 
 and not the universe as a whole, only because my interest 
 at present is bounded by King Arthur's death. 
 
 Now this leads to a peculiar result in the case where 
 the content has aroused no interest at all. For in this 
 case the limiting factor disappears. The object presenting 
 itself has no other title than reality as a whole. In 
 exhaustive philosophical inquiry at one extreme, and in a 
 marginal sensation at the other, this unlimited universe is 
 the object which presents itself. Width of interest and 
 lack of interest will have the same result 1 . 
 
 In marginal sensation then, what presents itself can 
 only be said to be the universe as a whole. The content 
 of consciousness is so small and narrow, the speech made 
 is so short, that the object is scarcely specified or defined 
 
 1 Compare the way in which the perception of spatial volume may 
 be based either on abundance and variety of positional signs or on 
 their absence ; the latter being the case with mist, or darkness, or a 
 snowdrift. 
 
 w. 3 
 
34 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 
 
 at all. Reality has entered my life, but has said scarcely 
 anything. It has not shown itself yet as a quality or a 
 relation or a thing. It has only flashed or resounded. 
 It has not declared itself as the property of blueness, but 
 it has been blue to rne, has "blued at me." If I will attend 
 it is ready to say more. 
 
 I fear that this largeness of the object in the smallest 
 of our experiences may seem paradoxical enough, and 
 yet I believe that the treatment is right. As for the 
 paradox, it can be matched on the conative side of 
 consciousness. In all desire and action it is true to 
 say that I as a whole am acting, but very often we 
 can specify the universe in me which is particularly 
 concerned ; I desire one thing as a member of a college, 
 one as a private person, I act in a judicial capacity or a 
 business capacity, the teacher or the student in me is 
 interested. Only at the two extremes I cannot thus 
 particularise myself. In a high and complete act of will 
 I "act with my whole heart," I "realise myself"; this is 
 above particularisation. In the mere throb of feeling, in 
 the indefinite emotion, I am below it. I may be extremely 
 unhappy without feeling clearly what part of me it is that 
 has cause to complain. The thwarted disposition has 
 spoken, but too vaguely to distinguish itself from the rest 
 of me. I say that "I" am unhappy. The feeling expresses 
 me, but defines no minor self in me. And this seems to 
 be the case not only with actually ignorant feeling but 
 with all " marginal " feeling. A disposition cannot define 
 itself in consciousness until it can so get control of 
 consciousness as to express itself in desire. Lacking 
 attention, then, or lacking control, neither an object 
 nor a disposition can tell its name ; they must appear 
 
THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 35 
 
 merely as reality or as myself. Yet, undefined and 
 unnamed, both have entered consciousness and played 
 a part in life. 
 
 Marginal sensation, we conclude, is of all our presenta- 
 tions the one which has the smallest content. It is our 
 first and briefest and obscurest meeting with the reality 
 which is not ourselves. Yet though the content is the 
 smallest possible, the object through lack of determination 
 is the largest ; that which presents itself can only be 
 described as the universe. 
 
 6. The ordinary use of Sensations. 
 
 The acuteness of paradox is softened when we turn to 
 those sensations which form part of our ordinary focalised 
 percepts. For here the object is certainly smaller, being 
 limited by the definite interest of the perception ; and the 
 content is possibly larger ; at any rate if it is true that a 
 sensation becomes more vivid or intense on being brought 
 out of the margin of consciousness. The additional per- 
 ceptual content of course cannot be included in the content 
 of the sensation as such. 
 
 The object is no longer merely the universe at large, 
 but what then is it ? As elsewhere, it is whatever further 
 investigation shows it to be,and such investigation normally 
 reveals certain things in a certain situation in the physical 
 world. Sensation is our first and narrowest apprehension 
 of these. My sensations are elements in the content 
 through which a coloured signal lamp, a noisy train, and a 
 bitter evening wind reveal themselves to me. These, I 
 might say, are the objects which present themselves ; and 
 the statement would be true and would cover the largest 
 
 32 
 
36 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 
 
 part of the truth. Yet there is more to be said. For* 
 though it is these objects that chiefly interest me, yet by 
 themselves they cannot supply the content of my sensa- 
 tional experience. Not the lamp and the wind alone and 
 unrelated express themselves in the green radiance and the 
 freezing touch, but the lamp and the wind in relation to 
 my human body, having its nervous system in working 
 order. 
 
 We recognise readily this second factor in the object 
 presented whenever our sensations are found to differ 
 from those of the companion who stands besides us. The 
 sensation of cold for me is sharper than for him, because 
 I have sat by the waiting-room fire whilst he has walked 
 briskly across the fields. The green which I see is 
 different from his because of a defect in my sight; the 
 local signature in the sensations, moreover, is obviously 
 expressive as much of my body's position as of that of the 
 lamp. We recognise the same fact wherever bodily effort 
 is closely bound up with the sensation ; what we feel as we 
 struggle homewards is obviously not simply the wind but 
 the pressure of the wind against our bodies. I am nearly 
 always interested in, and attentive to, the outward objects 
 alone, so that these pre-eminently are revealed to me ; yet 
 this is not always so. If an instrument is passed over my 
 skin I say that I feel the instrument, but if it presently 
 touches an open wound I am likely to say instead that I 
 feel the wound. What I really feel throughout is of 
 course the contact between the instrument and my body > 
 apprehended first through touch and then through pain. 
 What is presented to me in sensation is always a section 
 of the physical world in which my body is included; 
 but though the outward objects are speedily perceived as 
 
THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 37 
 
 well as sensed, it may be long before my body presents 
 itself in anything beyond the sensation. It is sensed but 
 not recognised 1 . 
 
 c. The peculiar use of Sensations. 
 
 This final case is comparatively easy to deal with. 
 Our interest is narrowly bounded, and cuts off the 
 sensational expression from the rest of the situation which 
 thus expresses itself, so that we go on to construct a 
 science of notes or colours instead of a science of musical 
 instruments or of physical optics. In this respect our 
 procedure is of the same kind as that of mathematics, 
 which cuts off shapes and numbers from the actual objects 
 to which they belong. The object presented will now be 
 not a physical situation but only a note or a colour. Here 
 at any rate the content of sensation might be thought to 
 exhaust its object, yet of course this does not happen even 
 here, for sensation cannot tell even so much as that the 
 tint it apprehends has a special place in a colour-scale. 
 However definitely we stereotype the limits of a content 
 in order to make that content the object of a new act 
 of apprehension, still under that new apprehension the 
 object will develop internally, and we shall know far 
 more of it than we did. Paradoxical though it may 
 seem, even when an object is bounded by a presented 
 content because our interest is thus bounded, even then 
 there is indefinitely more in the object than in the content. 
 The content of the sensation, let us say, was a single note. 
 
 1 That is, my perception abstracts, expanding one part only of the 
 content of sense. The object of perception usually excludes the relation 
 of the external thing to my body, though the object of sensation is bound 
 to include it. Only part of the sense object, therefore, is usually allowed 
 to develop itself as an object of elementary thought. 
 
38 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 
 
 The object also in this case is the same note, but it 
 contains a hundred features that sense could never detect: 
 it is the note of a violin, it is the note G, it is the highest 
 note and the climax of its phrase, it is beautifully pro- 
 duced. All this belongs to the object of sense, yet could 
 not enter the content of sense. Even though a content 
 covers its object it cannot exhaust it. 
 
 B. IMAGES. 
 
 The problem of images is a curious and difficult one 
 for psychology. How comes it that we can literally see 
 an object that is absent, unhindered by the sight of what 
 is present ? How can I hear the wind on a still day, in a 
 manner that prevents it from mingling with the sound of 
 the brook at my feet ? This kind of cognition is no 
 higher than sense with regard to the contents that it can 
 apprehend, yet it is superior in being able to dispense 
 with the material presence. The connection with sense 
 is certainly very close, and we speak of an image without 
 hesitation sometimes as the revival of sensation, yet the 
 connection is a mystery in the end. 
 
 But the most important question for my present 
 purpose is that of the relation of imagery not to sense 
 but to thought ; and this question at present is one of the 
 most controversial in the whole psychological field. The 
 absence of experimental training is a great disadvantage 
 to any one who presumes to enter such a dispute, and 
 forms to some extent a disqualification of the value of his 
 
THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 39 
 
 opinion ; yet I am unable to avoid holding an opinion on 
 the matter, and a strong one. If psychology is to be con- 
 sistent either with philosophy or with common sense, it is 
 to my mind bound to recognise that there is a cognition 
 which goes far beyond imagery. I can see no way of 
 describing the actual state of human knowledge unless 
 we admit that our mind can apprehend an infinite number 
 of objects which could never be contained in sensation and 
 which therefore could never be contained in sense-images. 
 I can conceive no satisfactory answer to Dr Stout's 
 admirable demonstration in Analytic Psychology^ of the 
 extent to which our thought outruns our power of 
 imaging, but some recent experiments have added further 
 evidence. In those conducted by Dr Btihler 2 , for instance, 
 his subjects were sometimes asked to state from memory 
 the number of statues on a certain bridge, or the number 
 of colours or figures in a picture. It was found some- 
 times that the image of the bridge or the picture preceded 
 and suggested the answer, and sometimes that it followed 
 the apprehension of what the number was. The figures 
 seen in the image were sometimes counted, but often the 
 number-knowledge was quite independent of this. More 
 complicated questions, demanding difficult thought on 
 psychological matters, gave even more striking results. 
 Biihler asserts definitely his own conclusion, that thought 
 goes beyond any images which may be present, and cannot 
 be reduced to them or to any other lower form of expe- 
 rience. We cannot even reduce it to consciousness of 
 ability to image, for the subject usually knows what it is 
 that he could image. 
 
 1 Vol. i., ch. 4. 
 
 2 Arch.f. ges. Psych. 9 and 12, 1907-8. 
 
40 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 
 
 Conclusions like enough to Buhler's to serve all my 
 purposes are drawn from their own experiments by 
 J. Orth 1 and by N. Ach 2 . " We find contents of great 
 complexity," says Dr Ach, " where we are conscious of 
 the manifold inter-relations amongst the parts, and where 
 yet these parts receive no adequate representation in 
 speech, and perhaps are not capable of being thus 
 represented.... Sometimes we have a lightning-like vision 
 of a content which would require several sentences to 
 express it, and which therefore cannot possibly, on account 
 of its brief duration, be expressed in words. Yet the sense 
 may be given unambiguously, and the remembrance may 
 be clear and definite, without any sensory qualities being 
 discernible in the mental process 3 ." 
 
 The experiments of Herr Marbe, earlier than any of 
 these, seem to me to lead irresistibly to the same result, 
 though that author does not draw such a conclusion 
 himself 4 . In the course of making a good many judg- 
 ments and of understanding, or rejecting as meaningless, 
 propositions presented to them, his subjects attested the 
 presence of images and feelings of miscellaneous kinds, 
 but they found no image or feeling whose presence dis- 
 tinguished understanding from non-understanding, or 
 judgment from what was not judgment at all. Sometimes 
 the subject describes his state of consciousness as " know- 
 ledge that the given combination of words was meaningless 
 and of the same sort as the meaningless combinations 
 which had been given before," and denies that in all this 
 
 1 Gefiihl und Bewusstseinslage, 1903. 
 
 2 Ueber die Willenstdtigkeit und das Denken, 1905. 
 
 3 Op. cit. p. 215. 
 
 4 Experimentell-psychologische Untersuchungen iiber das Urteil, 1901. 
 
THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 41 
 
 any image was present except the word "dasselbe" (p. 86). 
 Sometimes all images are denied: the subject asserts that 
 his judgment was made "rein reflektorisch " : which 
 Marbe reproduces in a very misleading way as " rein asso- 
 ciativ " (p. 20). His own expressed conclusion seems an odd 
 one (p. 91). " We understand a judgment when we know 
 with what objects it is meant to agree." " Knowledge is 
 never given in consciousness.... To know anything means 
 to be able to make right judgments about it." " Hence 
 to understand a judgment means to be capable of making 
 certain other judgments." If this means, as it seems to 
 mean, that what is in consciousness is the same whether 
 we understand a proposition or do not understand it (or, 
 in other experiments, whether we consider it to be true 
 or to be false), the assertion appears to me to be absurd. 
 What can consciousness be if judging and understanding 
 do not come into it ? The difficulty in Marbe's mind, as 
 in that of other writers, seems to be, How can any 
 presentation come into consciousness except as an image ? 
 I conceive that the answer is simply, This is what 
 thought is for. Thought experience, as Btihler main- 
 tains, is a matter of fact, and it cannot be reduced to 
 what is less than thought-experience. 
 
 This opinion has remained with me stubbornly even 
 after reading Professor Titchener's recent criticism of the 
 whole theory 1 . One feels exceedingly diffident in the 
 presence of such learning as Professor Titchener's, and an 
 experimental equipment so fine as his, and yet I cannot 
 see how his account of cognition can possibly work. 
 Beyond images, he says. "I can bear witness both to 
 
 1 Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes, 1909. 
 
42 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 
 
 kinaesthesis and to cortical set, but between these extremes 
 I find nothing at all 1 ." It may be valuable for us to 
 remember the possibility of extra-conscious factors such 
 as cortical arrangements. Nevertheless I cannot get 
 beyond this position : that if nothing could enter a con- 
 sciousness except sensations and images, the mind thus 
 conscious could be debarred from knowing any more than 
 one thousandth part of what human beings do know. 
 
 I am additionally hampered by what seems to me an 
 ambiguity in Professor Titchener's own expressions. On 
 page 15 he asserts " What is abstract and general (in a 
 so-called abstract idea) is not the idea, the process in con- 
 sciousness, but the logical meaning of which that process 
 is the vehicle." If I understand this rightly I thoroughly 
 agree with it, and I should take it to imply that the 
 " logical meaning " not only of an abstract idea but of the 
 ordinary idea was something other than a process in 
 consciousness: certainly something other than an image. 
 But on page 175 he says, "An idea means another idea, 
 is psychologically the meaning of that other idea, if it is 
 that idea's context. And I understand by context simply 
 the mental process or complex of mental processes which 
 accrues to the original idea through the situation in which 
 the organism finds itself." Psychological meaning is there- 
 fore apparently different from logical meaning. Here 
 again, if the contextual processes which form the psycho- 
 logical meaning consist in apprehension of that real object, 
 concrete or abstract, which forms the logical meaning, I 
 could accept the doctrine. But the author goes on to give 
 descriptions which seem inconsistent not only with this 
 
 1 P. 188. 
 
THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 43 
 
 reading of his view but with one another. " The meaning 
 of the printed page may now consist in the auditory- 
 kinaesthetic accompaniment of internal speech." " There 
 would... be nothing surprising... in the discovery that, for 
 minds of a certain constitution, all conscious meaning is 
 carried either by total kinaesthetic attitude or by words." 
 " As a matter of fact, meaning is carried by all sorts of 
 sensational and imaginal processes." "We should probably 
 find that... any mental process may possibly be the mean- 
 ing of any other 1 ." I can neither put these statements 
 together nor yet understand how on any reading they can 
 provide for our actual knowledge of the world. 
 
 From his protests against the "psychology of reflec- 
 tion," and against the interference of philosophical or 
 epistemological considerations in psychology, I have now 
 and then been inclined to think that Professor Titchener 
 considers this last argument an illegitimate one. I cannot 
 so consider it, nor can I get over the difficulty it puts in 
 the way of a purely sensational psychology. On the other 
 hand, certain of Professor Titchener's objections from the 
 side of introspection seem to me to suggest an unconscious 
 begging of the question. " It may very well be true," he 
 says, " that the thought of diamonds was there before the 
 sound of the word," and that " you know what you want 
 to say" in conversation before the words themselves 
 appear. But what is a thought-of ? and what is a know- 
 ing 2 ? These questions, on the non-sensationalist hypo- 
 thesis, of course cannot be answered by any analysis of 
 the process into a complex of images : it seems probable 
 that they could never be answered except by a description 
 
 1 pp. 177, 178. Italics mine. 2 p. 152. 
 
44 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 
 
 involving constant reference to the object known, as it 
 enters more or less fully and more or less vividly, with 
 more or less complication of associates, into the content 
 of consciousness. But it is just this reference to the 
 object that Professor Titchener rules out 1 . 
 
 Much of course remains to be done in the discovery of 
 the details of non-sensational cognition. But for my 
 purpose, and I should say for the purpose of any theory 
 of knowledge, its existence must be assumed. That is, 
 I shall assume that whether or not thought is always 
 accompanied by imagery it is by no means bounded by 
 imagery ; and that the mind is capable of apprehending 
 directly not only sensuous reality but any reality whatever. 
 
 C. THOUGHT. 
 
 Let us then admit the existence of a third level of 
 apprehension, or rather of an indefinite number of levels, 
 upon which we may meet with all those objects of know- 
 ledge which cannot enter in sense or sense-imagery. For 
 want of a better general title we must bring all these 
 levels under the name of thought. It is in these regions 
 that we are able to apprehend all " objects of higher order" 
 shape and position, melody and rhythm, likeness and 
 difference. We find here that meaning or quality in 
 things which is presented to the artist's mental vision, 
 and which by his art he tries to make plain to ours. Here 
 we find invented objects and remembered objects, so far 
 
 1 Op. cit. pp. 145-152. 
 
THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 45 
 
 as they go beyond imagery. On these levels, if anywhere, 
 we apprehend our own feelings, activities and dispositions, 
 and those of others. On these levels we can apprehend 
 not only " objects " in the narrower sense but also " objec- 
 tives" : those "facts" of which the apprehension constitutes 
 both judgment and the cognitive element in assumption. 
 Here we can show forth those connections and identities 
 in things in the showing of which all argument consists. 
 Here, finally, we have that complete grasp of a whole 
 in its parts which sets us above the need of discursive 
 argument. 
 
 For all these levels I intend to go on using the meta- 
 phor of sight and the terms " present " and " apprehend." 
 (I use the latter, as was said at the beginning, simply as 
 the correlative of the former, and not in any sense connected 
 more closely with its etymology.) To my mind they 
 describe the facts better than any other terms could do. 
 Judgment, for instance, must come under the general head 
 of apprehension, even if we reserve the name for the 
 apprehension of objects of a particular sort. 
 
 Certain Important Presentations. 
 
 In our miscellaneous list of thought-presentations 
 three points need particular mention on account of their 
 connection with many controversies. 
 
 a. Objectives can be apprehended : the contents of 
 affirmative and negative judgments. Sense of course can 
 apprehend neither : to grasp them is the peculiar office of 
 thought. 
 
 Most writers on the subject, including Meinong and 
 his followers, have seen in the nature of objectives a reason 
 
46 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 
 
 for denying that judgment can fall under apprehension at 
 all. The determination of affirmative and negative, they 
 have said, must belong not to content but to act : but it 
 cannot belong to such an act as apprehension, therefore 
 judgment (and similarly assumption) must be an act other 
 than apprehension. I agree with Mr Bertrand Russell 1 in 
 believing that this claim is based on a confusion. The 
 fact seems to be that there are two distinct kinds of "yes- 
 no determination," of which one belongs to an act of 
 choice and has no special connection with cognition, whilst 
 the other belongs to a cognitive content. The first dis- 
 tinction of yes from no, affecting our act, is seen in the 
 contrast of granting and denying a request. The second 
 distinction, affecting primarily not an act of ours but an 
 object that we know, is shown in the contrast of the 
 presence with the absence of some feature in the object. 
 The first difference, of acceptance and rejection, does not 
 concern us here: the second, which does concern us, 
 qualifies an object in the known world and is itself known, 
 and I see no reason why the knowledge of it should not 
 be described as apprehension. 
 
 b. Connections of fact can be apprehended. It is of 
 course most important for psychology to recognise that 
 such apprehension exists and constitutes the foundation 
 of inference. For otherwise we have no defence against 
 the popular doctrine that reasonable thought is governed 
 by association. 
 
 If we take association to have its ordinary technical 
 meaning of the force of habit in thought, it is evident that 
 
 1 See Mr KusselPs articles in Mind, 1904, on " Meinong's Theory of 
 Complexes and Assumptions," especially pp. 348-52. For him, however, 
 the apprehension of an objective is not a judgment but an assumption. 
 
THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 47 
 
 a train of good new reasoning can no more be governed by 
 association, generally speaking, than any other purposive 
 activity can be governed by habit in its main lines. Habit 
 may support us usefully in details, but that will usually 
 be all. We find our way to a new conclusion in thinking 
 as we find our way to a new district in exploring a coun- 
 try, not mainly by habit, but by observing the lie of the 
 land and searching out the road. 
 
 If association is used in an untechnical sense to cover 
 all kinds of connection of content, then naturally inference 
 is association. But if it is used in its technical sense of 
 habit, then nothing can be more different than the two 
 kinds of connection. Association connects thought-con- 
 tents by means of making habitual the transition between 
 the respective acts of thought. Inference connects con- 
 tents by means of uncovering the bond that exists between 
 the objects. Difficulty comes only from the constant 
 combination of the two processes. We usually remember 
 our multiplication tables, for instance, by the help of true 
 association, but we believe in them on account of inference 
 or of trust in past inferences 1 . Unless it is by confusion 
 and self-suggestion, association is of course unable to found 
 belief 2 . 
 
 1 The same combination of two processes, too elementary in this case 
 to be naturally called inference and association, but still of the same kind, 
 is found in the tied ideas of perception. We expect green grass to be cool 
 to the touch because (without being able to argue the point) we believe 
 that the nature of the object grass connects them. But habitual transi- 
 tion probably helps the green to remind us of the cool. 
 
 2 All this, a commonplace in logic, is really not a commonplace in 
 popular psychology. Training-college students, brought up on text-books 
 of " psychology for teachers," will attribute miracles to association with a 
 confidence that might be incredible to a logician who was not familiar 
 with this literature. 
 
48 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 
 
 c. Other people's minds, with their thoughts and feel- 
 ings and activities, are apprehended on these levels of 
 thought. However we come by our knowledge of other 
 selves, whether by an analogical argument or by some 
 simpler way, the fact remains that we do know a great 
 deal of them. When in true thought-knowledge I con- 
 template the physical world, not only my objects but the 
 contents of my mind are made of wood and stone. When 
 I contemplate my friend, the contents of my mind are 
 " made " of his spirit and his spiritual activity. For this 
 it is that enters my consciousness and is present to my 
 thought 1 . 
 
 Uninferred Knowledge. 
 
 As we glance over the kinds of knowledge obtained on 
 the level of thought, it becomes evident that, even with the 
 widest meaning of the term inference, not all of them can 
 be classed as inferential. Such an account would indeed 
 be impossible, since without infinite regress we cannot 
 suppose that every piece of thought-knowledge is derived 
 inferentially from other pieces of thought-knowledge, and 
 since our sensations, being incapable of apprehending 
 objectives, are incapable by themselves of supplying us 
 with any premises for inference. Hence non- inferential 
 
 1 I suspect that some readers may find difficulty in accepting this 
 doctrine, yet it seems to me inevitably true. If the content of know- 
 ledge be defined as I have defined it from the beginning, as the thing 
 known in so far as we are knowing it, then if we are knowing a person 
 all that we know in him will be content of knowledge for us. I hope 
 that any difficulty may be partly removed by Chapters vu. and vin., 
 "Defence of the Presentation of Reality in Thought" and "The 
 Apprehension of Feeling." In any case I cannot see how on my own 
 lines I can avoid believing in the thesis. 
 
THE FIELDS OF PKESENTATION. II 49 
 
 apprehension must occur in thought as well as in sense, 
 and must in fact be of common occurrence. This con- 
 clusion is natural enough, [since inference is only a special 
 method for making the features of reality clear to ourselves 
 and to others], and its truth would probably never have 
 been doubted but for an impression that knowledge which 
 claims to be non-inferential must somehow claim to be 
 infallible. 
 
 A list of the objects of uninferred knowledge, set forth 
 by Dr Stout in an admirable essay 1 , gives first " self- 
 evident propositions," and secondly " pleasures, pains, 
 emotions, desires and sensations, so far as they are being 
 felt or sensed 2 ." The list was probably not intended to 
 be exhaustive. One might add for instance our appre- 
 hension of images 3 ; and also our knowledge of the objects 
 which we assume. Shakespeare, having decreed that 
 Cordelia dies, knows without inference that she is dead. 
 Once more, we ought apparently to add one important 
 and interesting example that of memory. 
 
 Meinong has written a valuable paper on this subject 4 , 
 and continued the discussion in a more recent book 5 . His 
 arguments may be paraphrased as follows. First, memory 
 does not look like inference. " I was unhappy yesterday " 
 does not seem to be inferred from known facts of to-day. 
 When we say " I must have put this paper in the drawer 
 since it is there now," we are inferring, but we imply 
 
 1 In Mind, 1908. 
 
 2 In my view a feeling may be felt without being known, but the dis- 
 cussion of that subject must be postponed. 
 
 3 Of course this is not, as such, thought-knowledge. 
 
 4 "Zur erkenntnisstheoretischen Wiirdigung des Gedachtnisses " 
 (Viertelj. /. wiss. Ph. 1886). 
 
 5 Ueber die Erfahrungsgrundlagen unseres Wissens (1906). 
 
 W. 4 
 
50 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 
 
 "I do not remember putting it there." The case is the 
 same with a judgment made on first waking in the 
 morning, "I feel so unhappy that I know something 
 must have gone wrong yesterday." So far is true memory 
 from resembling an inference from introspection that, as 
 Meinong points out, the very phrase " I remember " is a 
 little unusual and artificial. The typical memory-judgment 
 takes the simpler form, " Such an event occurred." 
 
 Secondly, what is there from which we could infer our 
 judgments of memory ? There is scarcely one iastance of 
 belief in fact which does not itself involve belief in remem- 
 bered facts. " I noticed yesterday that the peak of the 
 hill has a peculiar shape." This memory -judgment, we 
 may think, could be tested by to-day's sense-perception. 
 Yet how, except by memory again, can we justify the 
 necessary premise that hills do not usually change their 
 shape in the night ? Or we may test it by an appeal to 
 our companions' recollection, yet there again we are as- 
 suming the validity of recollection as such. Even a purely 
 personal examination of my own memory must use that 
 memory, for all my acts of recollection except one are 
 already past. I must remember what in each case I did 
 remember, if I am to ask whether that remembrance was 
 correct. Finally, any account of memory -judgment which 
 makes it an inference from memory-images falls under the 
 same condemnation. 
 
 Our belief in the past, to sum up, does not seem to 
 rest on inference from other beliefs, and when we try to 
 make it so rest we find that we have too few beliefs apart 
 from it for anything to rest on. Memory in general there- 
 fore must be added to our sum of knowledge not derived 
 from inference. 
 
THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. II 51 
 
 D. SUMMARY OF CHAPTER. 
 
 This chapter has been of an irregular kind. Taking in 
 turn the three apprehension-levels of sense, sense-imagery, 
 and thought, we have examined in connection with each 
 whatever point seemed most interesting. In the first case, 
 we asked what object could be supposed to present itself 
 in sensation : in the second, we examined the claim of 
 imagery to constitute the whole of our non-sensational 
 knowledge, and decided that there must be a kind of 
 knowledge, called shortly "thinking," which went far 
 beyond imagery : thirdly, we specified certain contents of 
 our knowledge which could only be found on these higher 
 levels of thought, and we noted that some of these con- 
 tents were matters of immediate knowledge, in the sense 
 not that we were infallible with regard to them, but that 
 we did not obtain them by inference. 
 
 Having thus dealt separately with the different species 
 of knowledge, we must now observe the way in which they 
 combine. 
 
 45 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. Ill 
 The Expansion of Presented Contents 
 
 WE remarked in our second chapter that a distinction 
 must always be made between what at any moment was 
 appearing in consciousness and what was ready to appear. 
 No manifestation of an object exhausts the object; the 
 latter can always expand its expression and tell us more 
 and more. Not only can the content thus spread and 
 grow, but in a normal attentive mind it tends almost in- 
 evitably to do so. And this expansion is not confined to 
 the level or department of consciousness in which the 
 object originally appeared to us ; it is likely to involve 
 them all. The touch of a friendly cat in a dark room is 
 likely to call up the visual image of the cat and a good 
 deal of knowledge about it. Every department gives the 
 object room for special manifestations of its nature, and 
 when the expansion is prevented our discomfort may be 
 great. Dr Stout's " anoetic consciousness 1 " is, I suggest, 
 presentation deprived of this tendency to expand. The 
 object shows itself in the presentation-field, but only as a 
 
 1 Analytic Psychology, vol. i. 
 
THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. Ill 53 
 
 particular grey, with no expansion into " greyness " or 
 into " cat." 
 
 In phrases which may mislead, but which if they do 
 not mislead are excellent, such expansion has been called 
 " interpretation," and the matter presented in the higher 
 fields has been said to be the " meaning " of what is pre- 
 sented in the lower. The furry touch has acquired meaning 
 when the presentment is able to expand over all the fields 
 which are necessary to give us an adequate view of "the 
 cat." We are usually a good deal more interested in the 
 higher extension than in the simple view of the object 
 with which we began, and in this rather peculiar but in- 
 teresting meaning of the phrase the sensation may be said 
 to " stand for " or " symbolise " what follows ; to be inter- 
 esting in a "representative" capacity. Acquirement of 
 meaning means increase of possibilities. The law of the 
 object's nature is able to act more freely and richly ; the 
 experience becomes developable; can be rolled out into 
 many others. A small presentation comes to stand for 
 more in the sense of deepening its aspect of promise ; we 
 see in it the beginnings of much potential experience. 
 
 The word "symbol," however, is always a little danger- 
 ous, and it is especially dangerous in the case of downward 
 expansion, for it exposes us to the whole temptation of 
 exaggerating the importance of images. Not only does a 
 sensation spread upwards, but anything presented initially 
 in thought will generally ripple downwards as far as it can 
 go. A cat which we think of cannot usually present itself 
 in sense-perception (though something very like this is apt 
 to happen in a dream where we begin to think or to read), 
 but it presents itself readily in sense-imagery, visual or 
 verbal. Then we are apt to lose ourselves m all sorts of 
 
54 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. Ill 
 
 mazes if we begin to speak of this lower presentation, the 
 image, as a symbol of the higher presentation, the idea. 
 For we are led thus to look on the whole appearance as 
 primarily sensuous, making it an image symbolic, an image 
 with a meaning ; and then we naturally consider that the 
 symbol serves instead of what is symbolised, and so come 
 to deny or ignore the existence of the primary higher 
 presentation ; and by this time the path from psychology 
 to the theory of knowledge is lost amongst chasms un- 
 fathomable. 
 
 "Streben nach vollen Erleben" 
 
 This expansion of the contents of cognition follows 
 from what Lipps has called our "tendency towards full 
 experience 1 ." We tend to submit ourselves to the object as 
 fully as possible ; to let it exhibit itself in every depart- 
 ment of our presentation-field ; even, in " Einfi^hlung" to 
 assume its position and feel what it may be supposed to 
 feel. Sometimes the striving is too strong for the proper 
 maintenance of the boundaries between universes, and the 
 thought merges into a hallucination; but right contempla- 
 tion also is a making grow. To contemplate is to set the 
 object in a clear field and to let it unfold before us in the 
 contents of consciousness. Where first we found only 
 sense-contents we presently find shape and position and 
 likeness and distinction, and connections with all the world, 
 and relations on which inferences rest. Picturesquely, we 
 say that we think the thing out. 
 
 What in this way happens to a presentation on the 
 
 1 E.g. Ftihlen, Wollen, und Denken 102, and Bewusstsein und Gegen- 
 stdnde 100127. 
 
THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. Ill 55 
 
 supervention of thought has a parallel in what happens to 
 an impulse on the supervention of will. The impulse 
 develops and explains itself. It works out into ordered 
 schemes of means and end, into a steady and purposeful 
 way of living, which may be but slightly affected by the 
 dying out of the desire in its old narrow form. The con- 
 tent of conation clothes itself with will as the content of 
 cognition with thought. Or rather, lest the clothing 
 should be taken to be a mere addition from outside, we 
 had better say that in will and thought both contents 
 receive new life, and new and greater power to express 
 the subject in the one case and the object in the other. 
 The condition is that the current of our life should be 
 turned that way ; that the object in question should gain 
 attention and that the disposition in question should gain 
 control. 
 
 Expansion through Sense and Thought. 
 
 No one field of presentation is sufficient by itself to 
 give an adequate view of a concrete object. Sense must 
 if possible supplement thought, and thought must help 
 sense, and all kinds of thought must assist one another. 
 If this is to be done, each of the fields in question must be 
 capable of having reality presented within it, and hitherto 
 we have assumed that this was the case, and endeavoured 
 to describe as well as we could such presentations as 
 seemed to occur. 
 
 Nevertheless there exist and have always existed 
 philosophers for whom this assumption has seemed un- 
 justifiable, because they have found in it one or other of 
 two different mistakes. Some have refused it because in 
 
56 THE FIELDS OF PRESENTATION. Ill 
 
 their opinion reality could not be presented in sense, 
 others because they considered that it could not be 
 presented in thought. Either of these opinions would 
 evidently have serious consequences for our whole account 
 of knowledge, and therefore it is necessary that two 
 chapters should now be devoted to their consideration. 
 I can scarcely hope to refute doctrines which have gained 
 the adhesion of some of the greatest minds, but I will try 
 to make clear the way in which I differ from each, and my 
 reasons for doing so. It is possible that the result may be 
 that of making plain to more enlightened readers that 
 I have merely misunderstood the writers to whom I shall 
 specially refer ; and I should be glad to believe that this 
 was the case. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 DEFENCE OF THE PRESENTATION OF REALITY 
 
 IN SENSE 
 
 MY representative opponent in this chapter is Dr Stout. 
 And I may as well begin by saying that after persistent 
 and repeated study I am still not quite sure whether he is 
 really in opposition. I think at one moment that we are 
 fundamentally divided, and at another moment that after 
 all he may be only expressing the same thing in a rather 
 different way. The best I can do will be to set forth 
 Dr Stout's account by means of quotations, and then to set 
 forth my own in contrast, whether that contrast be really 
 only one of language or whether it goes down to the roots 
 of our philosophy. 
 
 The following quotations from Dr Stout seem to be the 
 most representative that I can find : 
 
 Manual of Psychology, 1901. 
 
 p. 134. "Sensations as such... are psychical states. 
 These psychical states as such become objects only when 
 we attend to them in an introspective way. Otherwise 
 they are not themselves objects, but only constituents of 
 the process by which objects are cognised." 
 
58 DEFENCE OF THE PRESENTATION 
 
 Groundwork of Psychology, 1908. 
 
 p. 1. "A psychical process is a process forming part 
 of the life history of some individual consciousness. It is 
 some one's experience, and it actually exists only while it 
 is being actually experienced." 
 
 pp. 3, 4. " All subjective states are psychical ; but not 
 all psychical states are subjective. Sensations in general, 
 so far as they enter into the relation of subject and object 
 at all, fall to the side of the object, and not to that of the 
 subject. When I listen to the sound of a bell, the act of 
 listening is subjective. But the sensation of sound is my 
 object.... The same holds good of sensations in general. 
 They are all psychical states. They actually exist only 
 while they are being experienced. But so far as they 
 enter into the relation of subject and object at all, they 
 are objective and not subjective." 
 
 p. 37. "Sensations... are psychical objects." 
 
 " Things and Sensations," in the Proceedings of the British 
 
 Academy for 1905. 
 
 p. 8. " We speak of experiencing a toothache as we 
 speak of jumping a jump. To experience a toothache is 
 to experience a certain kind of experience. Such imme- 
 diacy does not include any distinction of subject and 
 object. The experiencing is distinguished from the con- 
 tent experienced only as colour in general is distinguished 
 from this or that special colour." 
 
 " Are Presentations Mental or Physical ? " in the Proceed- 
 ings of the Aristotelian Society, 1908-9. 
 p. 235. "We must regard dream apparitions as 
 psychical or mental existents. But, in this respect, we 
 can draw no essential distinction between dream presenta- 
 
OF REALITY IN SENSE 59 
 
 tions. . .and the presentations connected with the perception 
 of actually existing physical things." 
 
 p. 241. "Presentations certainly are not specific 
 qualities of conation or attention ; neither are they modes 
 of cognition, if by this is meant the mental act or state of 
 our being aware of something in distinction from the 
 something of which we are aware. But the real ques- 
 tion is whether mental existence is confined merely to 
 consciousness in this sense.... There is nothing in (Mr 
 Alexander's argument) which has any bearing on my 
 contention that there are certain existents so connected 
 with conation and feeling as to form with these part of the 
 single system which we call an individual mind." 
 
 p. 245. " Doubtless all emotion involves conation and 
 feelings of pleasure and pain.... But these elements are 
 so blended in a continuous unity with organic sensations 
 that it seems quite arbitrary to contrast them as subjective 
 with the organic sensations as objective.... Sensations, then, 
 may be, in the proper sense, subjective." 
 
 Now in contrast with these opinions my own account 
 stands as follows : 
 
 Nothing exists except myself and the rest of the 
 world. My existence takes shape in action ; in part of 
 this I express myself against the world, in the other part 
 the activity is receptive and the world expresses itself 
 against me. In this forth-going and incoming, this ex- 
 pression and apprehension, my life consists. That which 
 I receive and apprehend is the world of reality. My 
 presentation-field of objects is part of this world, and lies 
 chiefly outside my body. The content of my apprehension 
 is also chiefly outside my body, consisting of just so much 
 of the world as I apprehend. 
 
60 DEFENCE OF THE PRESENTATION 
 
 Nothing enters my life except on the one hand my 
 own activities (impulses, likings, creatings), and on the 
 other hand so much of the real world as presents itself to 
 me. The content of sensation is not an activity of mine. 
 Therefore it forms part of the world of reality. If it be 
 asked how it fits into that world, and what relation it can 
 possibly be supposed to bear to an abiding physical object, 
 I will only say that reality is already bound to fit together 
 so many odd things, such as physical objects, laws, qualities, 
 relations, powers, situations, and events, that it can scarcely 
 make much objection to including the contents of sensation 
 as well. For guidance, however, we may note that the 
 latter's immediate connections will be with a part of the 
 physical world which includes that object I call my body. 
 
 My mind can contain the whole universe, yet there is 
 no room in it for anything which is not either a part or 
 act of my self or else a part or act of rny not-self. The 
 act of sensing, like all my acts, belongs to me, but what 
 I sense does not. No " modification of consciousness" and 
 no "psychical object" can escape the alternative, for there 
 is no room for anything between me and the world with 
 which I meet. 
 
 The Sensum. 
 
 What really concerns me is to distinguish sensation 
 from feeling on the one hand, and to make it a possible 
 starting-point for thought on the other. In order to 
 obtain these ends, it seems to me necessary that we should 
 do what many thinkers strongly object to doing, dis- 
 tinguish between the sensum and the act or event of 
 sensing it. The latter is not important here : it may be 
 called an act of recipience, or in the case of marginal 
 
OF REALITY IN SENSE 61 
 
 sensation at any rate it may be thought worthy of no 
 better title than " event " of recipience : so small may be 
 the activity involved on the part of the apprehending 
 mind. What is important is the sensum, the content 
 received. It appears to me necessary to insist that the 
 event of sensation is the event of the entrance of an 
 element into consciousness, in just the same way as is the 
 event or act of thought. I urge that to give up this is in 
 the first place to lose the distinction between sensation 
 and feeling, and in the second place to make the super- 
 vention of thought, which admittedly has an objective 
 content, exceedingly difficult to explain. We will take 
 these points in turn. 
 
 Sensation as Distinguished from Feeling. 
 
 Psychologists have usually (though not always) taught 
 that sensation is an experience distinct in kind from 
 conative experience and from feeling in the technical 
 sense. Dr Stout himself, as I understand him, teaches 
 this doctrine 1 ; Dr Ward certainly teaches it. Now if the 
 distinction is to be made, I can see no other such natural 
 and fitting way of describing the difference as to say, that 
 sensation is an experience of reception whilst the others 
 are experiences of response. In sensation, we should say, 
 an objective element enters consciousness : feeling and 
 striving-experience are the subjective elements in which 
 I respond to what enters, and express myself as against 
 the world. In elementary life, or with distracted atten- 
 tion, I naturally do not think about myself or about the 
 
 1 E.g. in a very interesting article on the activity-experience, in The 
 British Journal of Psychology, Vol. n. July, 1906. 
 
62 DEFENCE OF THE PRESENTATION 
 
 world, nor do I take any notice of the difference between 
 the two sorts of experience. That distinction between self 
 and not-self which leaves my own body on the not-self side 
 is of so little practical importance, that it is long indeed 
 before I come to recognise it. All this I grant, for it does 
 not touch the ordinary doctrine that sensation is different 
 from feeling whether the difference be noticed or not, nor 
 my own claim 1 that the difference, whether we know it or 
 not, is the difference between recipient and responsive 
 experience. Dr Stout, in one of the passages with which 
 my opinions seem to conflict 2 , considers the case of a 
 spectator at a football match who unconsciously imitates 
 the movements of the players, so that movement-sensations 
 blend with the impulsive and emotional elements in his 
 sympathetic excitement. Is it not absurd, the author asks, 
 to say that the sensations (in my terminology the sensa) 
 are present as objects whilst the other elements are not ? 
 It seems to me really not absurd, but the most natural way 
 of describing that difference in the nature of the elements 
 which, whether or not it is noticed, we admit to exist. 
 
 I am willing to accept as typical of sense-experience 
 an instance of it to which Dr Stout often appeals : the 
 instance of physical pain. This, with its distinction from 
 the feeling and striving which it calls forth, seems to me 
 an instance peculiarly suitable for my own exposition. 
 Physical pain, so far as I can see, is emphatically objective. 
 It is not a way of experiencing but a thing that we ex- 
 perience. It comes to us, comes upon us. We are not "in" 
 it as we are in our hatred of it or our struggles to escape 
 from it : we are opposed to it : under it. I know that when 
 
 1 Which I take to be practically the same as Dr Ward's. 
 
 2 Arist. Soc. 1908-9, 244. 
 
OF REALITY IN SENSE 63 
 
 we reflect and introspect we may use much the same 
 phrases as these about some impulse or disposition which 
 we separate from our main self: bat to do this we must 
 reflect, must turn round. Surely no such reflection is 
 required in the case of pain. No part of ourself is in it: 
 it is altogether something inflicted upon us. It is not a 
 way of loving or hating: it is something that we hate. The 
 knowledge of the cause of pain and the endeavour to 
 remove it comes indeed only later. What is primitive is 
 the struggle against, the incredulity towards, the writhing 
 endeavour to escape from, not the cause of the pain but 
 the sensed pain itself. 
 
 In the case described we are attending to a sense- con tent, 
 and it would seem that we attend to it without performing 
 any task so elaborate as that of introspection. Just this, 
 according to the doctrine I support, shows the difference 
 between sensation and feeling. Feeling and impulse 
 cannot be attended to except by introspection and reflec- 
 tion : their tendency as they grow in force is not primarily 
 to gain attention but to gain control over our inward or 
 outward behaviour. But when we struggle against pain, 
 or listen to a musical note, or enjoy the colour of a butter- 
 cup, we attend to a sense-content without any turning of 
 our attention inwards, such as occurs when we attend to 
 our dislike or our enjoyment. This is what I mean by 
 urging that sense-contents are objective from the first. 
 What is thus claimed for a content in the focus of atten- 
 tion must be claimed similarly for a marginal content. 
 Sensa, in a word, must be looked on everywhere as objective 
 elements in consciousness, in contrast with the subjective 
 elements of feeling and impulse : or else another distinction 
 must be proposed between these two kinds of experience. 
 
64 DEFENCE OF THE PRESENTATION 
 
 Sensation as Leading to Thought. 
 
 My second plea is this : that if the objective, presenta- 
 tive, and " received " character of sense-contents be given 
 up, it becomes very difficult to explain the transition from 
 these to the contents of thought, which are usually ad- 
 mitted to be objective elements. 
 
 If the cognition be taken to begin in sensation as in 
 an " immediate unity " of subject and object, and if this 
 means not only that no distinction between subjective and 
 objective is yet recognised by the sensitive subject but 
 also that no such difference is there, the question arises 
 how we ever come to make the distinction, or discover that 
 object world which we know in thought. "Why should 
 thought refer a ' modification ' of the individual conscious- 
 ness to something which is not a modification of the 
 individual consciousness but exists independently of that 
 consciousness 1 ?" Lipps accounts for the procedure by 
 an ultimate and irreducible "instinct 2 ." Dr Stout, in his 
 account of anoetic consciousness 3 , leaves the step unex- 
 plained, and explicitly conceives the possibility of a sentient 
 creature which should never be led to take it. There is 
 surely less difficulty in the whole account if we suppose 
 that what thought has to do in supervening on sensation 
 is not to refer to an object or to surround with an object 
 something that is in no sense objective, but only to turn a 
 very small and narrow objective content into one that 
 shall be wider, deeper and richer. 
 
 What I desire therefore is to treat sense-contents as 
 
 1 Dawes Hicks, Arist. Soc. 1905-6, p. 296. 
 
 2 Das Wissen von fremden Ichen, pp. 694-7. 
 
 3 Analytic Psychology, vol. i. 
 
OF REALITY IN SENSE 65 
 
 I have treated thought-contents : to consider them as 
 objective; as presented, apprehended, received: and as 
 forming the content of our first glimpse of what presently 
 reveals itself as the physical world. Sense-contents like 
 thought-contents may be called psychical with a meaning 
 which does not exclude many of the latter from being also 
 physical : for all mental contents exist in my mind, and 
 the whole universe exists there when I embrace it in 
 thought. Sense-contents like thought-contents often 
 receive little attention, for our attention usually flows 
 through and past what we already know of the object 
 towards that which we do not quite know. Sense-contents 
 have " existential presence 1 " inasmuch as they are there 
 and exist before us, are present with us : but this gives 
 them no greater nearness and no less objectivity than is 
 possessed by thought-contents, which also are present with 
 us. In short, in sense and in thought alike we apprehend 
 an object which is presented. 
 
 Do Sense- Contents belong to the Real World? 
 
 I believe all this to be true, yet for most forms of 
 metaphysics one evident difficulty remains. Granted that 
 in sensation we apprehend a presented content, has that 
 content any claim to belong to the real world ? Does not 
 the existence of a sensum depend on the presence of my 
 sensitive self? Is it not therefore inserted by my own 
 mind into that world which is truly presented in thought 
 alone ? The answer cannot be simple. 
 
 To begin with, it must be said that anything which 
 can be presented has according to my definition some sort 
 of reality. It is able at least to be apprehended : it comes 
 1 Dr Stout's term. 
 
 w. 5 
 
66 DEFENCE OF THE PRESENTATION 
 
 before us and upon us : we have so far to reckon with it : 
 it forms part of the circumstances of our life. I accept 
 Dr Stout's comparison of sensations with dream-images, 
 which for me are still presentations of reality, though that 
 reality lies far away from the physical world, " draussen im 
 Fabelland." Every presented object has as much reality 
 as enables it to be presented : what further reality it has, 
 and of what sort, are matters for further investigation. 
 
 In the case of sense-presentation we have already 
 examined in part what that further reality is. In the 
 ordinary case, we decided, the object presented in sense 
 was most naturally determined as being a certain part of 
 the physical world in which my own body was included. 
 What I feel is the wind against my face, what I see is 
 a forest from which ether waves pass to my eye. Further 
 investigation of the sensum may bring me information both 
 about the forest and about a colour-blindness in my retina. 
 So far one might say simply that the object presented was 
 this complex part of the physical world, and certainly real. 
 
 But from the point of view of ordinary realism and 
 ordinary science the difficulty of course is still to come. 
 Granted that the object presented in sense is the one 
 described above, still this remains that just that part of 
 the object which enters in the sense-content is a part 
 which, when it is not so entering, does not exist at all. 
 The physical world is presenting itself, is exhibiting itself 
 before me, but the exhibition is a special one for my 
 benefit. The relation is very subtle ; these contents must 
 not be said to be created by apprehension, seeing that 
 apprehension can create nothing; it is just that my 
 presence gives the world its opportunity, and, my conscious 
 life being there, other bodies combine with my body to 
 flash a sensum into that life. The buttercup explodes in 
 
OF REALITY IN SENSE 67 
 
 yellow ; the sky salutes me with blue ; the vexed nerve 
 not only thrills but stings. 
 
 The mystery of these objects, which somehow depend 
 for their existence on the presence of an apprehending 
 person, and which yet cannot without absurdity be sup- 
 posed to be created by his recipience of them, is undeniably 
 great ; yet it seems fair to conjecture that some of it 
 would be removed if we understood better how sensation 
 came about, and knew the whole relation between body 
 and soul. Meanwhile I urge that there is nothing in the 
 mystery, great as it is, to force these objects out of line 
 with other objects. For the purposes of psychology and 
 philosophy, if not of physics, they are simply very short- 
 lived parts of the real world. 
 
 We have to claim, in short, that the peculiarity of the 
 nature of sense-contents is not of importance for this 
 particular point in our theory of knowledge. If these 
 contents are presented and if they are real, then we have 
 all that for the purpose of the present chapter we require. 
 The nature and origin of their reality is indeed most 
 important for metaphysics, but for our present purpose it 
 seems irrelevant. The object which exhibits itself in 
 sense must indeed be more complex than we had hitherto 
 observed : apparently it must consist not only of bodies in 
 connection with a living body, but of all these conjoined 
 with a mind. This may lead us perhaps to look more care- 
 fully into the apparent simplicity of other objects. But for 
 the present my end is attained if I have been able to make 
 it apparent that even in sensation reality is apprehended. 
 
 At all events I can make my view no clearer than this, 
 and can only hope in the end that Dr Stout does not really 
 disagree with it. 
 
 52 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 DEFENCE OF THE PRESENTATION OF REALITY 
 IN THOUGHT 
 
 ACCORDING to the opinion criticised in the preceding 
 chapter, the contents of sense are too near to us to be 
 presentations of an objective reality. According to the 
 opinion now to be discussed, the objects of thought are 
 too far removed from us to be presented at all. 
 
 The opinion now in question is in one way more diffi- 
 cult to discuss than the former, because usually it is 
 rather assumed than explicitly set forth. It comes up 
 again and again in the best philosophy, and yet I cannot 
 believe at present that it is anything but a remnant of 
 the fallacy of introjection and of the obsession of repre- 
 sentative ideas. What I oppose is the constantly-recurring 
 tendency to believe that only in sensuous experience are 
 we in contact with the real world. The sense datum, it 
 is continually supposed, is all that is " given " to us, and 
 round it we have to make a " construction " of our own. 
 Then, by mere force of assertion apparently, we are held 
 to " identify " this construction with the real world which, 
 except through the hole of sense, we cannot reach. 
 
 Now the chief point of which we must remind our- 
 selves is that reality in the general sense is simply what 
 
DEFENCE OF THOUGHT 69 
 
 does in any way present itself to us. It is a fact of 
 experience that in all cognition and not only in sense we 
 have something before our eyes, something given in the 
 sense that no choice of ours has shaped it, and in the 
 sense that it does not express ourself as our desires and 
 impulses express ourself. It is our material, a circum- 
 stance of our life. What I mean by reality is the substance 
 of all such appearances, and belongs in no way uniquely 
 to sense-experiences. What I mean by the real tower is 
 not only that which I see in the distance but that which 
 I expect, intellectually, to overshadow me when I approach, 
 and that of which I remember the erection and could 
 state the height and conjecture the purpose and reason 
 out the relations: I mean that which in all these ways 
 I actually know. I remember and reckon on and describe 
 the tower, and not any construction of mine which I 
 identify with the tower. For by the name I mean nothing 
 more remote than what in all these ways appears to me. 
 Thus by the very force of words reality is presented not 
 only in sense but in thought. 
 
 Inattentively at first, I hear a noise. It strikes me, 
 comes before me, is an object to me. As I turn my 
 attention that way, I find more in this object than I 
 found at first. It shows itself not only as a noise but as 
 a musical noise, as a tune, as the tune of a well-known 
 song, as produced by a particular composer, as well or 
 badly rendered. These are all aspects of the real tune, 
 and not, in the natural sense, of a construction of mine. 
 In all these ways the reality presents itself to me. So 
 also is it with a bodily pain ; and with a physical thing 
 which I touch or see : and with objects such as those in 
 the world of mathematics, which mere sense can never 
 
70 DEFENCE OF THE PRESENTATION 
 
 apprehend. So also with a human being whom I learn 
 to know. 
 
 " But only through sense," it may be said, " have we 
 any guarantee that the object in question is really present 
 with us." Sensation is apparently a guarantee that the 
 object, or effluences from the object, or waves of ether 
 which have lately left the object, have the moment 
 before come in contact with our body. But why should 
 that involve for the object any unique privilege in the 
 way of being now in our mind ? Let us pause a moment 
 to examine the meaning of presence to a mind. 
 
 There appear to be two methods which may help us 
 to realise this meaning. One is the pushing of our cate- 
 gories one step up ; the consideration of the universe for 
 the moment not as substance and quality but as law and 
 expression. A real thing, whatever else it may be, is the 
 method, or necessity, or law, in a group of events. The 
 laws of its nature govern the behaviour of other objects 
 in relation to it and our own experience in respect of it. 
 The number five is a knot of such laws ; the constitution 
 of a country is another more complex and far-reaching 
 group ; a beech-tree is a third ; a man is a fourth. Now 
 "presence" under this category can only mean the actuality 
 of government by the law-group in question ; a thing is 
 present wherever the laws of its nature rule. The category 
 of substance seems inevitably to carry with it some asso- 
 ciation of restricted position in space or time. A substance, 
 we feel, cannot be here if it is somewhere else ; it cannot 
 be now if it was once and has ceased to be. Therefore if 
 we cognise such a thing, we think, we are cognising what 
 is away from us, and our knowledge of it must be round- 
 about ; what is present with us cannot be the real thing 
 
OF REALITY IN THOUGHT 71 
 
 but must be something else, perhaps an idea. But under 
 the category of law an object is present wherever the 
 laws of its nature rule, and that is the only meaning 
 which presence has. " I see Birmingham " means that 
 the nature of Birmingham is expressing itself in my per- 
 ceptual experience, governing the happenings there ; and 
 the contemplation of a thing in memory, in imagination, 
 or in the most elaborate thought means exactly the same 
 kind of fact. In all of these that law which is the object 
 is there, for it works, and there is no other meaning for 
 the presence of a law. Hence it is literally true to say 
 that the past or the future can be " present with me," or 
 that the friend I think of has " entered into my thought " 
 or has been " much in my mind." I can no more think of 
 a thing which is not there within my thought than I can 
 obey a law which is not obeyed. What is presented to 
 us in any field is quite truly and literally in our presence, 
 and what is only presented in thought may be "nearer 
 than hands and feet." 
 
 The second method is to reflect that we really do not 
 keep our minds inside our heads, or that, if we do, at any 
 rate the mind's eye can see through the skull. The 
 notion that we have direct apprehension in sensuous 
 experience only is surely, I urge, a mere remnant of the 
 belief that the mind lives inside the body, joined with 
 the undeniable truth that an external object's influence 
 can penetrate the body only by stimulating the sensory 
 nerves. When once we give up this idea, what meaning 
 can there be in "reaching the mind" other than simply 
 " being apprehended " ? That is present to the mind 
 which is there before it ; I can no more think of a thing 
 which is outside thought than I can see a thing which is 
 
72 DEFENCE OF THE PRESENTATION 
 
 out of sight ; and mental vision is not hindered by distance 
 in space or time or even by the separation of its object 
 from the world of fact. Or if we use the phrase " in the 
 mind," then our mind is capable of putting itself forth to 
 embrace the whole universe. 
 
 Knowledge Inferred and Uninferred. 
 
 Some of the chief obstacles in the way of believing 
 that thought brings us into contact with reality seem to 
 have been found in connection with inference. Where 
 any thought-knowledge has been admitted to be uninferred 
 it has often been admitted also to involve the real presence 
 and immediate vision of its object ; but it has seemed 
 much harder to admit this of inferential thought. This 
 has come about partly, I think, on account of the ambiguity 
 of the phrase " immediate knowledge." Knowledge that 
 is non-immediate in the historical sense of having been 
 reached by means of other knowledge was thought to be 
 also non-immediate in the epistemological sense of being 
 out of touch with its object. The other cause seems to 
 have been the tendency to describe inference as construc- 
 tion. Inference, like all apprehension, is certainly an 
 act, and often on account of its difficulty it is an ener- 
 getic and strenuous act, but still, like all apprehension, 
 it is a recipient or exploratory and not a creative act. 
 In it, as in the simplest vision, I am completely sub- 
 missive to the reality that I meet and do no more than 
 trace the outlines which are to be found in it. This fact 
 is only disguised by the way in which the recipient 
 activity is continually helped and guided by a separate 
 and exceedingly interesting creative act the construction 
 
OF REALITY IN THOUGHT 73 
 
 of hypotheses. Hypotheses are nothing at- all but sug- 
 gestive pictures and guiding lines, yet so useful are they, 
 and so constantly do we find reality projecting through 
 the picture we have drawn, that it is hard for us not to 
 suppose that picture and substance have blended into 
 one, and so to think that we have partly constructed that 
 which in real believing inference, not in hypothesis, stands 
 before our eyes. 
 
 Objects of Higher Order. 
 
 A different hindrance has beset some philosophers, 
 arising from the tradition that what is given must consist 
 only of simple or " foundling " and never of " founded " 
 contents. Anything in the way of a relation or of a 
 combination form has been supposed to be contributed by 
 the apprehending mind, and therefore to be no part of 
 presented reality. Now, as we said, with the question of 
 the nature or of the creation of reality we have in this 
 book nothing to do so far as we can avoid it. It may be 
 that the object presented to us does in some cases, 
 possibly in all cases, include in some way a part of our 
 own mind. Nevertheless reality is able to include that 
 mind, and such presentation would still be the presenta- 
 tion of the real. Whether or not the founded content 
 exists by the help of our mind, it certainly is not created 
 by our recipient apprehension of it. It stands the test 
 of reality in that it behaves as real: in that it stands 
 over against us and dictates and is dictated to us : in 
 that we can reckon on it and have to reckon with it. 
 
74 DEFENCE OF THE PRESENTATION 
 
 Professor James on Conception. 
 
 The philosophy last quoted has been vehemently 
 opposed in recent years by a brilliant champion, main- 
 taining the immediate presence of the real object in 
 contents of higher order. It seems strange that this 
 champion should himself become on yet another ground 
 the opponent of the presentation of reality in thought. 
 He is still for some reason so possessed by the tradition 
 of separating thought from immediate knowledge, that, in 
 order to preserve our power of knowing them immediately, 
 he seems disposed to hand all the higher-order contents 
 bodily over to sense. 
 
 Radical Empiricism asserts, says Professor James, 
 " that relations between things are just as much matters 
 of direct particular experience as the things themselves 1 ." 
 "The great obstacle. ..is the rooted rationalist belief that 
 experience as immediately given is all disjunction and no 
 conjunction, and that to make one world out of this 
 separateness, a higher unifying agency must be there 2 ." 
 " Intellectualistic critics of sensation insist that sensations 
 are disjoined only. Radical empiricists insist that con- 
 junctions between them are just as immediately given as 
 disjunctions are 3 ." I am not quite sure who the intel- 
 lectualistic critic is, having failed to find any statement 
 quite so bad as this in the works of the arch-enemy Green; 
 but that does not much matter. My own position is as 
 follows. (1) Relations of all sorts are given as their terms 
 are given ; in the sense that when we look for them we 
 find them, that their nature is fixed by no choice of ours, 
 
 1 The Meaning of Truth, xii, xiii. 2 Op. cit. xiii. 
 
 3 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 280. 
 
OF REALITY IN THOUGHT 75 
 
 and that they are objects presented to us. (2) They are 
 usually not given quite so immediately in point of time as 
 are their terms ; we have to look a little more carefully 
 into what is before us. (3) When relations are presented, 
 whether they be conjunctions or disjunctions or any other 
 kind, they are presented not in sense but in thought. 
 There is no meaning in the distinction at all if sense is to 
 be supposed capable of grasping these 1 ., 
 
 General Objectivity of Objects of Thought. 
 
 On the whole subject, then, I agree with Professor 
 Alexander 2 . " The difference between what is revealed in 
 sense and what is added in interpretation is solely a matter 
 of the method of the revelation. We are always by one 
 method or another seeing things themselves." 
 
 It follows, to my mind, that I must object to the 
 other metaphor according to which thought manipulates 
 reality, though Prof. Alexander in the same paper uses 
 it alternately with that of sight. It follows in the same 
 way that when Green speaks of " what may indifferently 
 be called a constructive act on the part of the subject, or 
 a manifestation of itself on the part of the object," I 
 should strongly prefer the second phrase 3 . Similarly I 
 should avoid Dr Bosanquet's description 4 . " ...This deter- 
 minate reality, which the individual has constructed by 
 identifying significant ideas with that world of which 
 he has assurance through his own perceptive experience." 
 
 1 For further examination of Professor James' position see appendix 
 to this chapter. 
 
 2 Arist. Soc. 1909-10. G ree n's Works, vol. i. p. 387. 
 4 Logic, vol. i. pp. 3-4. 
 
76 DEFENCE OF THE PRESENTATION 
 
 "Perception is his point of contact with reality as such." 
 It is only with caution that I should use Herr Rickert's 
 very suggestive description of knowledge as obedience to 
 an imperative ; caution being needed on account of the 
 suggestion of "construction" even here. If we are careful 
 always to think of the imperative as " see me thus," 
 " read me thus," and not as " make me thus," the descrip- 
 tion may be used to excellent purpose 1 . Finally, there is 
 a danger even in the useful term " Vorstellungsproduk- 
 tion," employed by Meinong's school 2 . We should all 
 agree that the act of apprehension was " produced " and 
 that the 'founded object which we apprehend was not 
 produced by the apprehension but founded in reality. 
 But I should wish to make it specially plain that the 
 content of cognition was not produced either, since for 
 me it is simply a part of the whole object ; that part 
 which in thought-apprehension we come newly to see. 
 Our coming to see it may be mediated ; our seeing it 
 is not. 
 
 The objects of thought, then, are real objects, not 
 constructed by us but given to us ; they are materials 
 and circumstances; they are "hard" facts, which we 
 "face"; in them we meet with the solid objective workL 
 We construct nothing ; the effort required is only that of 
 focussing and guiding our sight, and perhaps of seeing in 
 the dark. Reality lies before us on all levels of presenta- 
 tion and whichever way we look. If we only see it 
 " through a hole 3 ," at all events the hole is nothing worse 
 than the pupil of our eye. 
 
 1 Bickert, Gegenstand der Erkenntniss, p. 66. 
 
 2 E.g. Ameseder in Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologic, p. 487. 
 8 Bradley, Principles of Logic, p. 70. 
 
OF REALITY IN THOUGHT 77 
 
 Note. I may add here once for all that I find no reason 
 to believe in any kind of knowledge which would be 
 superior to the presentation of reality. It has been held 
 sometimes that with perfect knowledge the object would 
 cease to be presented to us because it and we had become 
 one. With regard to this we may find some help again 
 in the substitution of the category of law for that of 
 substance. When reality is looked upon as a substance, 
 odd associations of physical grasp and resistance and 
 strain seem to enter into our thoughts about know- 
 ledge. We picture the subject and object as somehow 
 interlocking and pulling each other close, and incline to 
 think that for perfect knowledge they would have to 
 coalesce and become one. But with the category of law 
 this tendency vanishes. The better we know an object, 
 the more elaborately and freely and variously do the laws 
 of its nature express themselves in our experience, but 
 there is no tendency for their field of show to come any 
 nearer. As the mists clear away, the landscape only 
 becomes more and more evidently something which is not 
 the spectator ; and perfect knowledge would surely be 
 only a clearer apprehension of the presented. 
 
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VII 
 PROFESSOR JAMES ON CONCEPTION 
 
 IT is related in the biography of Clerk Maxwell that 
 from early childhood his interest in the mechanism, the 
 " how," of any object was always the first thing with him. 
 " What's the go o' that ? " he would ask continually. And 
 no mere general answer would content him. " What,'* 
 he would ask, " is the particular go of it ? " 
 
 This is the search for conceptual knowledge in one of 
 its simplest forms, but it provides a convenient symbol 
 and metaphor for all such search. The endeavour to con- 
 ceive has usually been deemed an innocent habit in the 
 philosopher, natural or moral, and Professor James's prohi- 
 bition of the habit seems at first sight like a command to 
 the inquiring boy, " Go back and look at the thing, but 
 refrain from thinking about it." Why are we to be snubbed 
 in this way ? I can not help thinking that Professor James 
 is misled, for one thing, by his own matchless power of 
 metaphor. 
 
 It is seldom fair to cross-question metaphors, and 
 Professor James's are so vivid and delightful that one is 
 not tempted to cross-question except when, as in the 
 present case, they lead us to quite specially inconvenient 
 results. But when the inconvenience makes one look back, 
 his conception-metaphors seem to me to be really puzzling 
 from the first. We " lay hold of our experiences by " 
 concepts, he says ; we string reality on them ; they are 
 extracted samples, or photographs. "To understand life 
 
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VII 79 
 
 by concepts is to arrest its movement, cutting it up into 
 bits as with scissors 1 ." I can only say that I don't think I 
 do anything of the sort, and I don't see how it is done* 
 " Concept " must mean either an act of conceiving or a 
 content conceived. For me, the first is a process or event, 
 and therefore neither a string nor a pair of pincers. The 
 second is an element in presented reality, and that again 
 is not a string, but a current or a nerve a real thing 
 seen. 
 
 It is ill to contend in metaphors with a master of 
 metaphor ; yet my way of expressing the facts surely 
 avoids the difficulties of the other way, and therefore 
 suggests that they are difficulties of allegory only. In my 
 account, sensation gives us our first and most elementary 
 seeing or feeling of the experience-stream. The rest 
 perception and conception and their like are u seeing 
 what," " seeing how," " seeing into " ; they are the unfold- 
 ing of the bud ; the epiphany of the rainbow in the heart 
 of the sunshine. The first shimmer of the stream's surface 
 grows as we look at it into the crumpled silver tissue of 
 crossing ripples and patterned gleams, and deepens into 
 levels whence bubbles rise, and undercurrents that crease 
 the surface above and stir the sand below, and all " the 
 light and sound and darkness" of the stream's heart. This 
 it is to conceive. We come to see not only the glint of the 
 stream, but the make of it, " the go of it." And I no more 
 substitute my concepts for sense-reality than I substitute 
 the undercurrents or the shaping bed for the flash of the 
 surface. Nor do I ever assert that either alone can give, 
 the whole truth. 
 
 1 The Hibbert Journal, April, 1909, p. 568. 
 
80 PROFESSOR JAMES ON CONCEPTION 
 
 I have two quarrels with Professor James's moral of 
 " back to sense." 
 
 1. If words are to have any ordinary meaning, he is 
 surely attributing to sense-experience a richness which 
 it cannot have till thought supervenes. It is after all 
 literally true, as Mill and Berkeley teach us, that with the 
 eyes of our body we can not see a man, nor a stream 
 either. We are so much used to extending the meaning 
 of " sight " that perhaps illustration from touch and hear- 
 ing will impress the truth better. Think of the poverty 
 and barrenness of a succession of touches in the dark, 
 which we can not read off, or interpret, or recognise. Or 
 think of the ear assailed by a continuous meaningless 
 clash of instruments. The listener's " whole experience " 
 is altered, we say carelessly, when he realises at last that 
 five familiar tunes are being played at once. Perhaps it 
 is, but "sensation" is just our name for the element which 
 is supposed unaltered. In so far as the experience changes, 
 it is something more than sense. Relations, says Professor 
 James, are "just as integral members of the sensational 
 flux as terms are 1 ." True, for neither terms nor relations, 
 neither notes nor tunes, were " given " us in that clash and 
 blare. They were there for the finding, but it was not 
 sensation that could find them. What is secret in sense 
 gives up its secrets in thought. " Intellectual istic writers 
 on sensation insist that sensations are disjoined only. 
 Radical empiricism insists that conjunctions between 
 them are just as immediately given as disjunctions are' 2 ." 
 Both are ' immediately " given, I agree, but not in sense. 
 Confined to sense, we know sensations neither as disjoined 
 
 1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 279. 
 
 2 Op. cit. p. 280. 
 
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VII 81 
 
 nor as conjoined. Such terms and such relations are re- 
 vealed when we open our eyes wide enough to see them. 
 " Pure sensation," for such a writer as Green 1 , is surely the 
 unreachable limiting case of experience accepted without 
 any inspection ; with our eyes narrowed to a thread's 
 width ; with the given confined to the one field and for- 
 bidden to expand or reveal itself in other fields. Hence 
 we have neither " One, and then two, and then three," nor 
 yet " one, with two and three," but only " one, one, one," 
 each forgotten as it passes ; or rather it is " thus, thus, 
 thus " ; or, still more, it is " thu-u-u-u-s-s-s-s " to the end 
 of the chapter. It is a buzzing which must not expand 
 into " bee." 
 
 2. " The immediate feeling of life solves the problems 
 which so baffled our conceptual intelligence 2 ." Not at all ; 
 it sets them. Let us grant to Professor James that in one 
 sense of the word we are " given " all sorts of things as 
 " integral members of the sensational flux," just as we 
 are given Mr Chamberlain in a puzzle picture; still the 
 problem is to find them. We have experience folded ; the 
 problem is to unfold it. The " feeling " gives us the going 
 thing; conceptual intelligence seeks for the go of it. The 
 stream runs and shines ; but what is that running ? How 
 do the currents turn and cross and enfold one another ? 
 It shines, but what is in the shine and the blue ? 
 
 It would appear that in this matter Professor James has 
 misunderstood Mr Bradley '& complaints. Mr Bradley, I 
 
 1 I agree with Professor James in objecting to Green's speaking as if 
 our own " combining thought " created relations instead of finding them ; 
 as if it "did something" to sense experience, instead of finding in it what 
 sense cannot find. 
 
 2 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 260. The Hibbert Journal, p. 574. 
 
 w. 6 
 
82 PROFESSOR JAMES ON CONCEPTION 
 
 take it, stands with us by the stream of experience, and we 
 indicate to him certain elements, and movements, and 
 directions, and eddies, which we seem to make out in its 
 flow. " Such and such relations, such and such attributes ; 
 such natures of time and space." Mr. Bradley's comment 
 is, " A very slovenly piece of work. If those two currents 
 are on one level, as you say, how can their crossing look 
 like that ? How can the eddy you trace in that corner 
 throw such a shadow on the sand ? Your scheme is right 
 in its main lines, perhaps, but in some ways it is shame- 
 fully scamped and muddled. You must learn to see better 
 than this." To which Professor James replies, " But the 
 stream does run." 
 
 None of us, surely, are denying the fact of experience. 
 The instruments, we all admit, are blaring in our ears. 
 We, common-sense philosophers, have resolved the noise 
 fairly satisfactorily to ourselves, into our five familiar tunes. 
 Then comes Mr Bradley to torment us. "Are you sure," 
 he says, " that these are really the tunes you hear ? It 
 occurs to me that not one of them can be exactly as you 
 maintain. How can this and that conjunction come in ? 
 How can this particular dissonance possibly be rendered 
 in that way? Are you right in reading it as five tunes 
 at all ? " When we are thoroughly bewildered with this 
 teasing, Professor James comes to reassure us ; and he 
 says, " Thought finds impossibility in tasks which sense- 
 experience easily performs 1 ." "With a world of particu- 
 lars, given in loveliest union the ' how ' of which you 
 'understand' as soon as you see the fact of them, for there 
 is no how except the constitution of the fact as given 
 he asks for some ineffable union which, if he gained it, 
 1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 256. 
 
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VII 83 
 
 would only be a duplicate of what he has already in his 
 full possession 1 ." " Never mind the tunes ; there is a great 
 deal of noise going on." 
 
 One must confess that Mr Bradley exposes himself 
 rather recklessly to having his point missed, on account of 
 the unexpectedness of his transition from " appearance " 
 to "reality." We know how in a sunny brook the eddies 
 cast trembling but stationary shadows on the sand at the 
 bottom ; and it is often easier to see the shadow than to 
 find the knot or crumple which is the eddy itself much 
 easier than it is to see the run of the water in the knot. 
 Now Mr Bradley, after tormenting us about our careless 
 reading of the make-up of the brook, quite suddenly gives 
 up any attempt to help us with it, and drops down to this 
 fixed shadow-scheme at the bottom. " Somehow," he says, 
 "to cast these shadows, the real water-currents must be 
 thus and thus, though we cannot see how they manage 
 it." But the spectator, seeing the speaker's eyes so 
 abruptly turned from the body of the stream to its bed, 
 concludes that in Mr Bradley's opinion the stream does 
 not exist. " For this philosopher," he concludes, " there 
 is only the surface and the bed ; appearance and reality ; 
 a fleeting veil of gleams above a stretch of patterned 
 sand." 
 
 There are three truths and three corresponding false- 
 hoods in Professor James's texts, and every one of them 
 can, with a little straining of the reader's eyes, be found 
 in the works of Mr. Bradley. 
 
 (a) " Do not," says Professor James, " condemn reality 
 as soon as you find difficulty in seeing how it works. Be 
 modest, and doubt whether you have seen rightly." This 
 1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 369. 
 
 62 
 
84 PROFESSOR JAMES ON CONCEPTION 
 
 is a gentle statement of Mr Bradley 's judgment, which is, 
 " Your seeing is that of a sloppy-minded imbecile." They 
 join in condemning our poor attempts at interpretation. 
 "Dried specimens"; "bits cut with scissors," says Professor 
 James; "an unearthly ballet of bloodless categories 1 "; "a 
 spectral woof of impalpable abstractions," says Mr Bradley. 
 True it is that we must be modest ; the falsehood lies in 
 denying that we have reached any reality at all. 
 
 (b) Professor James says : "Get full data." " The only 
 way in which to apprehend reality's thickness is either to 
 experience it directly by being a part of reality oneself, or 
 to evoke it in imagination by sympathetically divining 
 some one else's inner life 2 ." " If you are to make out 
 the tunes rightly, you must open your ears to the whole 
 volume of sound." True, and most valuable. The false- 
 hood only comes when he tries to maintain that the data 
 are the solution ; that to see the stream is to see its make, 
 and to hear the noise is to hear the tunes. In being 
 myself I get my own experience in full, but how closely it 
 is often folded, how undiscovered are its treasures, how 
 little of its thickness do I apprehend ! How seldom, in 
 short, can I see the go of it and of me. Mr Bradley's 
 share in this truth is obvious. His share in the falsehood 
 is, I think, more seeming than real, but those accuse him 
 of it who object to his " it must be and can be, therefore 
 it is." This, they say rightly, but I believe irrelevantly, is 
 no sufficient answer to " how is it ? " 
 
 (c) " Here, then, inside of the minimal pulses of ex- 
 perience, is realised that very inner complexity which the 
 transcend en talist says only the absolute can genuinely 
 
 1 Logic, p. 533. 
 
 2 A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 250, 251. The Hibbert Journal, p. 571. 
 
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VII 85 
 
 possess 1 ." This is exactly what Mr Bradley says about 
 feeling 2 ,' and the truth and the danger are the same in 
 both. Only Professor James seems to me to make the 
 mistake which Mr Bradley is only accused of making ; a 
 failure to distinguish sufficiently between the folded and 
 the unfolded unity. 
 
 Professor James returns to feeling in petulance, Mr 
 Bradley in despondency. " These matters are too high 
 for us," the latter writer seems to say now and then. "All 
 our guesses are wrong; we cannot see how things are; let 
 us cling to our knowledge that they are. Truth beyond 
 this seems unattainable." This has usually been put down 
 to Mr Bradley's agnosticism. Would it be unjust to take 
 the other position as a result of too violent pragmatism ? 
 "We make truth. We make it very badly and with 
 difficulty. Let us give up making it." 
 
 I have tried to write from the standpoint of those who 
 conceive that reality does not wait for our thinking to 
 make it, but that the discovery of reality does; that some 
 discoveries can be made ; and that it is the duty of philo- 
 sophers to go on trying to make them. And in spite of 
 everything this is presumably the real standpoint of all 
 of us. 
 
 1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 284. 
 
 2 Appearance and Reality, pp. 520 522. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE AND ADDITIONAL: THE APPRE- 
 HENSION OF FEELING 
 
 LET us conclude the first part of this essay with a 
 chapter somewhat out of the main line of thought, and 
 repeating in a different and independent way various 
 arguments and dogmas which have been touched on 
 before. A digression of this sort may perhaps serve to 
 illustrate the concrete application of the method hitherto 
 used, and to show certain consequences which appear to 
 follow from the theory of knowledge which I have tried 
 to set forth. This chapter will therefore consist of a 
 self-contained essay on one of the current problems of 
 philosophy that of the possibility of apprehending our 
 own feeling. 
 
 This is not the place for propounding or establishing 
 a complete psychology of feeling, and I must therefore 
 only explain quite briefly what my opinion of its nature 
 is. We have used in this essay from the beginning the 
 twofold and not the threefold division of mental process, 
 treating conation-experience and feeling-experience as if 
 they were related to each other far more closely than 
 either of them to presentation. The doctrine I have 
 assumed is practically the same as that set forth by Lipps 
 
THE APPREHENSION OF FEELIN& 87 
 
 in his latest edition of Fuhlen, Wollen, und Denken. That 
 is, I have assumed that the complement to presentative 
 experience is the experience of activity, of striving. All 
 feeling is activity-feeling, but toned in many ways 
 toned pleasantly or unpleasantly for instance. The matter 
 of names is not important, and it might be preferable in 
 some ways to describe the fundamental experience as 
 conative, reserving the title of feeling for what Lipps calls 
 the colouring or tone-quality 1 . But in the present chapter 
 I shall generally use feeling as a short expression for the 
 whole subjective side of our life. 
 
 A. The Knowledge of Present Feeling. 
 
 On the subject of our knowledge of present feeling 
 I have little to say, and nothing new; and I am sorry to 
 admit that the little which I have brings me once more 
 into disagreement, or apparent disagreement, with Dr Stout. 
 This great psychologist believes, as I cannot believe, that 
 feeling which is present is ipso facto known. For him, it 
 will be remembered, sensational experience, though cog- 
 nitive, is not the apprehension of any object ; hence, being 
 provided with at least one example of a cognition which 
 is not apprehension, he is not impeded by the ordinary 
 difficulties in the way of a psychologist who has to claim 
 a knowledge of present activity in a sense that would 
 make a cognition apprehend itself as its own object. 
 Dr Stout quotes Professor Ward as saying that you might 
 as well suppose a man to put himself in a basket and 
 carry himself. But his own point of view enables him to 
 
 1 This, I think, would make the doctrine consistent with Dr Stout's. 
 See his article in The British Journal of Psychology, Vol. n. See on the 
 same subject Urban's Valuation, pp. 85 95. 
 
88 ILLUSTRATIVE AND ADDITIONAL: 
 
 avoid this difficulty. " I should say that a cognition 
 knows itself against its object by a reflective process." 
 " It seems to be an all-pervading fact of ordinary expe- 
 rience that the knowing consciousness is, however indis- 
 tinctly, aware of itself. In being aware of an object we 
 are aware of it as something known, and eo ipso we are 
 aware of the correlative knowing.... When we desire any- 
 thing, we are aware of it as desired ; it has a qualification 
 which is absent in the case of an object which we do not 
 desire. 1 " 
 
 My difficulty here is in the first place of course that 
 on general grounds I believe knowledge to consist in 
 apprehension, and that therefore Dr Ward's difficulty lies 
 directly in my way and is insuperable. In the second 
 place, it is that in the appeal to ordinary experience 
 I cannot find enough to make me alter my general view. 
 It is said that we know our desire, but it seems to me 
 that such knowing is a reflective act, and that the primary 
 process is simply to know-and- desire, to desire the known. 
 Similarly in cognition, so far as I can see, we cognise 
 what we apprehend, but not, in that same act, the act of 
 apprehending itself. I would suggest that there may be 
 a certain danger (of course not for Dr Stout himself) in 
 the ambiguity of the phrase " conscious process." When 
 this name is applied to a bodily event it implies that the 
 event is known, that it is presented in sensation ; but 
 when it is applied to a mental event "conscious" seems 
 to be the mere equivalent of " mental." That is, we use 
 " conscious process " indifferently to mean " process of 
 consciousness" and "process presented in consciousness," 
 and we must not argue from one meaning to the other. 
 1 Arist. Soc. 1905-6, p. 371. 
 
THE APPREHENSION OF FEELING 89 
 
 I hold then that present feeling is not in the ordinary 
 meaning known. Nevertheless I consider that in another 
 sense it can be partly known, even while it still exists. 
 What this knowledge is will become clear in the course of 
 the examination of the second part of our subject, the 
 apprehension of past feeling. 
 
 B. The Knowledge of Past Feeling. 
 
 If we take a first general glance at the subject the 
 arguments which strike us seem to be two. 
 
 (a) At first sight we are, I think, inclined to say 
 that we can remember our feelings. I remember a day 
 at school when I was extremely happy, and I certainly 
 seem to remember the happiness. " Do you not," it may 
 be said, " perhaps remember the cause, and the attendant 
 cognitions, and so infer, not remember, that you were 
 happy?" The cause was and is entirely unknown to me; 
 the mood came unexplained. The attendant circum- 
 stances were London streets, a fresh wind, and grey roofs 
 shining in grey light after rain. There were organic 
 sensations, I suppose, but I cannot say that I remember 
 them. The happiness certainly seems at first sight not 
 to be inferred but to be directly remembered. 
 
 Against this argument that we can remember feelings 
 two different objections have been brought. One is, 
 " This is not a remembrance, a presentation of feeling ; it 
 is a revival. You put yourself in the old position, and 
 are again glad." The other is, "You do not remember 
 the happiness ; you only remember that you were happy." 
 Both of these must be returned to later on. 
 
 (/3) The second argument which occurs to us is a logical 
 
90 ILLUSTRATIVE AND ADDITIONAL : 
 
 deduction from the fact of our present investigation. " Here 
 are we examining, judging, and investigating feeling. How 
 can it be said that we do not know it ? If we judge, we 
 must at least apprehend. Again, we can desire feelings and 
 expect them, and be pleased or vexed with ourselves for 
 having them. In all these cases is not feeling the object 
 of our apprehension ? " 
 
 The objection brought against this argument is, 
 " This is not knowing, but knowing about. You do not 
 apprehend your feelings, but only that you did or will 
 feel." 
 
 This answer evidently has the same sort of purport as 
 the former statement that "we do not remember happiness, 
 but only remember that we were happy." It is certainly 
 very difficult sometimes to know what exactly we mean 
 when we say that we remember. It will be wisest then 
 to examine in the next place a few of the different things 
 that remembering may mean. Or rather, not to tie 
 ourselves to words, we will examine what we can do with 
 a past process. 
 
 i. The simplest thing to do with a past process is to 
 repeat it. I can submit myself again to a sensation ; can 
 go again through the arguments for my beliefs ; can repeat 
 to myself the poem which I learnt. We certainly use the 
 word "remember" with this meaning sometimes. We say 
 not only, "Do you remember that poem?" meaning "Can 
 you repeat it"; but, in the same sense, "Can you remember 
 it ? " This of course is the simplest thing to do with feeling. 
 I can easily be happy again at the renewed thought of a 
 piece of good fortune; can revive my anger at an old 
 injury. It is possible that sometimes when we speak 
 
THE APPREHENSION OF FEELING 91 
 
 of remembering feeling we mean only this. "Feeling- 
 memory" in the sense of habit of feeling comes under 
 this account. A cat of my acquaintance, having once 
 caught his leg in a watch-chain and swung by it in the 
 air, swore softly with a true revival of feeling whenever 
 he met the watch-chain afterwards. 
 
 ii. Next, there is another thing we can do with a 
 past process. We can, without really repeating it, play 
 at repeating it. When I cannot look at the blue sky, 
 I may image it. Instead of playing on the violin the 
 tune I played just now, I may go over it in my head. 
 When I have ceased to believe in the premises of my old 
 faith, I may still go over the arguments that followed. 
 Without reviving my belief, I may still recall it. Where 
 I no longer know, I may still assume. I may project 
 myself back into the old place 1 . 
 
 One of the most interesting chapters in recent 
 psychology is that which works out the similar process 
 on the side of feeling. As I recall my sight of past 
 snows, my belief in a lost leader, so can I recall the 
 feelings which accompanied them, and in all these cases 
 to recall is not to revive. As I can act through to myself 
 a scene of youth in which I heard that I had failed in an 
 examination, so can I call up the dull misery of the hour 
 can feel it in play as I hear the announcement in play. 
 Since I know that this failure, by affecting my plans, 
 really laid the foundation of future success, I am far from 
 
 1 Of. Professor Alexander in Proc. Aristotelian Soc. 1908-9. "Suppose 
 ...I am remembering an event as happening to myself.... The past object 
 is before my mind, but it is not present. But my past self is present. It 
 is an extension backwards of myself. ...We find just what we should 
 expect to find if we understood mental events to be mere directions of 
 consciousness. A past direction is a present consciousness." 
 
92 ILLUSTRATIVE AND ADDITIONAL: 
 
 being miserable about it now. In the same way I can 
 share every sorrow of a hero of tragedy in the course of a 
 uniformly pleasant evening. 
 
 This, I think, is very often what we mean when we 
 speak of remembering feelings ; and the failure to recog- 
 nise the existence of these fancy- feelings has been the 
 source of many of our difficulties of theory. For most 
 people this way of remembering is easy enough easier 
 probably than imaging past organic sensations. We have 
 only been induced to believe that we cannot recall feeling 
 because we have disbelieved a priori in a recall distinct 
 from revival. Whenever we succeeded in the easy task 
 of play-feeling we have thought that we must be having 
 the real feelings again 1 . 
 
 Now, have we here a case of apprehending past feel- 
 ing ? When I first met with this chapter of psychology 
 I thought we had. Now I am fairly sure that we have 
 not. 
 
 German descriptions are obscure on this point by 
 reason of their use of the same word, Vorstellung, for 
 image and for presentation. Hofler 2 , taking his account 
 of fancy- feelings from an article of Witasek's, makes no 
 
 1 Cf. Professor Alexander, Proc. Aristotelian Soc. 1908-9, pp. 35, 36. 
 "Before it can be established that we have emotional or feeling memory 
 we must show that we are not merely remembering the bodily accompani- 
 ments, or the attendant circumstances, or the provoking object, of a past 
 emotion, and so reviving that emotion.... We feel our present self ex- 
 tending backwards to the remembered event, and the pleasurable tinge in 
 this experience is the ideal pleasure. It is quite distinguishable from the 
 pleasure that we feel in the same object when actually present.... It is a 
 pleasure ideally present, referred to the past of myself, which past is 
 called up by the memory of the external conditions under which it 
 occurred." 
 
 2 Psychologie, pp. 209, 210. 
 
THE APPREHENSION OF FEELING 93 
 
 distinction between this sense of having feelings vorge- 
 siellt and the sense in which the psychologist has processes 
 vorgestellt when he examines them as objects. Witasek 1 
 himself seems to take the fancy-feelings as presented. 
 But Meinong 2 , still referring to Witasek, takes them as 
 analogous on the feeling side to assumptions on the 
 knowledge side, and therefore as being still of the nature 
 of feeling, and not objects of knowledge. In Meinong's 
 account, that is, they are not presentations but true 
 feeling-images. 
 
 I have little doubt myself that Meinong's treatment 
 is right. The Scheingefuhle are still feelings, though not 
 "actual" feelings, not feelings-in-earnest, just as assump- 
 tions are still cognitive though they are not real beliefs. 
 We are not here apprehending our past feelings. We are 
 only playing at feeling them over again. 
 
 So far as we have gone, Dr Ward's objection to all 
 presentation of feeling still holds 3 . It is true that what 
 is not originally presentation cannot be made presentation 
 by being repeated, in earnest or in play. The question 
 is, then, whether we can do anything with a past process 
 except do it again. Is there such a thing as contem- 
 plation apart from, or over and above, repetition ? We 
 shall find that our attempt to answer this question involves 
 the answer to the second of the two objections from which 
 we started, in that it obliges us to think out the connec- 
 tion between knowing and knowing-about. 
 
 1 Z. f. Psych., 1901. Zur psychologischen Analyse der dsthetischen 
 Einfiihlung. In his more recent work on aesthetics Witasek takes fancy- 
 feelings to be ordinary feelings based on assumptions instead of on 
 judgments. 
 
 2 Ueber Annahmen. 
 
 3 Ency. Brit., first article on Psychology, p. 44b. 
 
94 ILLUSTRATIVE AND ADDITIONAL: 
 
 iii. Suppose that I see, on the dress of a saint in a 
 stained glass window, a border of a peculiar shade of rose. 
 I can, first, repeat this seeing by going to the church 
 again. Secondly, without going to the church, I may 
 visualise the tint. Thirdly, I may do more. I may 
 remark to myself on the unusual nature of the colour. 
 I may reflect that it occurred only in one other window 
 of the church's magnificent series of ancient glass, and 
 that I do not remember having seen it in any other 
 church. I may wonder what particular process was used 
 to produce it; may judge it to be a shade or two paler 
 than a La France rose ; may notice its rare harmony with 
 the other colours in the window, and think it gives a 
 tenderness and unexpected delicacy to the whole picture 
 which could not be otherwise attained. In all these 
 judgments I am apprehending that piece of colour which 
 is their subject; and in all of them I am doing something 
 more than merely repeat the process in which I appre- 
 hended it before. 
 
 Suppose that I have been taught in childhood a 
 certain account of the history of this saint. I may go 
 over it now in undisturbed faith. Or, if faith has dis- 
 appeared, I may still go over the story as a story, without 
 altering a detail. Thirdly, I may compare it with the 
 histories of other saints, Christian and heathen. I may 
 judge it to be beautiful, to be useful in education, to be 
 fit to be taught as a parable if not as literal truth. I may 
 form theories as to the way in which it arose. In all 
 these thoughts I am apprehending in a new way the 
 story which I used to believe and may still assume. This 
 new apprehension is neither belief in the story nor assump- 
 tion of it ; but it is real apprehension nevertheless. 
 
THE APPREHENSION OF FEELING 95 
 
 Finally, take my childhood's feelings towards this 
 saint. If my faith has been retained I may revive them 
 now, or something near them ; or by self-suggestion, even 
 if my faith has been shaken, I may manage to repeat 
 them. If I prefer it, I may without any illusion still 
 play at taking the old place, still feel my old devotion in 
 image though not in actuality. Thirdly, I may use 
 contemplation other than repetition. I may estimate the 
 value of these feelings in moral and religious develop- 
 ment. I may note the history of their growth and decline, 
 the way in which surroundings and interests helped them 
 or hindered. I may see what they rested on ; remember 
 the commonness of such feelings in the young. In all 
 these judgments I apprehend their subject. In knowing 
 these things I know feeling. This is the true apprehen- 
 sion of past feeling. But further commentary is needed. 
 
 In examining this whole question of the know- 
 ledge of feeling I was troubled by the apparent self- 
 contradictoriness of the statement, "Feeling cannot be 
 apprehended." How, I asked, could one make a judg- 
 ment without apprehending its subject ? How could one 
 think about a thing without thinking of it ? The last 
 section has shown that I still maintain this objection. 
 But I think now that the original statement, if carefully 
 expressed, may be maintained as well. To examine this, 
 let us as before leave the controversial ground of feeling 
 and deal first with objects cognised. 
 
 (a) Take first my tint of rose-colour 1 . I can apprehend 
 
 1 It will be just the same if I take, e.g. a movement sensation, which 
 in popular language "only exists at the moment of sensing." I have not 
 
96 ILLUSTRATIVE AND ADDITIONAL: 
 
 it in image and sensation. I can also apprehend it in 
 thought, as produced in the fifteenth century, as similar 
 to the La France roses outside, yet not like them destined 
 to fade ; as connected with certain ether- vibrations ; as a 
 glory to the church. All this is real apprehension. I 
 know the tint, not know about it. Yet it remains true 
 that a blind man could be taught all this knowledge and 
 still lack that knowledge which I had by sense. Or, to 
 take an example which is much better because it is less 
 likely to lead to irrelevant paths, if I were not able to 
 visualise colour I could still have in absence all this 
 apprehension of thought, could know in absence all the 
 colour's history and its gloriousness. But the rose-ness 
 of it I could get only by going to the church again. 
 
 Sense and thought, that is, know the same object, but 
 what sense sees in it thought cannot see. Green was 
 wrong in holding that perfectly adequate conception needs 
 no sensation to fill it up 1 . Thought knows the object 
 [I insist upon this] but not in its sensational capacity. If 
 the eye of sense is considered as occupying the blind spot 
 in the eye of thought, then we may say picturesquely 
 that thought, in knowing our object, knows about that 
 element in it which sense knows. Of course it is most 
 important to remember the other side; that sense is 
 blind to what thought sees, which is by far the greater 
 part of what is in the object. But that does not affect 
 us just here. 
 
 (6) So far the facts are clear enough. They are rather 
 harder to see and fix when we come to the next level. 
 
 taken trouble to use examples of this sort, because their peculiarity seems 
 to make no difference to my line of argument. 
 1 Works, n. 190. 
 
THE APPREHENSION OF FEELING 97 
 
 Take a statement in that history of the saint which 
 I formerly believed. I can repeat my belief in it, or 
 I can play at repeating and assume it. Thirdly, in con- 
 templation other than repeating, I can apprehend its 
 connections, history, value and the rest. This is still 
 apprehension; it is acquaintance, immediate knowledge. 
 I am said to be thinking about the statement, but 
 really I am thinking it about I am pulling it about, 
 making it exhibit itself, putting it in new fields of thought 
 to govern them, making it grow. 
 
 I am still apprehending the statement. But so far as 
 I am not repeating my original apprehension, so far I am 
 not apprehending just that in it which I apprehended before. 
 The exhibition in new fields is new. I still know the 
 object, but it-in-its-original-aspect I know-about. 
 
 With regard to both my instances, the colour in 
 the glass and the history of the saint, what I am most 
 afraid of is that emphasis may be laid on the second part 
 of the last sentence to the overlooking of the first. 
 I insist with all possible earnestness that if I know about 
 I know. If I cannot visualise the appearance of the rose- 
 coloured border, I can still know its position and value 
 and uncommonness, its purpose and its history. I know 
 that its tint is like that of a rose, different from a hyacinth, 
 deeper than the sunset; unexpected, beautiful. My 
 knowledge is not about it but of it. I know nearly all 
 that is in it, that makes it ; I know it. A man with the 
 window in front of him, but with a concussion of the brain 
 confining him to bare perceiving, would know the border 
 too, but know less of it, less in it. Each of us knows it, 
 and each knows-about that in it which the other knows. 
 We must absolutely reject the plan of giving the titles of 
 
 w. 7 
 
98 ILLUSTRATIVE AND ADDITIONAL: 
 
 knowledge and acquaintance to sense-knowledge alone, 
 and denying it to any apprehension in which only the 
 sense-element is invisible. 
 
 It may be said that this is only a matter of words, that 
 if we abstract and limit further, and take "the content of 
 my sensation" for our "object," we shall have to say 
 simply that thought knows about it without knowing it. 
 No, for in this very judgment the "sense-content" has 
 become an object of thought. And a thousand other 
 judgments press in; the sense-content has a history, a 
 place and date in my mental life, and relations to other 
 contents ; we can form theories as to its success in reveal- 
 ing the object ; theories as to its difference from the 
 sense-content of a colour-blind person looking at the 
 window. The "object" of sense has indeed blossomed 
 and swelled beyond the bounds of sense. No slip of 
 reality can be cut so fine that it will not grow in the 
 thought-field. No object can be made so microscopically 
 small that it will not govern an infinite range of thought. 
 
 The difficulty lies indeed in explaining what it is that 
 thought is debarred from. Did I say that the rose-ness 
 was invisible to it ? In that very judgment the rose-ness 
 is apprehended. Fortunately explanation is helped by 
 the fact that nearly everyone admits that there is a 
 debarring, and knows the sorb of exhibition which the 
 object, rose-colour, gives in sense alone. I need only lay 
 full emphasis on the other side, insisting that rose-colour 
 is known not only in sense but in thought. 
 
 That which sense sees in an object thought can- 
 not see ; but it is a mistake to explain this as the result 
 of a character of uniqueness or peculiar immediacy pos- 
 sessed by sense. It is simply a special case of the obvious 
 
THE APPREHENSION OF FEELING 99 
 
 rule that " so far as I am not repeating my original 
 apprehension, so far I am not apprehending just that 
 aspect of the object which I apprehended before." The 
 exhibition in new fields must be new. If I ask a different 
 question the object must give a different answer. Take 
 a level where sense does not enter at all, and let our object 
 be " the bishop who re-modelled Exeter Cathedral, com- 
 pleting the change from the Norman to the Decorated 
 style." This is my first introduction to Bishop Grandisson, 
 but I may deepen and enlarge my acquaintance with him 
 afterwards. So far as I do not repeat my first apprehen- 
 sion of him, so far I do not know him in the original way. 
 It is possible that I may cease to be able to recall that 
 first knowledge. Yet I shall hardly be said to have ceased 
 to know Grandisson because I am obliged to ask " What 
 was it exactly that he had to do with the Cathedral ? " 
 Or it may be that my first introduction was to " a 
 bishop of Exeter called Grandisson." Returning after 
 some years, I may say " I know all about the bishop who 
 re-modelled the Cathedral, but I cannot remember for the 
 moment who he was" meaning only "I have forgotten 
 his name." It will scarcely be denied here that the 
 so-called knowing-about is a better knowing than the 
 original apprehension, but the original is omitted. Once 
 more, let our object be the content of the assertion 
 " St Dorothy sent flowers from heaven to the youth who 
 loved her." This exhibition of the object is no more the 
 end of it than the guide-book or passport description is 
 the end of a man. I may think it about ; may estimate 
 the place of this incident in the story, its bearing on what 
 precedes and follows, its value for the mediaeval or modern 
 story-teller and poet, or for the child who hears it in a 
 
 72 
 
100 ILLUSTRATIVE AND ADDITIONAL: 
 
 Catholic school ; I may think of its probable origin and 
 its possible use as an allegory. In all this I apprehend the 
 incident, but not just as I apprehended it to begin with. 
 
 The case of feeling is now probably clear enough. 
 I can apprehend it, and I do so whenever I make a judg- 
 ment about it. But, as with sensation and belief, my 
 apprehension does not give me j ust that element, or aspect, 
 or exhibition of it which I had before. So far as I do not 
 repeat a process, so far I do not get just what that process 
 gave. Everything everything in the widest and vaguest 
 sense is a law-complex which works inexhaustibly, and 
 works differently in every field. Thought cannot exhaust 
 what enters in sense, but neither can sense exhaust it: 
 and feeling cannot exhaust feeling. My conclusion is, 
 then, that feeling and activity-consciousness are in just 
 the same position with regard to after-apprehension as are 
 the presented elements in consciousness. For each we may 
 use either repetition, or play-repetition, or apprehension- 
 other- than-repetition. So far as we do not repeat, so far we 
 do not get the same exhibition of the thing as we got before. 
 
 The sense in which I suggested that we might know 
 present feeling will now be clear also. We know it 
 when, and only when, our present act is to think of our 
 present feeling. In that sense I know it while I write 
 this passage. But in an ordinary act of cognition we 
 cannot know present feeling any more than we can see our 
 own face : it is not invisible, but we happen always to be 
 looking the other way. As in a ghost story, I leave rny 
 past selves all along the road, and when I like I can turn 
 and see them. Nevertheless I cannot see what they saw, 
 nor can I feel what their attitudes felt like, except by 
 
THE APPREHENSION OF FEELING 101 
 
 getting into them again. This is a perfectly possible 
 proceeding, but it is a revival or recall of past process and 
 not an apprehension of it. Between repetition and appre- 
 hension I have to choose. 
 
 Note. Our relation to the feelings of others will 
 obviously come under the preceding account. I may 
 share them in genuine sympathy : or I may play at 
 sharing them, in imaginative Einfuhlung : or I may 
 apprehend them in that in thought 1 perceive what they 
 are. That is, theymay supply me both with primary or 
 imaged feelings, and with objective contents of knowledge. 
 
 The investigation contained in this chapter was 
 occasioned by the study of Professor Alexander's most 
 suggestive and provocative paper on " Mental Activity 
 in Willing and in Ideas 1 ." I have come to agree with 
 a good deal of its doctrine, but with one passage I 
 am bound to disagree even more completely than I 
 did at first reading of it. It appears on page 27 of the 
 paper : " To me, I myself cannot be a cognitum, I can 
 only be a cognitum to a being who stood outside both 
 me and physical things, in the same way as I myself 
 stand outside physical things and life. Life is an 
 individual thing to the liver. But I can contemplate 
 another being's life though I cannot live it. Now it 
 is as impossible for me to contemplate my own mind as 
 for an animal to live another animal's life. There is no 
 reason, however, in the nature of things why a race of 
 beings should not arise or be now in existence who can con- 
 template minds. Such beings would be of a higher order 
 of mind and for them minds would be objects of knowledge." 
 1 Arist. Soc. 1908-9. 
 
102 THE APPREHENSION OF FEELING 
 
 I hope it is clear from the foregoing pages what my 
 comment on this would be. 
 
 (1) I can and do contemplate my own mind as I 
 contemplate physical things, and life, and anything 
 else in the universe. Professor Alexander proves it 
 by writing papers about his mind. 
 
 (2) But to contemplate is not the same as to live 
 through. My contemplation of an animal's life is a quali- 
 tatively different experience from the animal's, and my con- 
 templation of my own life is a different experience from 
 the living of it ; hence I can only contemplate the part 
 which I am not engaged in living. 
 
 (3) As for the higher race of beings, they will have 
 the advantage of being able to contemplate any part of 
 my life they choose, since they are not engaged in living 
 any of it ; and they will presumably have the disadvantage 
 of a much more limited access to what they want to know. 
 So far they are in the same position as my next-door 
 neighbour. If they are able by some means to share my 
 feelings and thoughts, they may overcome the limit of 
 access by living my life as well as contemplating it. They 
 will then be in the same position as myself. Of course if 
 they are cleverer than myself they will be able to do 
 much more with that position. And if they can " enter 
 into" my beliefs and feelings without being actually 
 possessed by them, as I do fitfully with my past self and 
 with other people, they will keep a calm and detachment 
 of mind which will enable them to understand me much 
 better than I understand myself. But I cannot imagine 
 any other way than this. They can contemplate heaven 
 and earth and myself and themselves, and so can I. And 
 for all of us "seeing life" is a different thing from living it. 
 
PART II 
 
 ERROR 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 IS ANY KNOWLEDGE INFALLIBLE? 
 
 HITHERTO we have dealt with the nature of knowledge 
 in the narrower sense of that term, without complicating 
 the matter by consideration of the fact that cognition in- 
 cludes not only true knowledge but mistakes. We must 
 now take account of this, and in order to guard against 
 false accounts it will be necessary to begin by asking 
 whether any part of cognition is free from this mixture. 
 Is there any department of experience in which it is 
 impossible to make a mistake ? 
 
 No one, I believe, has ever claimed infallibility for 
 inference, therefore we may confine our examination to 
 uninferred knowledge. With regard to this we shall not 
 even now attempt a complete enumeration of its different 
 kinds, but shall only examine the most prominent. There 
 are not many kinds for which infallibility has been seriously 
 claimed. 
 
 1. The apprehension of a priori truths, such as the 
 law of connection between premises and conclusion in a 
 syllogism, is an instance of knowledge that is highly certain 
 and trustworthy. The propositions apprehended are self- 
 evident in a marked degree, and they are continually being 
 
106 IS ANY KNOWLEDGE INFALLIBLE? 
 
 tested and easily justified by means of all our other know- 
 ledge and by new experiments. Since they are the basis 
 of inference, they cannot themselves be strictly inferred, 
 but they are plain without inference. Nevertheless this 
 self-evidence is clearly a matter of degree and not of 
 uniqueness of kind, for it varies with the simplicity of the 
 truth and not with its uninferrable nature. The connec- 
 tion between premises and conclusion in a first-figure 
 syllogism is no more a priori than the corresponding 
 connection in the fourth figure, yet it is undeniably easier 
 to see. In the second case indeed it is quite possible to 
 make a mistake. We must grant, then, that the cognition 
 of propositions of this kind is not as such infallible ; 
 it is only on a high level of certainty because in the 
 most important cases the propositions are very easy to 
 apprehend. 
 
 2. Memory, which we have seen reason to class as un- 
 inferred, is undeniably fallible. Occasionally we attempt 
 to defend it by a shift of names ; when a recollection is 
 proved false we say of it not " I remembered " but " I 
 thought I remembered." But it has never been main- 
 tained that we have here a real difference in the quality 
 of our experience. A false memory is just the same sort 
 of experience as a true one ; therefore memory as such is 
 not infallible. 
 
 3. Infallibility has sometimes been claimed for intro- 
 spective judgments, but the claim has not often been made 
 by psychologists, who are too well aware of the difficulty 
 of introspection. In simple cases, certainly, introspective 
 knowledge is amongst the most certain that we have ; it 
 is hardly possible to be mistaken in judging that I have 
 at this moment a visual sensation of marks on a white 
 
IS ANY KNOWLEDGE INFALLIBLE? 107 
 
 ground and certain sensations of noise and of contact, nor 
 in judging that I am trying to write about the theory of 
 knowledge. But the judgments must be simple if they 
 are to be certain, hence introspection as such is not infal- 
 lible. The belief that it is so has sometimes been made 
 more plausible by a confusion with two other things. One 
 is the certainty of that non-introspective, non-apprehen- 
 sive, " immediate " knowledge of our present feelings arid 
 conations in which some writers believe. As was ex- 
 plained in the chapter on the apprehension of feeling, I 
 cannot see my way to believing that such knowledge exists 
 at all ; it appears to me that we feel our feelings, but that, 
 except in fallible reflection, we do not know them. The 
 other confusion is with the undeniable infallibility of 
 " simple apprehension " so far as it goes. This will be 
 explained presently. 
 
 4. The really serious question comes up in connection 
 with sensations. The opinion that these cannot go wrong 
 is of course a natural one for those who hold that sensa- 
 tions are " immediately given " in a way in which other 
 knowledge is not given ; but we have opposed this opinion, 
 urging on the one hand that all knowledge was " given," 
 and on the other hand that the contents of sensation like 
 all other contents were presented as objects. What we 
 have to investigate is the claim of a special sort of given 
 contents to be necessarily true representatives of the 
 objects to which they belong. 
 
 The prima facie argument against this claim is the 
 existence of inappropriate sensations and of hallucinations. 
 A green rose-leaf is presented to a colour-blind man, and 
 it seems to him the same colour as the rose. A cold-spot 
 is stimulated by a warmed steel point, and we feel the 
 
108 IS ANY KNOWLEDGE INFALLIBLE ? 
 
 point as cold. A hypnotist suggests to his subject that 
 the gold coin in his hand is burning him, and immediately 
 the subject feels the burn. In all these cases have we not 
 false sensations ? The answer is instructive and valid. 
 We have, it is said, nothing wrong here in the actual 
 sensational experience. The error enters only in the per- 
 ceptive judgment by which the sense-content is enlarged. 
 There would have been no error had I judged that with 
 my defective eye the tint of the rose is indistinguishable 
 from that of the rose-leaf, or that the pain was a vivid 
 image not connected with my hand. These true cogni- 
 tions could still have contained the same sense-content as 
 the false ones, as is shown by the fact that when my 
 opinion is corrected the sense-content does often really 
 remain unchanged ; when I know that the steel point is 
 warm I still feel it as cold. Sense-content, then, is inde- 
 pendent of these errors and untouched both by them 
 and by their correction. Therefore sense-experience is 
 infallible. 
 
 Now the interesting point is that this kind of defence 
 need not be confined to sense experience. Take an object 
 of higher order such as we find in an illusion of direction 
 or of comparative length. When we thoroughly under- 
 stand the illusion-picture and know that the lines are 
 really straight and parallel they may still appear markedly 
 curved and convergent, and we say that there is no fault 
 so long as we are not misled by the appearance. Or take 
 a false memory. I remember an event in my childhood 
 which I know from circumstantial evidence cannot possibly 
 have occurred, and I find that this knowledge has not the 
 least effect upon the clearness and firmness of the memory. 
 I say naturally that I am not in error from this event 
 
IS ANY KNOWLEDGE INFALLIBLE? 109 
 
 appearing to me when I look towards iny past, so long as 
 I do not believe that it really did happen in my past. In 
 common language we say that there can be no error in 
 apprehending any object whatever, so long as I do not 
 believe in it. 
 
 Belief, in this sense, is the apprehension of a content 
 as belonging to a particular part of reality. There is no 
 error in the sting of heat unless I connect it with the 
 object touching me instead of my body, or with my 
 body instead of my imaging mind. There is no error in 
 remembering until I assign the scene to the actual past. 
 I may think of the doings of wizards without the least 
 error until I say " Wizards exist and in fact behave thus." 
 The infallible way and the only way of avoiding error 
 is to stop short of the line round our content at which it 
 unites with a special and determinate universe of reality 1 . 
 
 Thus it appears that the infallibility of sense is nothing 
 but a special case of the infallibility of all such simple 
 apprehension. Sense cannot lie, for it is incapable of 
 pronouncing on the critical point ; in it we are too low for 
 any distinction of universe. It is infallible not because of 
 its immediacy but because of its inarticulateness. 
 
 The Search for Foundations of Knowledge. 
 
 It appears, then, that no knowledge worth speaking of 
 is infallible. We must now represent that this makes very 
 little difference to our security. The search for some in- 
 fallible experience has nearly always been prompted by 
 
 1 It is most important to remember that the introspective judgment 
 "that I am apprehending this and that" is quite different from simple 
 apprehension. 
 
110 IS ANY KNOWLEDGE INFALLIBLE? 
 
 the desire to find safe foundations for our knowledge to 
 rest on ; but, as a matter of fact, on no foundation which 
 has ever been proposed would our knowledge have had 
 room to rest. Suppose that sense-knowledge in some 
 concrete meaning of the term, or that introspective judg- 
 ment, were to be proved infallible, and that on these we 
 attempted to base the rest of our knowledge, how could it 
 be done ? The case would be different if every kind of 
 uninferred knowledge were as such unerring, but for 
 memory at least such unerringness has never been claimed, 
 and yet we cannot proceed one step without trusting to 
 memory. Nowhere in cognition is an unshakable foun- 
 dation to be found for the mass and breadth of our belief. 
 The world of knowledge, in fact, is here in just the 
 same position as the world of will. We find on the surface 
 of the latter a mass and tangle of miscellaneous desires. 
 Some of our purposes hang together and support one 
 another, but some do not. Some are the embodiments of 
 dispositions that lie deep in our nature and send their 
 roots into every part of it ; others seem to have scarcely 
 any roots at all. Yet in all of them we are desiring, seek- 
 ing, valuing. By their means we have to find out that 
 way of life which is our good on the whole. In this good 
 some of our present stray desires will certainly not be 
 fulfilled, and we cannot find any department of desire 
 which is safe from error of this sort. No one concrete 
 purpose or valuation can be pronounced a priori to be 
 certainly right, not even our most primitive instincts, or 
 our most delicate intuitions, or our most faithful loyalty 
 to general rules. Any one of these may, under certain 
 circumstances, mislead us. Not one desire is infallible, 
 and yet on the whole man does work out his good. 
 
IS ANY KNOWLEDGE INFALLIBLE? Ill 
 
 Knowledge without Foundations. 
 
 Are we then left, in ethics or in epistemology, with 
 a castle in the air ? The answer is neither new nor 
 original. 
 
 We have found that " primary reality " in both worlds 
 the immediately given in every sense of immediate 
 the actually desired and actually cognised provides in no 
 department a safe and infallible foundation for the rest 1 . 
 Everywhere, as experiences which primarily are indistin- 
 guishable, we have both right and wrong, both truth and 
 mistake. A right desire or a true belief is not in itself a 
 different sort of experience from the wrong and false ; its 
 self-evidence is the same; it is only by other evidence 
 that we distinguish the two. Of no kind of experience 
 can we say, Here error is impossible. 
 
 To defend the reality of the known universe by dis- 
 puting this seems a plan exactly parallel to the defence 
 of morals by intuitionist ethics. Since the beginning of 
 morality there have been those who sought within value- 
 experience for some infallible bit of experience on which 
 the whole of conduct might be based. Some had intuitions 
 of the Ten Commandments ; some turned to our most ele- 
 mentary feelings and maintained that the perfect clue for 
 our guidance lay there. Nevertheless the reply has always 
 been made that in the first place not one of these valua- 
 tions was unerring, and that in the second place, even if 
 they had been unerring, each was too narrow and small to 
 
 1 On the mixed nature of "primary reality" see a very interesting 
 review of Mr Schiller by Dr Stout, in Mind for 1907. On this particular 
 point I agree with Mr Schiller as against his critic. 
 
112 IS ANY KNOWLEDGE INFALLIBLE? 
 
 provide the foundation of ethics. There is not one in- 
 fallible desire, and yet the world of values stands firm, and 
 there is one kind of life and no other which is satisfactory 
 to man. Ethics has to be based not on any one part of 
 value-experience but on the whole character of humanity, 
 which can only reveal itself gradually, on a large scale, and 
 in many different ways. 
 
 So must it be with knowledge. No one particular 
 judgment of ours need be infallible, yet the universe 
 stands firm. In arithmetic, for instance, every one of our 
 operations is exposed to error, and yet the laws of number 
 hold and we find them out; and through our uncertain 
 operations we obtain an immense body of beautifully 
 established knowledge. So with the whole of cognition, 
 justified by the whole Wirklichkeits2usammenhang l . The 
 lack of unshakable foundations within experience is no 
 great matter, for every such foundation has turned out to 
 be far too narrow for the breadth of the structure. It is 
 enough that the world which manifests itself in the whole 
 of experience should be real. 
 
 1 Lipps, Bewusstsein und Gegenstande, p. 98. 
 
CHAPTEE X 
 
 ERROR AND THE REAL 
 
 " IT is enough," we said at the end of the last chapter, 
 "that the world which manifests itself in the whole of 
 experience should be real." In the mixed contents of 
 feeling and will a real world of character shows itself; in 
 the mixed contents of cognition a real universe is pre- 
 sented. Now here we must go into more detail. What 
 real object can be said to be presented in an erroneous 
 apprehension ? 
 
 In our original distinction between content and object 
 we said that the object was progressively revealed in the 
 content as investigation proceeded. This would seem to 
 leave us in this case with a choice of descriptions. We 
 may take the "object" in error either as that which 
 we finally believe in, or as that which we believe in 
 whilst the error still prevails. Either description will 
 bring out some truth. The one looks on erroneous 
 contents as being peculiar exhibitions of ordinary objects ; 
 the other takes them to be presentations of objects 
 which in themselves are peculiar. We will begin with 
 the first. 
 
 w. 8 
 
114 ERROR AND THE REAL 
 
 1. Error as Abnormal Presentation. 
 
 In this account we start from the fact that all mistakes 
 are imperfect apprehensions of the ordinary world. Some- 
 thing must be present with us in order even to be mis- 
 understood. A column of figures, for one child in the 
 class, adds up to an amount not reached by any other 
 child or by the teacher. A man bearing pain heroically 
 appears to us as a man insensible to pain. A fictitious 
 injury, brooded over by a sullen-tempered person, appears 
 to him presently as an actual injury. In all these experi- 
 ences, at the time when and in so far as the error is 
 true error, our attitude is that of the ordinary recipient 
 apprehension; if our mistake is genuine, we are not 
 choosing to make a mistake, but are receiving what comes 
 to us. What comes is a peculiar manifestation of the 
 object, because, presumably, there is something peculiar 
 in our conditioning body or mind. Nevertheless it is a 
 real manifestation of an ordinary object. One of the laws 
 that make up the very nature of 6 + 3 is this : that for a 
 boy in a particular degree of hurry, with a particular 
 share of carelessness, it will add up to 10. 
 
 2. Error as Presentation of Abnormal Objects. 
 
 In the second description, instead of saying that the 
 peculiarities of our mind or body condition the particular 
 appearance of the " external " universe, we reckon them 
 along with this as elements in that given world which 
 appears. We have then no reason to say that any mode 
 of presentation is peculiar or abnormal, but instead we 
 
ERROR AND THE REAL 115 
 
 comment on the peculiarity of some of the objects with 
 which our life presents us. 
 
 In the first place, all these objects are presented, are 
 actually seen. They are present with us, forced upon us, 
 given and apprehended, just as certainly as any others. 
 An erroneous content, like any other content, falls wholly 
 on the object side of life. It is not an expression of 
 myself in the sense in which an impulse or a feeling is 
 an expression of myself; it is something given, to which 
 I respond. To put it shortly, as before, when I am 
 genuinely mistaken I am never choosing to make a 
 mistake 1 . 
 
 This means that all these objects in some way and to 
 some extent are real, for they are proving themselves 
 real making themselves count. Nevertheless they are 
 unable to count for much. Their self-evidence is there, 
 but other evidence collapses about them. They break 
 their promises ; they rouse expectations and disappoint 
 them ; they contradict themselves. Presently we " see 
 through them"; they become "transparent" fallacies. 
 And finally they fade altogether out of our world. 
 
 Every object which can appear to us has reality 
 enough to appear; it is for us to discover how much 
 more reality it has. An ordinary object can appear on 
 its own account, and it can do more, for it can appear to 
 other people, and can keep its promises, and can affect 
 other objects, and can often live with a life of its own. 
 The object in error appears only parasitically, clinging 
 to other objects, and in all the further tests it fails. 
 
 1 If we say in the ordinary phrase that objects appear " to " the mind, 
 then by the very force of words these objects, like all others, are " extra- 
 mental." 
 
 82 
 
116 ERROR AND THE REAL 
 
 
 
 No more than other objects is it created by our appre- 
 hension of it, but it has no more reality than serves it 
 to appear 1 . 
 
 Other Accounts of Error. 
 
 Mistakes have been described in many other ways, 
 but we are cut off from using many of the descriptions 
 by the doctrines laid down in earlier parts of this essay. 
 We are not at liberty, for instance, to say in the usual 
 sense that error lies in the failure of our ideas to corre- 
 spond with reality, and that truth lies in their success; 
 for in treating of true cognition we denied the existence 
 of any "ideas" between us and the real object. The 
 most we can say is that error means the failure of the 
 real world to appear to us in a normal way. Again, we 
 cannot express ourselves by saying that in error we con- 
 struct wrongly, or combine the given wrongly; for we 
 have urged that knowledge is not construction or combi- 
 nation but apprehension only, and that not only elements 
 but the forms of their combination are presented to us. 
 Professor Alexander says 2 that a centaur consists of a real 
 head and a real body, and that I have only put the head 
 on the wrong body. But, in the first place, I did not put 
 it there ; I had no choice in the matter, unless the case is 
 one of invention and not of error at all. And in the 
 second place the combination form is so essential a part 
 of the content presented that I remove only a very small 
 
 1 This has to be carefully stated, for even in an erroneous object in- 
 vestigation may go on disclosing features without limit. Thin and 
 unstable as these objects are their esse is far more than percipi. 
 
 2 Aristotelian Society, 1909-10. 
 
ERROR AND THE REAL 117 
 
 part of error by asserting that the elements are not 
 erroneous 1 . 
 
 Nor, further, can we say that error consists in taking 
 up a wrong attitude towards a real object the attitude 
 of belief instead of doubt or assumption ; for we have laid 
 it down that belief is characterised not by attitude or act 
 but by content apprehended. Nor, I fear, can we adopt 
 a very attractive account which makes error consist only 
 in leaving things out, in failing to see all that is in the 
 real object. In the way of its use there stands the objec- 
 tion that we do not attribute error where the content 
 of knowledge is merely defective ; we attribute it only 
 when the content has an addition which is positively 
 wrong. Where we believe a slander, for instance, our 
 error lies not merely in our failure to perceive the alleged 
 event as a work of imagination but in our apprehension 
 of it as an actual event in a given person's life. Error is 
 something more than ignorance. 
 
 Error Described, not Explained. 
 
 Our own accounts of the subject, even more than those 
 we have avoided, are obviously not explanations but 
 descriptions. The explanation of the possibility of making 
 mistakes is far beyond the scope of this essay, and would 
 involve the whole metaphysics of the relation of substance 
 to its appearances and of the relation of mind to the 
 universe. Our business here is only to guard ourselves 
 
 1 The assertion itself seems highly doubtful. If I remember a tune 
 wrongly at all what guarantee is there that it will not appear with a 
 note which, as it happens, has never occurred in the actual world? 
 
 For excellent criticism of the combination view, see Dr Stout's article 
 on " Error " in Personal Idealism, pp. 34-35. 
 
118 ERROR AND THE REAL 
 
 against descriptions which seem misleading, and in par- 
 ticular to guard against any that would tend to weaken 
 our hold of the fundamental axiom that in true know- 
 ledge of whatever sort we have reality, in the fullest sense 
 of that word, present in the mind. 
 
 Even a description of error, with explanation un- 
 attempted, forms indeed a crucial task for epistemology. 
 The undeniable fact is that sometimes we know truly and 
 sometimes we make mistakes ; and in this we find a 
 double-edged sword which threatens the two classes of 
 theory. If in cognition we are in direct contact with real 
 object how can we ever have error ? If we are not, how 
 can we ever have truth? To the present writer 1 it 
 appears imperative to take the first alternative ; and that 
 means that all the chief difficulties in our way will be 
 connected with this section of the essay. The writer is 
 only too well aware of her incapacity for dealing with 
 them in any way thorough enough to be satisfactory. 
 The description may, however, be carried a little further, 
 and may be so used as to make the difficulties themselves 
 a little more vivid, which is perhaps the most desirable 
 thing at present with a view to advancing the meta- 
 physics of the subject. We may be able to obtain this 
 vividness by means of a rigidly literal use of a certain 
 ambiguity of ordinary language. 
 
 The Double Sense of Mind. 
 
 We hold fast even in the department of Error to the 
 doctrine which we have professed from the beginning, 
 namely that in so far as the mind is cognitive it is 
 
 1 As also, I am very glad to observe, to Dr Stout. See his essay in 
 Personal Idealism. 
 
ERROR AND THE REAL 119 
 
 recipient only. To cognise is to apprehend the given. 
 The object comes to the knower, comes before him ; and 
 cannot be created or even affected by his recipience of it. 
 
 Yet in Error, apparently, something in the concrete 
 event is affected, or even created, by peculiarities of the 
 individual. An ordinary object appears to him in a way 
 in which it does not appear to other persons, or to this 
 person at other times ; or (taking our second account) an 
 extraordinary object appears to him, which finds no place 
 in the common course of nature. 
 
 The question is how both these statements can be 
 true. How can the individual mind, receiving what is 
 presented to it, be a factor in determining what object or 
 what appearance of an object it shall receive ? It is the 
 business of metaphysics to explain the possibility ; our 
 business here is only to state consistently and in contrast 
 the facts to be explained. This task would seem to be 
 most conveniently performed by a frank use of the double 
 meaning which popular usage attaches to our most im- 
 portant term. 
 
 We are accustomed in fact to speak of objects with 
 equal readiness as presented " to " the mind and as pre- 
 sented "in" the mind. These uses are obviously incom- 
 patible, and involve a double meaning of " mind " which 
 we may turn to our own account. Mind in the first sense 
 must be that which apprehends the object ; mind in the 
 second sense is a factor in determining the appearance of 
 the object. When a mind in the second sense is abnormal, 
 the world must misrepresent itself to mind in the first 
 sense. 
 
 I, it appears, sit within my mind, and any peculiarity 
 in the atmosphere of that mind may affect the appear- 
 
120 ERROR AND THE REAL 
 
 ance of the objects which come before me. Or, I receive 
 the objects mixed with my mind. The development of a 
 presentation will reveal to me something of the world's 
 character and something also of my mind's stupidity and 
 fatigue. Or, in a vivid if difficult metaphor, the outer 
 mind is the violin and the world is the bow, and I, the 
 inner mind, am the hearer of the music. If the violin is 
 defective the music will be spoilt 1 . 
 
 With this description and distinction the subject 
 must be left. The metaphysical questions which so 
 evidently are raised must be answered in some other 
 place than this essay. 
 
 1 The metaphor is derived from Witasek's Psychologic, where it is 
 used for a different purpose. 
 
PAET III 
 
 THE MANY-MANSIONED 
 UNIVERSE 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE VAKIOUSNESS OF REALITY 
 
 "EVERYTHING that is anything is an object 1 ." The 
 category of object, says Twardowski 2 , is the most general 
 possible ; it is the Ens of Aristotle and the scholastics ; 
 it includes everything existent and non-existent. Every 
 kind of cognition is the apprehension of some object. 
 " Every presentation and every belief must have an object 
 other than itself and, except in certain cases where mental 
 existents happen to be concerned, extra-mental ;... and 
 ...the object of a thought, even when this object does not 
 exist, has a being which is in no way dependent upon its 
 being an object of thought 3 ." 
 
 So far as I can see, in agreeing with this doctrine 
 I am assuming no more than the simplest psychological 
 account of cognition. I cannot apprehend without appre- 
 hending something. Cognition consists in the presenta- 
 tion of something in consciousness. The something is 
 not my experiencing, for it is experienced. If it were 
 
 1 Mally, in Gegemtandstheorie vnd Psychologic, p. 126. 
 
 2 Inhalt und Gegenstand, p. 39. 
 
 3 Russell, "Meinong's Theory," Mind, 1904, p. 204. 
 
124 THE VARIOUSNESS OF REALITY 
 
 created at the moment I saw it and annihilated the 
 moment I ceased to see it, it would still have a being 
 not dependent on my act of seeing, since it would 
 have been there for me to see. It is not an act of 
 mine ; it is not myself at all ; it is the world in which 
 I live. 
 
 It is simply a psychological fact that I actually 
 have objects ; that a world, of a nature to be continually 
 determined, does come up against me, does enter my 
 consciousness. Sensation and perception are names for 
 coming across objects, apprehending them, in sense ; an 
 idea is the presentation of an object in thought. To say 
 that I only know my own ideas can mean no more than 
 that I do not know the objects which I do not know. The 
 objects come to me and come against me, I reckon on 
 them and must reckon with them, and therefore in that 
 sense they are so far real. Some are to be reckoned with 
 far more than others ; and therefore have greater reality ; 
 they have more power of expansion, involve more, will show 
 themselves in more lights and answer more questions. 
 There is more to be made of a live man than of a man in a 
 dream, especially after I have awakened from the dream. 
 But, since they determine my seeing, since they are stuff 
 that I apprehend, some reality is in them all. 
 
 At present all this seems to me so plain that it is 
 difficult to argue about it. I seem to myself to be stating 
 nothing but the barest facts of living 1 . Descartes only 
 expressed half the basal certainty ; for, since I think, not 
 only must there be an I to think but there must be 
 
 1 Eussell says the theses in question are " generally rejected." Surely 
 this implies some misunderstanding on his part, or on mine, or on the 
 part of the major part of the world. 
 
THE VARIOUSNESS OF REALITY 125 
 
 something that I think of. What I am, and what the 
 something is, of course remains to be determined. But 
 so far as this description goes realism appears to be 
 unanswerable, and subjective idealism to be a most 
 elaborate, unnecessary and ill-founded structure built 
 upon it. 
 
 Let us then assume the truth of this form of realism, 
 and go on to develop some of its consequences. 
 
 Universes of Reality. 
 
 It is clear that these different objects will fall con- 
 veniently into various groups. This is a fact of observa- 
 tion ; it is by no means essential to the theory of realism. 
 If all things had the same sort of reality, if no two had, 
 if we never met the same object twice or if we never 
 met any object but one, still if we met anything, if we 
 were conscious at all, we should be apprehending a real 
 world. As a matter of fact, however, we do find these 
 different groups, and we speak of them conveniently as 
 belonging to different universes of reality. 
 
 One great group, peculiarly interesting for all our 
 practical purposes, is that of physical objects ; existing in 
 ordinary time and space. Closely connected with it yet 
 not exactly identical with it is the world of " homeless " 
 yet somehow actual objects ; of notes and colours, of 
 shapes and relations and complexes, of such " objectives " 
 as hold good of the actual world. There is the world of 
 the objects with which mathematics deals, and so on. 
 
 Besides these, there are groups more remote. The 
 objects I meet in a dream are real, for they do meet me ; 
 but they are out of connection with the objects of my 
 
126 THE VARIOUSNESS OF REALITY 
 
 waking life. When I try to remember a dream, as opposed 
 to trying to continue it, I have lost touch with these 
 objects, and can only turn the former content into an 
 object after the fashion of ordinary psychological investi- 
 gation. But while the dream lasts I am exploring the 
 object itself; asking continually not "What am I thinking 
 of you ? " but " What will you do next ? " And the object 
 proves its reality by doing. Then there are all the worlds 
 of fiction. " The golden mountain of fairy-tale is as little 
 identical with my image of it as the real mountain is 
 identical with my image of it 1 ." " Selbst wenn wir die 
 Centauren oder die goldenen Berge des Marchens vor- 
 stellen, so sind sie fiir uns doch da draussen im Fabelland 
 und nicht 'in uns ' 2 ." " When I judge that Athene was the 
 daughter of Zeus, I am not making this statement about 
 an idea in the heads of the Greeks 3 ." 
 
 In contemplating these objects we are not making 
 objects of our own processes. It is possible, however, to 
 do this, and such objects will not fall behind others in 
 their possession of trans-subjective reality. The objects 
 of " inner perception," says Lipps, though they have not 
 existence independent of my whole consciousness, are still 
 independent of my present consciousness. " When once 
 an experience has occurred it is a fact eternally real, 
 whether or not I am now conscious of it 4 ." 
 
 Finally, we must mention in particular a class which 
 involves some special difficulties that of objects with an 
 internal inconsistency. We seem to meet with them when 
 
 1 A. Hoernle, Mind, 1907, p. 87. 
 
 2 Munsterberg, Psychologic, p. 49. 
 
 3 Meinong, Stellung der Gegenstandstheorie, p. 48. 
 
 4 Bewusstsein und Gegenstande, p. 51. 
 
THE VARIOUSNESS OF EEALITY 127 
 
 for argument's sake we invent such a term as "green 
 crimson," or whenever for practical purposes we employ a 
 reductio ad absurdum proof 1 . I believe that these are real 
 objects like the rest, but their reality has been denied 
 and will need special examination presently. 
 
 Specification of Universe. 
 
 In ordinary judgment we seldom trouble to express in 
 words the situation of the particular sphere of reality in 
 which our objects exist. Sometimes this is only because 
 the whole content of our thought is not put into words. 
 If I describe an imaginary episode in a few sentences both 
 I and my hearer are probably aware throughout that my 
 statements refer to a non-actual universe, and it would 
 be absurd to make an explicit assertion of this fact. 
 Often, however, the nature of the universe concerned is 
 not included in the content of cognition, though it is ready 
 to appear there at any moment. When I read a novel for 
 half an hour at a time I " know " that its universe is 
 outside the actual world that is to say that I should 
 admit it at once if the question were raised ; nevertheless 
 throughout most of my reading the matter is not before 
 my mind at all. I know it ; there is no illusion ; but I am 
 not knowing it. I am interested in the universe of the 
 novel, not in its relation to any other universe ; and there- 
 fore I find it uncomfortable, and the focus of the picture 
 is clumsily disturbed, if the author suddenly introduces a 
 statement about a certain episode being founded or not 
 founded on fact. But it is absolutely unfair to conclude 
 that therefore my enjoyment of fiction is founded on 
 
 1 Meinong, Stellung der Gegenstandstheorie, Chapter II. 
 
128 THE VARIOUSNESS OF REALITY 
 
 illusion 1 . There is never illusion unless there is a mistake, 
 and it seems very hard to be accused of making a mis- 
 take in a judgment of relation simply because I am not at 
 the moment thinking about the relation at all. 
 
 Baldwin's .account of our assignments of objects to 
 their universes forms one of the best parts in Thought 
 and Things. " Every object of cognition has subsistence 2 
 as simply made-up or present-existence comes later, when 
 the object is determined as existing in one or other of 
 alternate spheres. Existence is not a content added. It 
 is rather an intent, an aspect of a content already made-up, 
 whereby it is recognised as fulfilling a certain sort of ex- 
 pectation or demand made upon it." " An existential 
 judgment often for the first time determines the real 
 reference or control of a content which has already had 
 formulation in a predicative or relational context. The 
 relational meaning may be determined in the logical 
 mode, while the real reference is still schematic, alterna- 
 tive, or quite undetermined. For example, I may say 
 c Sea-serpents hiss ' before I am at all prepared to say 
 whether they exist or not, and in what realm." " Instead 
 of saying with Bradley that in judging 'the sea-serpent 
 exists' we have qualified the real world by the adjective 
 of the sea-serpent, I should say that we have qualified the 
 sea-serpent by the adjective of realness of a restricted sort. 
 The 'realness' is constituted just by the... recognition of 
 the sea-serpent as a ' controlled ' content. Of course, after 
 
 1 As e.g. Hoernle, Mind, 1907, p. 88. 
 
 2 Baldwin says that his "subsistence" is equivalent to Meinong's 
 Bestand; but in Meinong's usage we deny Bestand of e.g. relations 
 which do not hold (such as the difference between two exactly similar 
 things). For Baldwin these have subsistence since they are objects of 
 thought. More words are needed. 
 
THE VARIOQSNESS OF REALITY 129 
 
 reality as a logical universal has arisen, we may use it 
 substantively to the various contents as adjectives, as is 
 seen especially in negative judgments of existence." " The 
 pre-supposition of a sphere of existence or reality is always 
 the sleeping-partner in the entire firm-meaning expressed 
 as ' Content, Ltd.' until this partner claims the right, in 
 the existential judgment, to have his name written out 
 in the firm-title, * Content, Reality, & Co. 1 ' " 
 
 Notes on Difference of Universe. 
 
 Confusion occurs when the task of remembering the 
 distinction between two universes becomes too delicate 
 and difficult for us. Sometimes, however, we seem to 
 fall into the other mistake of forgetting identity. To a 
 schoolboy, and indeed I think to most of us, the person- 
 ages of a remote period of history fail to appear as in a 
 world continuous with our own. They are not actual 
 to us ; we think of the time-series of their lives almost 
 as if it were the time-series of a novel; not as part of 
 the time in which we live. I do not know whether 
 it shows a peculiar defect in my intelligence that I 
 find the same difficulty even with people and events 
 of the present day if they belong to distant parts of the 
 world. 
 
 Of course, since " universe of reality " is no more than a 
 picturesque name for kind or department of reality, it will 
 often be indifferent whether we speak of two universes or 
 of divisions of one universe, or of one universe qualified in 
 a certain way, or thought of in abstraction from some 
 property which really belongs to it. It depends on our 
 
 1 Thought and Things, Vol. i., pp. 240, 241; Vol. n., pp. 20, 21, 25. 
 W 9 
 
130 THE VARIOUSNESS OF REALITY 
 
 own taste whether we say that the older writers on 
 political economy dealt with our actual world or with 
 some other. And when a remark is prefaced by the 
 phrase " humanly speaking " I am never sure, nor do I 
 think the speaker is always sure, whether it is meant to 
 apply to actual fact or not. But we must be prepared to 
 recognise divisions when they are convenient, unless we 
 are to put too great a strain on our psychology. Such a 
 strain appears to be involved in all attempts to impose 
 the same centre or scheme of localisation on all universes. 
 When I say " I have just been enjoying the scent of these 
 roses," the reality apprehended is naturally and suitably 
 described as being " continuous with present perception." 
 But the description is very much less appropriate when we 
 say "The death of her first child was a terrible shock to my 
 sister," and it becomes almost absurd when our judgments 
 are " Pharaoh's daughter walked by the river," " Perdita 
 was abandoned on the sea-coast of Bohemia," and "Of 
 imaginary curves of such a kind the following equation 
 holds." The reality of these objects is no doubt continuous 
 with that of present perception in the sense that by taking 
 pains we could find the way round. But this way round 
 does not enter into our ordinary thought. Nor, even when 
 we do see something of it, need that element which is 
 nearest actuality be also nearest the centre of the picture. 
 In a historical novel we usually date the real events 
 with reference to the fictitious events, and not these by 
 those, 
 
 As we must allow each universe the right to its own 
 schemes of localisation, so must we allow to each its own 
 sense of " existential judgment," and its own distinction 
 between necessary truths and truths of mere fact. We 
 
THE VAKIOUSNESS OF REALITY 131 
 
 may have a merely categorical judgment within a ficti- 
 tious as well as within the actual world. Contrast " The 
 Utopians are a singularly orderly nation " with " If another 
 nation attacked them they would naturally defend them- 
 selves in the following way." The distinction between 
 categorical and conditional would be no clearer if these 
 judgments referred to the inhabitants of Germany 1 . 
 
 1 This in criticism of the mode of expression in Bosanquet's Logic, 
 Vol. i., pp. 116, 215. 
 
 92 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 ASSUMPTIONS 
 
 AMONGST the objects just described occur some which 
 have a peculiar and interesting quality, in that they are 
 created by our own choice. At the moment of appre- 
 hension I deliberately determine the character of the 
 object I am to apprehend. I can do this in the actual 
 world, by building three ships and seeing them completed. 
 Or I can do it in non-actual worlds by means simply of 
 the fiat, "Let there be three ships." That is, I can 
 assume. 
 
 Assumption in its ordinary concrete use is a double- 
 sided term, and we must be careful not to confuse the 
 two elements it implies. We create our objects, and in 
 the same moment we apprehend them, and the two pro- 
 cesses are as distinct as they are in the building and 
 seeing of an actual ship. The being of an assumption- 
 object is in no way dependent upon my apprehension of 
 it, inevitable though that apprehension is. It is dependent 
 upon the act of creation alone. The cognitive element in 
 an assumption differs in no way from any other cognition. 
 Here as elsewhere cognition is nothing but the presenta- 
 tion of reality in consciousness, only in this case the reality 
 presented is our o.wn creation. 
 
ASSUMPTIONS 133 
 
 The Peculiarity of Creation by Assumption. 
 
 When I write a chapter in a novel I do in a different 
 universe precisely what I do when in the actual world 
 I build a ship. I enlarge reality ; create more objects for 
 the apprehension of myself and of others. These objects 
 would be real if they were only presented once and then 
 destroyed and forgotten ; but in most cases they have 
 much more reality than this, since they are capable of 
 being presented again and again, of being looked at in 
 various aspects, of being explored and developed in con- 
 sciousness to an indefinite extent. 
 
 The only difficulty in this matter seems to lie in the 
 distinction of universes. It is not always easy to keep 
 one's mind clear as to the exact kind of reality which has 
 been created. 
 
 To begin with, we have the ambiguity of the phrase 
 
 " Let there be ," " Let it be so." The effect of this is 
 
 sometimes an alteration in the actual world ; it is the fiat 
 of creation in this world. More often, however, we intend to 
 make no such alteration but only to assume it. The actual 
 change does not occur in the world of actuality. Our 
 assumption has reference to the actual world, but creates 
 its object in the sphere of fiction. 
 
 Next, take a universe which is already non-actual. Let 
 it be that of a novel in course of composition. " Henry is 
 not yet utterly depraved. Let him be placed in a position 
 of responsibility and it may save him yet. If a sudden and 
 striking call were to come he could probably pull himself 
 together. But no such chance of redemption is to be 
 granted him." That is, even in the fictitious world of the 
 novel, the events I apprehend are not to be actual. My 
 
134 ASSUMPTIONS 
 
 assumption has reference to the novel universe, but creates 
 its object in a world more fictitious still. I create against 
 the background of the novel but in a different material 1 . 
 
 Thus we may lay down the rule that assumption 
 never creates in the universe to which it refers. A new 
 universe is always introduced, one remove further from 
 actuality. I can assume an assumption " Suppose your 
 opponent in this game of chess were to think of your 
 attacking him thus." Or I may make the hero of my 
 play write a novel in which the heroine writes a short 
 story describing the writing of an epic. Every assumption 
 brings in a new universe without the slightest confusion ; 
 every creation is in a new material. 
 
 Finally, as before, an object in each of these universes 
 has its own sort of existence. A high golden mountain is 
 not " actually" high, nor does an existent golden mountain 
 actually exist, since they do not enter actuality at all. But 
 in their own universe they are high and they do exist 2 . The 
 word " actually" is indeed quite ambiguous on this account. 
 
 Conative Analogy for Assumption. 
 
 When Mr Hoernle, in a passage quoted above, sug- 
 gested that our enjoyment of fiction rested on illusion, he 
 supported his argument by the observation that a wish 
 
 1 In such a phrase as " Let ABC be an equilateral triangle " there is 
 the same ambiguity as we noticed at first. With regard to the universe of 
 real space I am assuming ; in the universe of fictitious geometrical figures 
 I am creating. If I am concerned only with a piece of paper that lies 
 before me, then my phrase expresses no assumption but a simple impera- 
 tive issuing in a bodily action. It is in exactly the same case as "Let us 
 build a ship." "Let us imagine a triangle" lies between the two. In 
 regard to the world of images it is actual creation, in regard to that of 
 sense-perception it may fairly be called assumption. 
 
 2 Of. Meinong, Stellung der Gegenstandstheorie, p. 17. 
 
ASSUMPTIONS 135 
 
 can only be maintained if we suppress the collision of its 
 idea with reality, and that if it is maintained it tends to 
 become a desire. I urge that this analogy is wrong. 
 A wish belongs to my "actual" self; it is an incipient 
 desire, kept from passing into action by the fact that the 
 resistance of the environment (to neglect more compli- 
 cated cases) makes action hopeless. This is analogous to 
 an object which is apprehended in the actual world and 
 which yet is unable, on account of the weakness of my 
 mind, to gain my full attention and to work itself out in 
 full and consistent belief. If my puzzle-headedness gave 
 way a little my attention would be gained and the 
 development would take place. If the mental weakness 
 increased even the marginal apprehension would dis- 
 appear. Similarly Mr Hoernle is right in saying that any 
 relaxation of the known pressure of the environment will 
 turn the wish into a desire (and then into an impulse), 
 whilst an increase of the restraining pressure may abolish 
 it even as a wish 1 . 
 
 If then a wish in the conative sphere does not corre- 
 spond to an assumption in the cognitive, what shall we 
 say is the true conative analogy for assuming ? 
 
 So far as I can see, the following is the proper line of 
 argument. When we assume, conation enters in a peculiar 
 way into the cognitive world. Normally it enters only in 
 the activity of apprehending objects which were already 
 real, as when we look round to acquire new perceptions, 
 or as when we draw inferences from facts which we know. 
 
 1 For the whole scheme of the cognitive-conative analogy as I see it I 
 must refer to my Logic of Will. When I wrote this, however, I was un- 
 acquainted with the notion of Scheingefuhle, and the scheme might now 
 be greatly extended by their means. 
 
136 ASSUMPTIONS 
 
 But in assumption we have not only a new apprehension, 
 but a new object is created for us to apprehend. So in 
 the analogy cognition must enter peculiarly into the 
 conative sphere. Its normal entrance develops our estab- 
 lished dispositions by setting before us new objects which 
 would satisfy established desires, or by finding means to our 
 ends ; but in the case analogous to assumption it must so 
 enter as to create a new disposition in us. Further, the 
 new object which is created by assuming has a reality 
 which is not that of the actual world, and therefore the 
 new disposition must be separated from the actual in 
 some equivalent way. 
 
 It appears to me that these conditions are satisfied by 
 a slight modification of Meinong's answer to the problem. 
 For him the analogy for assumption is a "Phantasiegefuhl 1 ." 
 I should prefer to say that it was a fantasy-cZm're. "If 
 I were the last person left alive in the world and my cat 
 were the last animal, I should greatly desire that the cat 
 should remain alive and fond of me." Here is a desire 
 which is cut off from actuality as an ordinary wish is not 
 cut off. The person supposed to be concerned need not 
 even be myself; I have fantasy-desires when in watching 
 a play or in reading a powerful novel I take upon myself 
 the impulse and feeling of the hero of the drama. 
 
 In assumption and in dramatic desiring we have 
 analogous creations, of objective and subjective elements 
 which are not actual and which yet in their special way 
 are real. In assumption the actual world has nothing 
 added to it, except in the sense that an event of assump- 
 tion has actually taken place. But the whole real universe 
 is increased, because the newly created object has such 
 1 See, e.g., fiber Annahmen. 
 
ASSUMPTIONS 137 
 
 reality that at least one presentation of it is possible. 
 In Einfuhlung or in any fantasy-conation the complex of 
 dispositions which makes my actual self has nothing 
 added to it, except by means of this exercising and 
 strengthening of my emotional imagination. But my 
 whole self, which is not merely the actual, is increased, 
 for I have added the personality of another to my own, 
 with such reality as allows of at least some of his cona- 
 tions existing in me. By force of Shakespeare's invention 
 the universe contains both himself and Othello. By force 
 of the sympathy of a lad in his audience that lad's self 
 contains not only himself but Othello as well 1 . 
 
 Returning to Mr Hoernle's statements, we see that 
 this change in analogy has freed assumption from its 
 connection with illusion. The passage into actual desire 
 and conation is normal for an actual wish but not for a 
 fantasy-impulse. Similarly assumption in itself, apart from 
 confusion and error, involves no blending of universes. 
 
 Truth and Falsehood in Assumption- Worlds. 
 
 There is no real Ivanhoe, says Professor James, but as 
 many different Ivanhoes as there are different minds cog- 
 nisant of the story. An alteration in one man's version 
 does not affect that of any other man, and we are con- 
 fusing universes if we appeal from our differences to the 
 idea in Scott's mind 2 . One would say that common opinion 
 would hardly go so far as Professor James. It is true 
 
 1 Of course in this contrast of the actual with the rest of the real no 
 disparagement of the former is intended. That which actually exists, 
 which actually happens, which is actually true, has by far the fullest and 
 richest kind of reality. 
 
 2 The Meaning of Truth, pp. 27, 28. 
 
138 
 
 ASSUMPTIONS 
 
 that we change universes if we begin to speak of Scott 
 where we have hitherto spoken only of Wilfrid and 
 Rowena; whilst we are reading intelligently we are not 
 regarding these personages as ideas in the author's mind. 
 Nevertheless we should surely feel ourselves justified in 
 appealing, not to "Scott's idea," but to the "real" story, 
 related in this case in a particular book. If anyone departs 
 from this account of events we do not hesitate to say that 
 he has gone wrong; and for this very reason his alterations 
 fail to affect our own views. The case would be altered of 
 course if our companion declared his intention of writing 
 a new novel on the same subject as Scott; we should then 
 have to make it clear in future (not which author we meant 
 to imitate, but) to which version we meant to conform. 
 
 It is a curious but inevitable fact that the creator of 
 any world has the rights of a despot within it just so far 
 as he chooses to employ those rights. If Shakespeare 
 makes Sir Toby get drunk every day then he does get 
 drunk, and no regrets on the part of a reader can make 
 him respectable company for Olivia. Yet the impossibility 
 is partly determined by the very fact that the author has 
 not chosen to be an absolutely arbitrary despot. The 
 drunkenness he decreed, but for the rest he left his world 
 to be governed by the ordinary law of actuality, that 
 people who behave in this way are not respectable. In 
 general all created worlds conform to these laws except so 
 far as their creators explicitly abolish them. It is false 
 to say that princes are ever turned into swans, or that 
 a man can live when he is marble from the waist down, 
 or that the noise of breaking ice can become a man, 
 unless some German peasant or Arab or Esquimaux has 
 declared with authority that it shall be true. 
 
ASSUMPTIONS 139 
 
 It is surely far less paradoxical to extend our theory 
 of truth and error so as to cover statements in these 
 assumption-worlds than to follow Professor James 1 in 
 refusing to extend them. These objects which we partly 
 create and for which we partly borrow life from the 
 ordinary world have life in them from both sides. They 
 have solidity and resistance. Their presentation in con- 
 sciousness can develop harmoniously in one way and not 
 in another way. We can argue about any good novel ; 
 can maintain not only " Ivanhoe did this," but also " He 
 would never have done that." Of course there are limits 
 to the definiteness of structure which enables us thus to 
 argue, because in no humanly created world can creation 
 be so concrete as to determine everything. It is neither 
 true nor false to say that Viola had brown hair. And a 
 bad novel is harder to argue about than a good, because 
 its personages have so much less in them. 
 
 Now there is another reason on account of which a 
 bad novel may baffle our arguments. That is, it may 
 have a definite structure which is inconsistent with 
 itself. It is exceedingly difficult to discuss the probable 
 colour of a heroine's hair if in Chapter 1 her eyes are 
 a velvety brown and in Chapter 8 they are sapphire blue. 
 So again we may be baffled by Dr Venn's bad theologian 2 , 
 who inquires what the duty of a Christian would be in 
 case his God issued an immoral command. We cannot 
 argue ; not only because the given laws of our universe 
 are not extensive enough, but because their nature invali- 
 dates the ordinary convention that in case of doubt we 
 proceed on the laws of the actual world. Here we only 
 
 1 And Mr Bussell? See the next section. 
 
 2 Empirical Logic, p. 390. 
 
140 ASSUMPTIONS 
 
 know that one of the most fundamental of these laws, 
 that of non-contradiction, does not hold ; and it is exceed- 
 ingly difficult to say what is left to guide us. We know, 
 moreover, that the inventor himself is not prepared to 
 decide the question (as he has the right to do), because he 
 has not noticed what he has done. If he did know it, it 
 would be much better worth while to discuss the con- 
 sequences, and we might be able to give him advice on 
 the most reasonable method of procedure. 
 
 This brings us to a curious and interesting subject 
 that of objects which are deliberately created with an 
 inconsistency in their natures. 
 
 The Problem of Self -Contradictory Objects. 
 
 What are we to say of such objects as " a pentagon 
 with six corners," or " crimson green " ? 
 
 They evidently create many difficulties, and the 
 simplest plan would be to deny that there were any such 
 objects. Yet in every presentation something must be 
 presented. Therefore we must take one or other of two 
 alternatives ; we must either deny that any presentation 
 at all corresponds to such phrases as those given above, 
 or else we must hold that what is presented is not what 
 at first sight it seems to be. These are the only methods 
 by which we can avoid the admission of self-contradictory 
 objects into some universe. 
 
 The first method is that used by Lipps 1 . The thought 
 corresponding to such phrases, he says, is only an attempt 
 at thought. It is not merely that we cannot image the 
 objects, for we can and must think of many things which 
 
 1 Bewusstsein und Gegenstdnde, pp. 60 62. 
 
ASSUMPTIONS 141 
 
 we are unable to image infinite space for instance. It 
 is that we cannot think of them at all. The second plan 
 is Mr Russell's 1 . When we use the phrases in question 
 objects are denoted, but objects of a singularly remote 
 and complicated kind, which contain no inconsistency. 
 
 Lipps' solution seems to me to be blocked by psycho- 
 logical facts. The phrases which indicate self-contradictory 
 objects are used intelligently; they are not mere com- 
 plexes of sounds, and it seems impossible that no real 
 thought should correspond to them. A reductio ad 
 absurdum proof, gone through with a knowledge of what 
 the end will be gone through therefore as a deliberate 
 examination of a self-contradictory object, is surely not 
 a mere attempt at thought. Mr Russell's solution allows 
 it to be considered as good and intelligent thought, and 
 indeed at first sight he seems to attribute to us an almost 
 unheard-of degree of intelligence. Introspection is diffi- 
 cult, and when the question is raised it is not always 
 possible to tell exactly what we have been thinking of; 
 yet I felt it at first impossible to believe that in an 
 ordinary quiet moment of my life, when I did not know 
 that I was doing anything extraordinary, I had really 
 been contemplating the objects described by Mr Russell. 
 On consideration, however, this would seem to be hardly 
 a fair objection, for we may contemplate the most com- 
 plicated object without noticing its complication provided 
 that it only shows us part of itself, or that it is presented 
 with a fallacious appearance of simplicity. 
 
 The real objection to both accounts is, to my mind, 
 the limits they set to our imagination. When I set out 
 deliberately to think of a self- contradictory object, can 
 1 " On Denoting," Mind, 1905. 
 
142 ASSUMFTIONS 
 
 I Dot do so ? No assumption-object, after all, has reality 
 unless I, by assuming it, deliberately give it reality. In 
 all such bestowal of reality I depart from the strict law of 
 the actual world and create a world which is partly new. 
 Cannot I, if I so wish and purpose, set the law of non- 
 contradiction aside ? Against Lipps I maintain that in 
 all the present discussion I am thinking, and am therefore 
 thinking of an object, and ipso facto of a real object. As 
 against Mr Russell I maintain that the objects I think 
 of are by no means so difficult to apprehend as the things 
 which in his view my phrases denote, but that on the 
 contrary they are comparatively simple though self- 
 contradictory presentments. I am glad to find myself 
 here in agreement with Professor Meinong. Dr Stout 
 appears to disagree 1 , yet he says that an object is real if 
 it is possible to make a mistake or even to conceive a 
 mistake concerning it 2 ; and certainly in the matter of 
 self-contradictory objects Mr Russell conceives that 
 Professor Meinong is making a mistake. 
 
 Content and Object. 
 
 Not only is the object of my thought self-contradictory, 
 but that part or aspect of it which enters my thought 
 includes the self-contradiction. Here as on the general 
 relation of content and object I differ from Twardowski, 
 who says that the content can never contain a self- 
 contradiction, and that therefore the object must be real 
 
 1 Personal Idealism, article on "Error," p. 37. "There is only one 
 conceivable way in which the abstract object can be unreal. It may be 
 unreal because by its own intrinsic nature it is incapable of existing. But 
 this can be the case only when it is internally incoherent." 
 
 2 Op. cit. p. 38. 
 
ASSUMPTIONS 143 
 
 in order that it may do so. The content, he says, must 
 exist, and therefore cannot be inconsistent ; the object 
 may be inconsistent, for it is real without existing 1 . In 
 my view both can be inconsistent because neither of them 
 exists. I myself am the only actual existent in the case, 
 unless we apply the term to my act of apprehension, which 
 actually occurs. 
 
 The Truth about Self-Contradictory Objects. 
 
 We now return to the problem we approached before. 
 What is truth, in a universe where by hypothesis a self- 
 contradiction does not involve falsehood ? 
 
 The difficulty seems to be no more than an unusually 
 acute case of indeterminateness. In the universe of 
 ordinary fiction, it is true to say that Sir Toby is a 
 drunkard and neither true nor false to say that Viola has 
 brown hair. It is false to say that Viola is capable of 
 murdering Sebastian for money : not because this incap- 
 ability is ever asserted, but because the creator of this 
 universe has evidently taken over from the actual universe 
 the law that human beings cannot absolutely belie their 
 characters. For similar reasons it is true to assert that 
 while Orsino is in his own garden he cannot be in Olivia's. 
 But we find greater difficulties in a universe where we 
 know that one self-contradiction at least is according to 
 law. Are we to consider the law of non-contradiction as 
 abrogated altogether, or is it to hold except in this one 
 case ? and how far does this exempted case extend ? The 
 creator of the universe must decide, but if he has not 
 
 1 Inhalt und Gegenstand, p. 23. 
 
144 ASSUMPTIONS 
 
 decided we must presume that he followed the ordinary 
 conventions of world-making, and then we may fairly 
 discuss what in this case the convention would naturally 
 decree. 
 
 Meinong's decision seems to me a fair one. In my 
 way of putting the matter, it amounts to saying that the 
 ordinary laws must be supposed to hold wherever they are 
 not explicitly denied. The same reason which makes it 
 true to say that green grass is green and that a golden 
 mountain is golden, also requires us to say that a round 
 square is round 1 . The roundness of a square is an im- 
 possible Sosein, nevertheless the roundness of a round 
 square is not impossible but necessary 2 . Similarly an 
 existent round square is existent though of course it 
 cannot actually exist 3 . 
 
 As far as I understand the dispute, Mr Russell would 
 have no special reason to object to this solution if he could 
 admit that the self-contradictory objects were real at all. 
 His fundamental difficulty lies only in their initial breach 
 of the law of non-contradiction. Meinong urges that this 
 
 1 Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologic, p. 8. 
 
 2 Mally, op. cit., pp. 128, 129. 
 
 3 It is existent, that is, just as it is round, in its own universe. 
 Kussell seems to miss this point when he says that he can see no differ- 
 ence between " is existent " and " exists " (Mind, 1907, p. 439). The words 
 of course are ambiguous and indifferent ; " to exist actually" only means 
 " to be existent in the actual world." But the distinction of universes is 
 all-important, and has nothing special to do with the self-contradiction in 
 these objects. I create for myself at this moment the object of thought 
 "an existent plane figure with 973 one-inch sides." This is existent in 
 its own universe, for I have decreed it so, and its sides are of the required 
 number and length. But it will not be existent in the actual world until 
 I take the trouble to draw it. Shakespeare creates a house for Olivia, 
 and it exists, but is not "actually " existent. Cf. Stellung der Gegenstands- 
 theorie, pp. 16, 17. 
 
ASSUMPTIONS 145 
 
 law applies undamaged to all that is actual or possible 1 , 
 but Mr Russell objects that it is of propositions, not of 
 subjects, that the law is asserted, and that " to suppose 
 that two contradictory propositions can both be true seems 
 equally inadmissible whatever their subjects may be 2 ." 
 I suppose Meinong would reply that it was not equally 
 inadmissible ; that the law applied to assertions made 
 with reference to the actual world, not to the worlds 
 which we made for ourselves. 
 
 The question perhaps reduces itself to a matter of words 
 and of convenience in the end. It would be possible without 
 inconsistency to limit the term " reality " to such objects 
 as are either actual or connected with the actual world in 
 a way in which fictitious objects are not connected. Sir 
 Toby would still be a real object, but only as being an 
 actual invention of Shakespeare's. It would be false to 
 say that he was a drunkard. It would be true to say 
 " Shakespeare says that Viola had a brother," but false to 
 say either that she would or that she would not have 
 murdered him. This is, I think, a consistent usage, but 
 I do not consider it the most convenient. I am not quite 
 sure whether or not it is Mr Russell's. To clear up that 
 point, and to settle the question on its own merits, it 
 would be well for the disputants to discuss it with regard 
 to fiction as a whole, without complicating matters by 
 seeming to confine themselves to the special and bizarre 
 case of self-contradictory objects. 
 
 1 Stellung der Gegenstandstheorie, pp. 16, 17. 
 
 2 Mind, 1907, p. 439. 
 
 w. 10 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE MUTUAL RELATIONS OF JUDGMENT, APPREHEN- 
 SION, ASSUMPTION AND DOUBT 
 
 ACCORDING to my view, the fundamental need in a 
 treatment of knowledge is to recognise that every in- 
 stance of knowledge is an instance of the presentation of 
 reality in consciousness ; or, regarded from the other 
 side, an instance of the apprehension of reality. When 
 this is once settled, the disposal of our various special 
 terms is not much more than a question of convenience, 
 and many uses may be equally justified so long as we 
 make ourselves clear. 
 
 If we are to mark out judgment from the rest of 
 apprehension, there are perhaps two or three chief ways 
 open to us. We may say that we judge when we appre- 
 hend an object as belonging to the world of actuality or 
 validity ; as being non-fictitious. Or we may use the term 
 whenever we assign an object to its special universe, 
 whether or not that universe is the actual world. Per- 
 sonally I should prefer the second alternative. Our 
 distinction would then be equivalent to that by which 
 Professor Baldwin distinguishes belief; " The particular 
 control which assigns a thought to a sphere of existence, 
 
JUDGMENT, APPREHENSION, ASSUMPTION AND DOUBT 147 
 
 inner, external, semblant, or other 1 ." Thirdly, we may 
 adopt a different distinction and say that to judge is to 
 apprehend an object of higher order. This would include 
 all the cases which fell under the other descriptions, for 
 existence in any sphere is an object of higher order. 
 
 I think that it matters very little which of these alter- 
 natives we adopt, but an important point comes next. 
 When we apprehend any of these objects we have no 
 choice, as we have several times remarked, as to what we 
 shall apprehend. We can decide whether or not we shall 
 see anything whether we shall look that way. But once 
 we have looked we have no choice of what we shall see. 
 When we have asked a question there is but one answer. 
 We speak of assigning objects to this sphere or to that, 
 but neither objects nor contents wait for any directions 
 from us. Denying a proposition is a very different matter 
 from denying a request. When we deny the existence of 
 an object the cognitive part of the process consists of 
 nothing more than the apprehension that the object does 
 not exist. To believe in an object is to see the content 
 show forth the object's position in its universe, and not 
 in any sense to put it there or even to consent to its 
 being there. 
 
 Now since an act, in any sense in which it is relevant 
 for our distinctions, must be capable of being a choice, and 
 since in these matters we have no choice, we must keep to 
 the doctrine we have held throughout, that in all cognition 
 the act is of the same sort, consisting simply in apprehend- 
 ing ; in opening our eyes on a particular level and looking 
 in a particular direction to see what is there. Judgment 
 is marked out from the lower and simpler kinds of appre- 
 1 Tlwught and Things, Vol. 11., pp. 2123. 
 
 102 
 
148 THE MUTUAL KELATIONS OF 
 
 hension by a peculiarity in the content apprehended, and 
 by a consequent peculiarity in the act of sight, but in no 
 other way. 
 
 I must therefore disagree entirely with the doctrine of 
 some of Meinong's school, that "judgment and apprehen- 
 sion differ neither in object nor in content, but in act 1 ." 
 " The conviction that justice exists is different from the 
 imaginative contemplation of a righteous world 2 ." Yes, 
 for the content of our apprehension is different ; in the 
 first case we see our justice living and growing in the 
 actual course of events, in the second case we see it only 
 in a non-actual universe ; or perhaps we only see it in- 
 complete, disjoined at the edges from any universe. 
 Besides knowing the characteristics of justice, we know 
 that it is doubtful whether or not it exists. 
 
 Meinong's own method is to distinguish judgment from 
 mere presentation by two characteristics the presence of 
 belief, and determination " with regard to yes and no 3 ." 
 For my account, both these points belong to content and 
 not to act. To believe is to see the connection between 
 object and universe ; and to affirm or deny, so far as it is 
 cognition at all, is to apprehend the presence or absence 
 of objects. This latter point is evident, I think, when we 
 avoid the confusion pointed out by Mr Russell, between 
 rejecting P and apprehending not-P 4 . The denial of a 
 request comes under the first head ; it is the opposite of 
 consenting to that request, and differs from it primarily in 
 act. The denial of a proposition is the opposite of affirming 
 that proposition, and differs from it primarily in content. 
 
 1 Witasek, Psychologic, p. 280. 2 Op. cit., p. 78. 
 
 3 E.g. in Uber Annahmen. 
 
 4 Mind, 1904, p. 348. Or see p. 46 of the present essay. 
 
JUDGMENT, APPREHENSION, ASSUMPTION AND DOUBT 149 
 
 Assumption and Judgment. 
 
 The foregoing decisions will evidently have some 
 bearing on the position of assumption in the whole of 
 knowledge. 
 
 We must remind ourselves to begin with that the 
 term in question is the name of a concrete process which 
 includes more than cognition. When we assume, we create 
 an object as well as apprehend it. Hence it is certain 
 that assumption in the concrete will differ " in act " from 
 judgment and from the rest of apprehension, but the im- 
 portant question for us is only, "Does the cognitive 
 element in an assumption differ thus in act from the rest 
 of cognition ? " My answer must evidently be once more 
 that it differs in act only in so far as it differs in the 
 content apprehended. In assumption my object is partly 
 of my own creation, and I know it. I need not always have 
 the fact in mind ; I may be attending to internal details 
 so intently that the object's relation to the actual world is 
 not in consciousness at all. But unless confusion and 
 mistake supervene I never see the object as actual ; where- 
 as in judgment this is what I do see. That means that 
 there is a difference in what I have in mind, in the content 
 and the whole object of consciousness. 
 
 " The revolution began yesterday" has its object in the 
 actual universe ; " Suppose that the revolution had begun 
 yesterday " has it definitely not there. That is, though 
 the limited part of our object expressed by the term 
 " revolution " may be the same in assumption and in 
 judgment, the whole object presented to us is not the 
 same. Even the limited part, we may say, is made in 
 the two cases of two different materials. 
 
150 THE MUTUAL RELATIONS OF 
 
 If the objects differ in this way, does it follow that it 
 is impossible to find an assumption and a judgment whose 
 object shall be the same ? The answer is determined by 
 that peculiarity of assumption-creation which prevents the 
 creation from ever taking place in the universe to which 
 the assumption refers. If judgment by definition has to 
 keep its object always in the actual universe it is impos- 
 sible for an assumption-object to be identical with it, but 
 if we allow the term to refer to other universes then the 
 identity can be obtained by the device of making judg- 
 ment and assumption refer not to the same but to 
 neighbouring worlds. The best instances will be supplied 
 by the writing and reading of historical novels. The 
 author in the course of composition, referring to a his- 
 torical personage, makes the assumption that " The Em- 
 peror expressed himself thus." This assumption refers to 
 the actual world but makes its creation in the novel's 
 world. The reader, thinking and judging in the latter, 
 says, " The Emperor uttered the following words." Here 
 we have an assumption and a judgment with the same 
 content, and we observe that all the difference between 
 them has disappeared. 
 
 The great writer who has been the first to see the 
 importance for logic and psychology of the study of as- 
 sumptions has given an account of them which differs in 
 some fundamental points from mine. Judgment, according 
 to him, differs from mere presentation in two characters 
 both of which belong to the act, namely in that it involves 
 belief and in that it affirms or denies. Assumptions keep 
 the affirmation or denial but drop the belief 1 . They are 
 
 . l Uber Annahmen, p. 2. 
 
JUDGMENT, APPREHENSION, ASSUMPTION AND DOUBT 151 
 
 much nearer to judgment than to presentation, for it is 
 quite intelligible to speak of them as judgment without 
 belief, but unintelligible to say that they are presenta- 
 tions determined with regard to yes or no 1 . 
 
 Mere presentation ( Vorstellung) makes the weak point 
 to my mind in all parts of Meinong's philosophy. He 
 himself is hindered by it ; it does not fit in with his 
 classifications, and is apt to make an exception to all his 
 rules 2 . I suggest that the whole difficulty comes from 
 attempting to distinguish the different forms of cognition 
 as different acts instead of making them all apprehensions 
 with various contents. For me the yes-no determination 
 and the belief are both a matter of content. Mere presen- 
 tation, if we wish, may be harmlessly defined as presenta- 
 tion lacking these characters. It is much more doubtful 
 whether they can still be counted as two characters and 
 not rather as one, for both seem to consist in the kind of 
 connection which is seen to exist between our central 
 content and the rest of reality. I have therefore worked 
 throughout with a different definition, keeping closer to 
 ordinary language, and have made the differentia of as- 
 sumption consist in the fact that in it I deliberately create 
 for contemplation a non-actual object. Then if belief is 
 taken in Baldwin's sense to mean the sight of the object 
 as having position in a special universe, not necessarily 
 in the actual universe, we must grant that in assumption 
 belief is still present as well as affirmation and negation. 
 For we know in what way our assumption-object does and 
 does not exist. 
 
 Witasek's development of Meinong's account shows the 
 
 1 Op. cit., pp. 277-8. 
 
 2 See e.g. Uber Annahmen, passim. 
 
152 THE MUTUAL RELATIONS OF 
 
 danger involved in describing assumptions as judgments- 
 without-conviction. Assumptions, according to Witasek, 
 are very closely related to judgments, for they lack nothing 
 except belief, and the amount of belief that is present in 
 a judgment may vary in amount to any extent 1 . True, 
 a judgment that began with fall conviction may lose that 
 conviction bit by bit; the landscape that seemed solid 
 and distinct may become more and more misty ; what we 
 saw clearly may fade away until it vanishes. But the end 
 of this scale of doubt is anything but an assumption ; the 
 end is suspense of judgment, absence of cognition. " It is 
 absolutely certain that the murder took place thus and 
 here " may be weakened through " It is probable that it 
 happened thus " and " We cannot be quite sure that it 
 happened thus " into " It is quite uncertain whether there 
 ever was a murder." But by no natural process of cogni- 
 tion does this become "I will write an account of the 
 murder for the Daily Mail." 
 
 This may become rather more evident when we have 
 examined the position of doubt as such. 
 
 Doubt, Judgment and Assumption. 
 
 Not only assumption and judgment but doubt and 
 judgment differ in their content. In judgment the map 
 is complete ; the central object is seen in position within 
 its universe. In doubt of the existential sort we see the 
 central object but it is not clear to us whether it has a 
 proper connection with the universe or not. The moun- 
 tain stands out clearly but mist encircles it, so that we 
 cannot be sure whether it is a real part of the landscape or 
 
 only a mirage. 
 
 1 Psychologic, p. 310. 
 
JUDGMENT, APPREHENSION, ASSUMPTION AND DOUBT 153 
 
 Nevertheless the mountain may be real ; that is, belief 
 in it and doubt as to it may have the same object in spite 
 of their difference in content. An assumed mountain on 
 the other hand can never be thus real, nor, except by 
 confusion, can it ever come to appear so. It is encircled 
 by no line of mist ; its edges stand out in the void against 
 the background of that actual landscape of which it 
 can never become a part. We have no doubt here ; the 
 object is non-actual and we know it. 
 
 It is therefore extremely important to keep clear of 
 any confusion of assumption with doubt. Doubt may 
 properly become belief as the mist clears away. Assump- 
 tion never can. Even if we assume a hypothesis which 
 turns out to be true, the belief is continuous not with our 
 assumption but with our doubt. It occurs to us that the 
 object half hidden in mist may have a certain shape ; 
 here is the germ of belief. For the sake of experiment 
 we sketch that shape ; construct it to stand out on the 
 mist. Having our eye thus guided, we are able to discern 
 more and more clearly that this in truth is the shape of 
 the mountain behind. But though the appearance of the 
 mountain looms up and fills out our picture, the picture 
 is no more than a vision and a help to the eye. When 
 we have done with this it vanishes ; it never becomes 
 part of the mountain, for its material is not granite but 
 empty air. 
 
 In constructive hypothesis I apprehend an object 
 created by me, and thus enable myself to apprehend an 
 object which I did not create ; but in that second cogni- 
 tion I am not assuming. The real object appears to me, 
 never in so far as I assume, but in so far as I begin to 
 believe. Of course there may be all kinds of mixtures 
 
 10-5 
 
154 JUDGMENT, APPREHENSION, ASSUMPTION AND DOUBT 
 
 and confusions. An object long and vividly assumed may 
 through self-suggestion come to be believed in, just as by 
 the same process a fantasy-desire or fantasy-impulse may 
 burst the bounds of its universe and blend with actual will. 
 In a fit of melodramatic jealousy or resentment a man 
 may experience all these possibilities. But in so far as our 
 procedure is rational our will grows not from fantasy-desire 
 but from actual craving, and our belief develops not out of 
 assumption but out of " opining." 
 
PART IV 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE PRESENTATION OF REALITY 
 
 "!T may be," says Professor James, "that the truest 
 of all beliefs shall be that in trans-subjective realities. It 
 certainly seems the truest, for no rival belief is as volumi- 
 nously satisfactory.... Anticipating the result of the general 
 truth-processes of mankind, I begin with the abstract 
 notion of an objective reality. I postulate it... 1 ." 
 
 I cannot decide whether I am bolder or more modest 
 than Professor James in beginning with what I take to 
 be not the postulate but the certainty, not the abstract 
 notion but the concrete unavoidable presence, of an objec- 
 tively real world. Is it that I attribute to our experience 
 more than he feels justified in attributing to it, or is it 
 that he demands more than I before he will call a thing 
 objective and real ? 
 
 All that I demand is that the object's being shall be 
 independent of our apprehension in the sense that this 
 act of apprehension has not created it. This condition is 
 satisfied by every object that enters our consciousness, for 
 apprehension can create nothing. If we had invented the 
 
 1 The Meaning of Truth, p. 243. 
 
158 THE PRESENTATION OF REALITY 
 
 universe as we might invent a novel, I should still call it 
 objective and real. If every object were created at the 
 moment when we observed it and annihilated the moment 
 we ceased to observe it I should still use the same terms. 
 Since we really have experience, it is in my usage inevitable 
 that there should be a real world. Such reality has been 
 defined as the limitation of activity 1 , but it is also the 
 tool and material and basis of activity ; it is support as 
 well as resistance. "What we must take account of" is 
 " what we can count on." 
 
 If there is any presentation there must be a real 
 world. But now, this reality being granted, the world 
 develops before us. Some of it we do invent, but for the 
 most part it invents itself. Some of it never recurs, but 
 some does. That is, it behaves twice in the same way, 
 and therefore ipso facto it is in so far the same ; I have 
 nothing to do with any numerical identity which is 
 different from qualitative or working identity. Some of 
 it is ready to recur whenever we choose ; two and three 
 make five whenever we like to add them. Some of it 
 appears with the same behaviour in all manner of different 
 shapes, arid thus we find the laws of causation, and the 
 relations of space, and the operations of time. An immense 
 and indefinite amount is added to what we have to reckon 
 on and reckon with, in that we apprehend not only the 
 behavings of the world but these ways of its behaviour. 
 
 Every presented object has such reality as enables it 
 to present itself, but most objects have far more. Not 
 only do they present themselves now and here, but if we 
 take proper steps they will present themselves otherwise; 
 and not only do they present themselves to us but they 
 1 Baldwin, quoting Stout. 
 
THE PRESENTATION OF REALITY 159 
 
 affect one another the evidence for this being that in 
 sense and in inference we see them do so. Parts of the 
 universe have most complex and interesting ways of 
 behaviour, and these parts we call fellow-men. We know 
 them as different from ordinary things partly by their 
 resistance and incalculableness 1 , but still more because 
 they can help us and co-operate with us much better than 
 a thing will do. They are known as human not only 
 because they overthrow our expectations but because we 
 can expect so much more of them. Complex as their 
 customs are, they present themselves with a certain 
 naturalness and intelligibility. We learn readily to under- 
 stand and depend upon them. Indeed the process of 
 early development consists scarcely so much in learning 
 to expect a certain behaviour here as in learning not to 
 expect it from the rest of the world. Our discoveries con- 
 sist less in finding that some of the universe is personal 
 than in finding that some of it is not personal. 
 
 Since our powers of apprehension are not confined to 
 sense, therefore we apprehend in the personal part not only 
 bodies but minds. In all cognition, and not only in per- 
 ception or sensation, or uninferred knowledge, reality is 
 in my sense directly presented. Hence we have direct 
 apprehension of other men's natures and of other men's 
 experience. We find that their experience of outer objects 
 is to a very large extent the same as our own ; that is, our 
 external world is for the most part qualitatively identical, 
 and, as before, I have nothing to do with any non-qualita- 
 tive identity. As a matter of history, our discoveries 
 consist rather of finding that some of the universe is not 
 common than of finding that some of it is ; for, owing to 
 1 Baldwin. 
 
160 THE PRESENTATION OF REALITY 
 
 the nature of our practical life, the commonness of im- 
 portant and interesting objects is forced on us as soon as 
 we meet with the object at all. From the beginning our 
 sensory experience, for instance, is supplemented by what 
 in thought we perceive of other men's sensory experience. 
 Further, we apprehend not only the experiences which 
 other men share with us, but their private experience as 
 well. Their feelings and thoughts are sometimes harder 
 to perceive than the motions of their bodies, but often 
 they are much easier. These also form part of the 
 universe which we know. 
 
 Finally, in these matters as in all others mistakes are 
 possible and often actual. Sometimes what has presented 
 itself as bread reveals itself presently as a stone. Some- 
 times what has presented itself as a man reveals itself as 
 a lifeless thing. It is abstractly conceivable, though not 
 credible, that the loaves in our larder are all stones, that 
 all the objects we have believed to be men are really lifeless 
 machines, that England is not really an island, and that 
 the integral calculus is founded on an immense mistake. 
 If all this were found to be so the world would greatly 
 change its shape for us. Nevertheless the world, the 
 real world, would in some shape remain. Whilst we live we 
 cannot escape from this intimate presence, this inevitable 
 and undeniable pressure of objective reality. Whilst 
 experience exists there is a real person and a real 
 universe. 
 
INDEX OF AUTHORS REFERRED TO 
 
 Ach, N., Vber die Willenstdtigkeit und das Denken (1905), 40 
 Alexander, S., *' Mental Activity in Willing and in Ideas" (Aristotelian 
 
 Society's Proceedings, 1908-9), 91, 92, 101-2 ; (Aristotelian Society's 
 
 Proceedings, 1909-10), 75, 116 
 Ameseder, R., " Ueber Vorstellungsproduktion," in Gegenstandstheorie 
 
 und Psychologie -(1904), 76 
 Avenarius, R. (Article in Vierteljahrschrift f. wiss. Ph. 18), 17 
 
 Baldwin, M., Thought and Things, 128-9, 146-7, 158-9 
 Bosanquet, B., Logic, 75, 131 
 
 Bradley, F., Appearance and Reality, 81-5; Principles of Logic, 76, 84 
 Biihler, K., "Tatsachen und Probleme zu einer Psychologie der Denk- 
 vorgange " (Arch. f. d. gesamte Psychologie, 1907-8), 39, 40, 41 
 
 Dawes Hicks, "Sense-Presentation and Thought" (Arist. Soc. Pro- 
 ceedings, 1905-6), 64 
 
 Green, T. H., Works, 75, 96 
 
 Hoernle, R. F. A., " Image, Idea, and Meaning " (Mind, 1907), 5, 16, 26, 
 
 126, 128, 134, 135, 137 
 Hofler, A., Psychologie, 92 
 
 James, William, "On the Function of Cognition" (Mind, O.S. 10), 4; 
 "The Philosophy of Bergson " (Hibbert Journal, April 1909), 
 78-85; The. Meaning of Truth, 74, 137, 157; A Pluralistic Universe, 
 74, 78-85 
 
162 INDEX OF AUTHORS REFERRED TO 
 
 Lipps, Theodor, Bewusstsein und Gegenstande, 8, 16, 54, 112, 126, 140 ; 
 Das Wissen vnnfremden Ichen, 64; Vom Filhlen, Wollen, undDenken, 
 54, 86-7 
 
 Mally, W., in Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie (1904), 123, 144 
 
 Marbe, K., Experimentell-psychologische Untersuchungen Uber das 
 Urteil (1901), 40, 41 
 
 Meinong, A., 16, 23, 45, 128, 142; " Zur erkenntnisstheoretischen Wiir- 
 digung des Gedachtnisses " (Viert. f. wiss. Ph. 1886), 49, 50; "Uber 
 Gegenstande hoherer Ordnung" (Z. f. Psych. 1899), 13, 18; fiber 
 Annahmen (1902), 93, 136, 148, 150-1; Untersuchungen zur Gegen- 
 standstheorie und Psychologie (1904), 144; Uber die Erfahrungs- 
 grundlagen unseres Wissens (1906), 49, 50; Uber die Stellung der 
 Gegenstandstheorie im System der Wissenschaften (1907), 126, 127, 
 134, 144, 145 
 
 Munsterberg, H., Grundziige der Psychologie, 126 
 
 Orth, J., Gefiihl und Bewusstseinslage (1903), 40 
 
 Prichard, H. A., "The Psychologists' Treatment of Knowledge" (Mind, 
 1907), 4, 19, 20, 27 
 
 Kickert, Der Gegenstand der Erkenntniss, 8, 76, 
 
 Russell, Bertrand, " Meinong's Theory of Complexes and Assumptions " 
 (Mind, 1904), 46, 123, 124, 148; " On Denoting" (Mind, 1905), 139, 
 141 ; Review of Meinong's " Stellung der Gegenstandstheorie" (Mind, 
 1907), 145 
 
 Stout, G. F., 87; Analytic Psychology, 39, 52, 64; Manual of 
 Psychology (1901), 14, 57; Groundwork of Psychology (1903), 23, 58; 
 "Things and Sensations" (Proceedings of the British Academy, 1905), 
 58; "Error," in Personal Idealism, 117, 118; " Neo-Kantism as 
 represented by Dr Dawes Hicks" (Arist. Soc. 1905-6), 88; "The 
 Nature of Conation and Mental Activity " (British Journal of Psycho- 
 logy, 1906), 61, 87; Review of Schiller (Mind, 1907), 111; "Are 
 Presentations Mental or Physical?" (Arist. Soc. 1908-9), 68, 62, 
 65, 66; "Immediacy, Mediacy, and Coherence" (Mind, 1908), 49 
 
 Titchener, Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes (1909), 
 10, 41-4 
 
INDEX OF AUTHORS REFERRED TO 163 
 
 Twardowski, K., Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand (1894), 13, 16, 
 17, 18, 19, 123, 142-3 
 
 Urban, Valuation, 87 
 Venn, Empirical Logic, 139 
 
 Ward, James, Article on Psychology in Encyclopaedia Britannica, old 
 
 volumes, 20, 61, 87, 93 
 Witasek, "Zur psychologischen Analyse der asthetischen Einfiihlung " 
 
 (Z. f. Psych. 1901), 20, 93; Psychologie (1908), 17, 27, 120, 
 
 148, 151-2 
 
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