A49 UC-NRLF THE BRITISH ACADEMY The Basis of Realism By S. Alexander Fellow of the Academy lFro7?i the Proceedings of the Biitish Academy, VoL F/] London Published for the British Academy By Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Pres; Amen Corner, E.G. Price One ShiUing net ■'■■/^ . THE BASIS OF REALISM By S. ALEXANDER FELLOW OF THE ACADEMY Read January 28, 1914 CONTENTS I \. The spirit of Realism. % Occasion of this paper. 3. The starting- point of Realism. 4. Naive and artful Real'ism. 5. Mind, a specific empirical quality or existence. 6. Objects and Things ; ' sensory con- tents'' and 'objects of thoughf. 7. 'Mind always a world; its objects always fragments.'' 8. The riches of mind ; and tertiary qualities, II 9. Independence of objects. 10. Minds and ' Mind\ 11. The wider issues. Supplementary Note : Mind as ' thing'' and as 'character''. 1. The spirit of Realism.^ The temper of Realism is to de-anthropo- morphize : to order man and mind to their proper place among the world of finite things ; on the one hand to divest physical things ^f the colouring which they have received from the vanity or arroganeb of mind ; and on the other to assign them along with minds their due measure of self-existence. But so deeply ingrained and so natural is the self-flattering habit of supposing that mind, in its distinctive character of mind, is in some special sense the superior of physical things, so that in the absence of mind there would be no physical existence at all, that Realism in questioning its prerogatives appears to some to degrade mind and rob it of its riches and value. But this apprehensive mood is the creature of mistake. Realism strips mind of its pretensions but not of its value or greatness. On ^ When I speak in this paper of Realism I mean contemporary realism, and for the most part my own form of it^ A 2 .-JPfefercSSlJlMsiQF THE BRITISH ACADEMY the contrary, in leaving to other things their rights mind comes into its own. It is as in a democracy where all men are equal, but where to speak theoretically and disregard the limitations of custom or tradition or poverty, each man is free to rise to the height of his native powers, equality in principle leading to difference in eminence. Realism is the democratic spirit in metaphysics, and if it dethrones the mind, it recognizes mind as chief in the world it knows. This prejudice against realism reposes in fact upon a confusion between the different ideas of reality and perfection, physical things are as real as the mind but not as perfect.') We may illustrate from the similar distinction in morals between goodness and perfection. The good Greek was no less good than the good Christian ; but if progress has any meaning, or time has any driving power, the Christian is the more perfect man, richer and fuller and more comprehensive in senti- ment and conduct. When, accordingly, we speak of degrees of reality, we must be careful to ask whether we do not mean degrees of perfection. The inconvenience of suggesting this necessary distinction is that it raises so many fundamental questions, which cannot fully be discussed in this place, but to which I may revert in the end. But I will observe here, that perfection itself may be understood in two senses or may arise from two different causes. There is, in the first place, the perfection which comes of greater development, from the fact that the world exhibits existences on different levels. Such is the difference of minds from physical things, which I have been thinking of hitherto. But on any level the more perfect may mean the more complete. Thus a triangle is incomplete because it is only a fragment of the space with which it is continuous. It cannot exist by itself entirely ; and it does not pretend to do so, for it is but the limit between two surfaces and is understood as such. So also a society is more complete than the individual member of it. Now in the first sense of perfection, that of higher development, it seems clear that the higher degree of perfection may leave the lower as real as before. Take the case of the human person. When certain processes occur in certain places in the central nervous system and are of appropriate kind and complexity we have the emergence of the distinctive property of consciousness. But the reality of consciousness though more perfect does not interfere with the reality of the material constituents on which it is built. The water which is so large a con- stituent of the body remains and does its work as water. But when — to take the second sense of perfection — we consider the relation of the triangle to space or of the individual to society, it may be thought that the constituent is transformed in the complete whole to which THE BASIS OF REALISM 3 it belongs. But in order to justify this conclusion we should need to prove that its absorption into the whole alters the characters which it possesses as a part. According as the answer to this question falls out, we have the two opposed systems of absolutism, for which only the complete is real, and of pluralism, which allows to the parts a relative but independent reality. It is possible (though not certain) that the two distinctions, that between the perfect and the real and that between the more complete and the real, may turn out to be identical in the end. Both of them will occupy us, but especially the first. And at any rate it is important to recognize that, prima facie, degrees in development are different from degrees of completeness, and raise a different issue ; and that the first are compatible accordingly with quite divergent metaphysical views of ultimate things. 2. Occasion of this paper. These remarks have been suggested by a lecture of Prof. Bosanquet's on The Distinction of Mind and its Objects, delivered by him last February at Manchester, as the Adamson Lecture and published by the University, which contains a statement of his attitude towards Realism. Mr. Bosanquet has done me the honour to take as his text the particular form of Realism expounded in various papers by me, and, independently of me and with much help and suggestion for me in personal intercourse, by Prof. T.P. Nunn.^ To say that the criticism is generous and sympathetic is to say that it is Mr. Bosanquet^s. But it is finally adverse and even sharply so ; and I am as grateful for the strictures as for the appreciation. But it seems to me that in part the opposition depends on the belief that in asserting the reality of the object, independent of mind though in relation to it, I am destroying the reality of mind, or at least am robbing it of that which gives it preciousness in knowledge and in life. Not only do I deny this consequence, but I continue to deny it even though I say, as I am prepared to say, that so far are objects from being dependent on mind that we must rather say, if we speak of depen- dence at all, that it is mind which is dependent on objects.^ ^ Mr. Nunn's papers are to be fouud in : — Proceedings Aristotelian Society, N.S., vols, vi, 1905-6: ^ The aims and achievements of Scientific Method', vii. 'Causal explanation', viii. ' Concept of epistemological levels', x, ' Are secondary- qualities independent of perception.''' His book. Aim and Achievements of Scientific Method (1907), is now out of print. My own papers are in Proc. Arist. Soc, vols. viii. to xi. (1907-11) ; Mind, N.S., vols. 21, 22 (1912-3) ; Brit. Journ. of Psych., iv, 1911. Two less technical papers are in Hibbert Journal, viii, 1909 (in which there is an incidental blunder about Kant, corrected recently by Prof. Norman Smith in Mind, vol. 22) ; and in Journal of Education, March and April, 1909 {' Tlie conduct of understanding '). "^ See later, section 9. 298517 4 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY But the most serious ground of opposition arises from the funda- mental principle of my critic's idealism. For Mr. Bosanquet, Idealism means not so much a belief that mind and things are inseparable, except by an abstraction, as rather that the truth is the whole. Only the whole is self-existent and this whole has the character of mind. This is the reason why I have called attention to that other sense of the conception of reality, according to which the real means not the highest but the most complete. Accordingly, Mr. Bosanquet complains that my realism neglects the fundamental fact that there is no discon- tinuity in kind between mind and its object; and that the very object itself, when you take it as it really is in our experience, owes its reality to characters which are mental, lives in a medium of mind ; and therefore the attempt to sever the object from mind defeats itself. It often happens, I believe, in philosophical and other discussion that an opponent will urge against the doctrine he is criticizing a principle which, verbally at least, that doctrine accepts and insists upon. This is my case. For I have pleaded that the fundamental features of things are also to be found in mind, and have implied therefore that mind and things are continuous in kind. From such a situation two conclusions may be drawn. The first is that there may be some deep-going difference which it is of interest to discover, and if possible to remove. The second is that if this and other misconcep- tions of realism are possible to a critic so receptive and just, the fault is not likely to lie wholly with the critic and may be due to some failure of clearness on my part. And without answering my critic in detail, which might be less interesting to others than to him and me, I propose, therefore, to restate the principle of realism with special regard to the issues which have been thus raised, as well as to certain other misapprehensions entertained in different quarters. 3. Starting-point of Realism. The empirical characters of various kinds of existences and their empirical laws are the subject-matter of the special sciences. Of Metaphysics the business is to describe the fundamental or a priori characters of things if there are such, and the relations that subsist between them. I mean by these relations not such empirical relations as subsist, say, between animals and plants or between monkeys and men, which are for the biologist ; but such relations, if there are any, as are implied in the very existence of varieties of being : as if for instance it were possible to show that variety of existences depended on difference of grouping in certain fundamental elements : and again, the mere relation of participation in one universe. Minds and physical things are two great classes of existences (I do not say the only two), and the relation between them THE BASIS OF REALISM 6 in virtue of which mind knows things, which is commonly described as belonging to theory of knowledge, is but one chapter of the whole science of metaphysics. Now the experience of this relation of knower to known declares 1 that mind and its object are two separate existences connected 5 together by the relation of togetherness or compresence, where the ; word compresence is not taken to imply co-existence in the same ] moment of time, but only the fact of belonging to one experienced | world. The mental partner is the act of mind which apprehends the * object, an act continuous with the whole tissue of mental processes which, considered as a whole, is the mind.^ The object is what it declares itself to be,^ square, table, colour, or the like — also, to anticipate a later observation, with feelers which it throws out towards a wider whole of which it forms a part. This statement does not mean the mere distinction of the act of mind from its object or so-called con- tent ; and those who have supposed the object in this proposition to be the mere formal object have missed its point. The obvious dis- tinction of the mental act from what it is about would obtain if the object were merely a mental content or presentation ; and it is implied by Berkeley himself when he declares that mountains and trees exist in the mind not by way of mode but of idea. What the statement means is, that the object of the mental act is a dis- tinct existence (or subsistence) from the mental act. We realists are compelled to harp upon the distinction with a reiteration as wearisome to ourselves as it is to others, because the independent existence of the object is neglected by so many who assert the distinction but do not take it seriously. But the intent of the proposition is not merely to assert the inde- pendent existence of the object, which is therefore non -mental, but ! even more to assert that the mind is also a thing existent side by side j with it^ itself one of the things which make up the universe, and one ' of a number. This is the harder part of the principle to realize, and perhaps the more important. It is best realized by contrast with the familiar doctrine that the mind apprehends itself and things alike, being as it were spectator both of the me and the not-me. When the phraseology of ideas was current in philosophy, the mind was spectator both of ideas of reflection and ideas of sensation. It may be doubted whether this doctrine or that of representative ideas has worked the greater havoc. Now experience tell us that the mind does * See later, section 7. ^ The question of illusion and error does not yet arise. See later, section 4, p. 8. 6 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY not experience itself as an object, but lives through its own self. It does not experience itself in the same way as it experiences objects. Common speech says, indeeH, the mind is aware of itself as well as of objects. But while the objects of which it is aware are distinct from its awareness, the self of which it is aware consists in its awareness. Berkeley said that you have only to open your eyes, and you will see that to be is to be perceived. Bury yourself, we say, in the fact of experiencing an object like a table, feel yourself into the whole situa- tion, and you will realize that this situation is the compresence of two things of which one, the act of mind, enjoys itself and, in that act of enjoying itself, contemplates the other. To be aware of a thing is to be caught in the common web of the universe, to be an existence alongside the^other existences; peculiar in so far as this empirical character of awareness is distinctive of a certain order of existence, but otherwise not peculiar, at least for metaphysics. But it is this very peculiarity of mind, that it enjoys and does not contemplate itself, which conceals from us if we do not keep careful guard against pre- possessions, the experienced fact that a common world unites us both — the one, the thing contemplated ; the other, the thing enjoyed. We still imagine a mind which contemplates both and may be thought to be the source not merely of its own knowing of things, but even of their existence. Whereas, if we would but 'recover' by means of philosophy ' the innocence ' of the mind which knows no philosophy (and how difficult that is to do !), we should know that we have gone down into the meUe of the world, that physical things are there distinct from us for us to contemplate, and we distinct from them, and that the apparent limitation, that we do not contemplate ourselves as we contemplate them, is to the mind when it again grows reflective the indication that our existence is, not indeed more real, but more perfect than theirs. But this last is to anticipate. Two things, however, are implied in the analysis which are evident at once. The first, is that there is in ourselves no other mind than that which we know in enjoyment, whether as enjoyment immediately at the moment, or as supple- mented by remembered and expected enjoyment; or mediately as supplemented by inferred enjoyment ; or by reflective synthesis of all these data. Such knowledge by enjoyment may, however, be helped out by whatever else we may learn about the mind from its connexion with its own body or other things Secondly, our compresence with physical things, in virtue of which we are conscious of them, is a situation of the same sort as the com- presence of two physical things with one another. To recognize that THE BASIS OF REALISM 7 my consciousness of a physical object is only a particular case of the universal compresence of finites is in fact the best way to realize the analysis which has been given. Of two compresent things A and J?, let ^ be a mind, and suppose both to be contemplated by a being higher than mind. For such a superior being (say God) they would be separate things, and if A is perceiving B, he would see in this nothing but a state of things in which B stirs ^ to a conscious action and A becomes conscious of B, but B does not owe its character as B to its being perceived by A. Now consider A himself. He would be for himself only an enjoyer, and B would be contemplated. But the fact is unaltered. It is still the fact that B is compresent with A , B is experienced because A is an expenencijig. But that does not make B any the less a distinct existence from A, Hence it follows that the distinction of enjoyment and objects contemplated is more fundamental than that of act of mind and its object (of experiencing and experienced). For it is only in the light of the first that the second, which is in truth and for realism identical with it, receives its fit interpretation. That 'enjoyment' is a well- chosen word I should not maintain, and will gladly accept a happier name for the same thing, if it be offered. The late Mr. Shadworth Hodgson reproached me for requiring that we should speak of enjoying a toothache ; and it is true that while I only contemplate a toothache (which is an affection of my body) I must speak of enjoying the sensing and the pain of it. I am therefore all the more glad that I can fall back upon the authority of Miss Austen, who tells us of Elizabeth Bennet, that the behaviour of Mr. Bingley's sisters towards Jane Bennet 'restored her to the enjoyment of her original dislike". I am contented, provisionally, with what satisfies Elizabeth Bennet and Miss Austen.^ 4. ' Naive ' and artful Realism. This proposition, that experience itself assures us of the existence of a mind, an object, and a relation of compresence between them, is or claims to be, like any other funda- mental proposition from which a philosophy sets out, an intuition. Not in the sense that it is given us by some unexplained faculty, nor assuredly, if the above be true, that it is reached without effort, but in the sense that it describes a fact which we are brought face to face with and accept, as we accept a colour or a sound, or the fact that the sun is perpendicular at noon. Nor is it meant that such a fact carries ^ Possibly, as I am reminded by a friend. Miss Austen meant slily to suggest that Elizabeth wilfully and with pleasure encouraged her dislike. In that case my authority fails me. But I give myself the benefit of the doubt, and allow the text to stand. The passage quoted is in ch. viii of Pride and Prejudice, 8 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY its own self-evidence with it in a way in which other propositions do not. On the contrary, the proposition may be erroneous ; the fact may be seen imperfectly, like the alleged fact which Berkeley saw that to be was to be perceived. Whether the fact is truly seen depends on its agreement with all relevant data. What is meant is, that the fact cannot be proved by argument. The use of argument is, like the use of a microscope, to put us in a position for seeing.^ It is, I imagine, this directness of the principle, which is in the minds of those who designate this form of realism ' naive ' realism. In what precise sense the epithet is understood by them is not quite clear, except that it appears to imply some degree of crudeness in the doctrine to which it is applied. If it means that the independent existence of physical things is postulated or assumed, the criticism may or may not touch Reid, but certainly not the principle here maintained. For postulation of the independent objectivity of things is the evasion of a problem, by way of escape from the belief that all we know is ideas. But our principle is the mere transliteration of the very experience of objects. If it is asked on what evidence we know that an independent object can exist, the answer is that in the experience of it^the independent object is revealed as entering into relation with the apprehending mental act. The problem is not evaded but shown to be gratuitous. But it is replaced by a different problem, of high importance to state : namely, how amongst the objects of which we are aware as distinct from ourselves, there comes to arise the distinction of the real and the illusory. For to the innocent vision there is no such distinction. The image is as real as t he percept. And to the last the image remains as independent of the mind as the percept. But we discover that certain images are not verified by perception, do not cohere with the forceful and compelling parts of our experienced world. Hence we are faced with the fact that not all objects which claim to be real can establish their claim, and indeed that every image without exception contains elements introduced by the personality of the experiencer. Our realism is therefore not naive if that epithet implies the crudeness of assumption without evidence. What the particular crudeness may be which this name, certainly not one of eulogy, suggests, is not so easy to see. Mere artlessness if it existed (and it does not here) is not irreconcilable with truth. It is as * There are some similar remarks of Mr. Russell (Principles of Mathematics, § 124, pp. 129-30). I do not inquire whether what is said here of philosophy does not apply, directly or indirectly, to science as well. THE BASIS OF REALISM 9 if you were to show a person a white square and asked him what it was and received the answer a white square. That would be artless but true. We must suppose that the naiveness of the principle consists in its inadequacy or relative unimportance.^ Its importance must be left to speak for itself. But as stated so far, though it seems to me of fundamental importance, it is inadequate, and I proceed to repair its defects. Our statement is the barest knowledge that we have of the funda- mental fact of relation between mind and things as we know the fact by acquaintance and not by description. I borrow the language used by Mr. Russell for the distinction described by Prof. Ward and W. James as the difference between knowing a thing and knowing about it. But even as a statement of acquaintance with the fact, it is incomplete. A closer study of my bare experience of things reveals that not only do I enjoy myself in compresence with the object, but that I, as enjoyer, (and not merely my body which is only another object), am in a relation to it of space and time ; and that in respect of sensory experience I am related to the object as effect to cause, am passive and aware of my passivity in respect to it, as Locke and Berkeley and many another philosopher have urged. For the more precise exposition of these matters I must needs refer elsewhere.^ But not only do I enjoy in myself more than mere compresence with the object ; I learn from other sources about my mind, that is by description of my mind, that my mind depends for its action, or uses as the vehicle of its action, a body and in particular a nervous system. I discover that my mind responds to external things through bodily organs, and that my enjoyments are initiated by my sense-organs. I come to know that my mind is located in my body and that its events are in temporal relation with events of my brain. In this way, by knowledge which is not enjoyment but consists of contemplated objects and therefore is not knowledge by acquaintance with mind, I come to discover that consciousness is a character which attaches to brain- processes of a certain sort in certain places of my brain.^ The mind ' Once ou an evening when the sun had lighted the line of snow above the Roseg glacier near Pontresina, a friend of mine and 1 called the attention of a newly arrived travellerto the spectacle. After observing it through his field- glasses, a pair of the best Zeiss binoculars, he exclaimed to us ^ It is snow '. That was naive, because though true it was incomplete and perhaps not im- portant. ^ Mind, N.S., vol. 21, 1912. ' On Relations and in particular the cognitive relation.' Section 4 ff. ' For this see Miiid, N.S., vol. 21, 1912. ' The Method of Metaphysics and the Categories.' Section 5. 10 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY ceases then to be what it was for simple acquaintance, a mere non- physical thing existing beside the physical objects which it knows. There is now a body united with a mind. Nor is there the least difficulty in justifying this union of an enjoyed mind with a dontem- j plated body in a single whole. For our original fact has taiight us I that physical things which we contemplate and our mind wjiich we enjoy are co-equal existences ; and, secondly, our body is also 4 direct object of contemplation to us and our brain is something whichj we can ^ contemplate, if not in perception yet in imagination and in iiiought. All we have learnt about ourselves by this synthesis of enj(wed and contemplated experience is that mind is not merely a thing by itself, floating as a continuum of activities in space and time, but ils really, though distinct from its object, not independent of the body /to which it belongs. ? Next, there is this more to be said about the fundamenlj^l relation of mind and its object, that, as we have seen, it is found ,iiot simply in the relation between these two groups but between any two existences in the world whatever. There is nothing peculiar in the relation itself between mind and its objects ; what is peculiar in the situation is the / character of one of the terms, its being mind or conscious. The I relation is one of compresence. But there is compresence between two physical things. The relation of mind and object is comparable to that between table and floor, and the cognitive relation — if you ,, abstract, as you may, from the distinctive character of the mental term — is merely the simplest and most universal relation between finite things in the Universe. To realize this is but to take the view of a being higher than mind, for to such a being minds would be open to contemplation equally with physical things, and the cognitive j relation would be seen to be one example only of universal com- presence, with such other predicates as we can assert about such compresence. Finally, the distinction of the enjoyer and the contemplated which marks off* the mind's experience of itself from that which is experienced by it — a distinction as we saw more vital than that of act and object — IS seen to obtain not merely as between mind and things, but wher- ever a new character of existence emerges as compared with the things of lower level of existence. Mind enjoys itself and contem- plates life (whether in other beings or itself) and physical things. The living being, the tree, enjoys itself and contemplates the air it breathes (I am venturing to use diff*erent language from Words- worth). The distinction may be carried further down, were it not for the difficulty of the detail ; and it may be carried up to the THE BASIS OF REALISM 11 angel who enjoys his own angelic character and contemplates minds and all things below. ; Thus, when we add to the initial fact all we can discover in it and about it, it turns out to be a particular instance of a wider principle, that the universe consists of distinct real existences of different order, compresent with each other and ' knowing ' each other in such measure as is possible to them at their various stages of development. The intuitional fact of enjoyment and compresent object contemplated leads up to an equally intuitional principle of compresent reals con- stituting a universe. This principle is corroborated by all fact, for all knowledge is in detail the statement of various coherences of things or characters of things. The com presence of reals means the existence as a fact in the real world of the principle which is used by all sciences in their different departments ; it is the metaphysical or ontological truth of the logical principle of coherence. 5. Mind a specific empirical quality or existence. Of the consequences of this conception I single out two, not in order to criticize other writers but in order to give sharpness of definition to the conception^ even at the risk of giving it excessive sharpness. ^ In the first place, mind or consciousness is a new quality of existence, and that which has mind is a new creature, existing at a higher level than physical or even living things. I do not inquire whether we can properly speak of unconsciousness as included in mind. For it is clear that if this is so, there is no difference of kind but only of grade between consciousness, subconsciousness, and unconsciousness, and that therefore unconsciousness is a form of consciousness. But I do mean that consciousness is a distinctive quality which belongs to organic being at a certain stage, and that it is as much a specific quality as blue or life. Thus I am compelled to dissent from the statement of Prof. E. B. Holt, though he is a fellow realist, that ' consciousness, whenever localized at all (as it by no means always is) in space, is not in the skull, but is " out there " precisely wherever it appears to be '.^ The complex of experiencings is, as the preceding section implies, always localized in the skull. And when James declares ^ that ' there is no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are * New Realism, New York, p. 353. Mr. Holt's doctrine is now more fully expounded in his book, The Covcept of Consciousness, London, 1914. What he calls consciousness I should call the objects of consciousness. But we are both trying to describe what consciousness is, and our difference is not merely one of language. 2 Radical Empiricism, London, 1912, i, p. 3. 12 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY made, but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked', I confess the fascination of this whole way of thinking, which it lies beyond me here to discuss, but I am compelled to dissent. Granted that our thoughts and material objects are identical ; whereas Berkeley repelled the Lockeian separation of ideas and things by declaring material things to be ideas,<4j ur realism d eclares that such ideas are material things. But we are not concerned with thoughts but with the thinking of them. And it follows from our analysis that the thinking of things is the prerogative quality of a special kind of thing, which on its material side is a brain, or at least a nervous system. In one sense it is true that consciousness, the system of -ings, introduces no fresh stuff of existence. For I have the conviction, which I cannot here defend, that that there is only one matrix from which all qualities arise. And in the same sense as on a lower level the secon- dary qualities arise out of this matrix, perhaps by some grouping of elements within it ; or, upon a higher level, life ; in that same sense we have on the highest level known to us the emergence of a new quality, of mind. Lest the notion of the emergence of a new quality be thought obscure, I add that I mean by it nothing more than what happens when in descent from a certain organic type a new type is produced ; as when descent from an ape leads to a form which though ape-like is no. longer ape but man ; or better still, when in time descent from an invertebrate leads to a vertebrate type. Or, to take an example from a quite different field, I mean what Browning's Abt Vogler means when he says of the musician, ' that out of three sounds he frames not a fourth sound,^but a star.' The new quality of mind may be called a functional quality. For when we consider conscious- ness as we know it only by direct acquaintance, it is itself a specific thing, a complex of conscious processes (though even this account involves terms like 'process' which are of a descriptive character). But we learn that the processes which are conscious are specific pro- cesses taking place in a material thing, and mentality is the specific quality of such processes,^ That conscious process should be process with a new quality and yet be entirely expressible without residue in physiological terms is indeed a debatable conception. But if facts compel us to it, why should we seek to evade the facts ? The one error we have to avoid is that which vitiates epiphenomenalism : the error of supposing that physiological ^ On the justification of speaking of mind sometimes as a ' thing' and some- times as a ' quality' or ' character', see further Supplementary NotCy at the end of the paper. THE BASIS OF REALISM 13 processes which are conscious would be the same, even as physiohgkal processes, if they were without consciousness. ' The fertile point of view \ says Mr. Bosanquet, ' lies in taking some neuroses — not all — as only complete in themselves by passing into a degree of psychosis.' ^ I lay the emphasis on the words ' not all \ The neurosis must be in such place and time and of such complexity as to carry with it the conscious character. But if we avoid the error thus exposed, this fact that vital process of a certain order may be mental, difficult and '■ mysterious as it may sound, is our first-hand experience of what may prove to be something fundamental to the universe of things, and may in particular be applicable on the border-line between life and its physico-chemical basis, another instance of the contrast between the enjoyed and contemplated. I have no intention to entet^ upon the question of vitalism ; but I refer for confirmation of what has here been said to the sane and balanced treatment of the whole subject by Prof. Lloyd Morgan.^ But as I am writing in order to provoke discussion and not as one who claims finality, I will add for clearness' sake a further illustration of my meaning, which may turn out to be rash. Psychologists have rejected on good grounds the supposed sense of innervation, the sensation of nervous discharge. But if we do not confine innervation to the outgoing discharge, and refuse to separate from one another afferent jcentral^and efferent process, assigning to the process as a whole the unity which belongs to the neurone, then what the older psychologists mistakenly called the sense of innervation is in fact consciousness itself or in general. The physiological transition along ^ The Value and Destiny of the Individual, Gifford Lectures for 1912, p. 3 (London, 1912). ^ See his Instinct and Experience, London, 1912, and his lecture. Spencers Philosophy of Science, Oxford, 1913. I do not, however, see the necessity of the notion which he appears to accept, without much enthusiasm , of a ' guidance ' due to cognition or ' cognitive relatedness ' which need not change the amount of energy- {Lecture, pp. 45, 52.) Guidance, in the sense intended, is I suppose guidance by purpose. But surely purpose is itself a mental and brain process, and does affect the total of energy. I should like to discuss Prof. Hobhouse*s treatment of purpose {Development and Purpose, London, 1913, pt. ii, ch. ii), but it would carry me too far. Dr. J. S. Haldane's Mechanism, Life and Personality (London, 1913), contains an excellently moderate statement of the case for ' neo- vitalism' ; but I do not like the philosophy of it. I am well aware how dogmatic the above view of the relation of the mental to the brain process may seem, without consideration of different conceptions. But I must be brief. I am not unmindful of the difficulties presented by the facts of binocular fusion and flicker referred to by Mr. Mac- Dougall {Mind and Body, London, 1911, ch. xxi). Tlie above view is not of course peculiar to me, but is one of a type. 14 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY the neural chain is in its new quality the transition which is con- sciousness. Consciousness being thus a real existence, whether we call it thing or function or quality, it is clear that it cannot be a relation. This remark is made only because the contrary has been supposed. In the experience, the perception of a table, the terms of the relation are the table and the perceiving consciousness. The relation involved, the cognitive relation, corresponds to the word o/*, and it is neither the table nor the consciousness but their togetherness. Table is not , togetherness, nor is the perceiving act togetherness, though it is true of the latter at least that from the nature of the case there would be no perceiving except in the togetherness. Whether the same is true of the table is a point to raise at a later stage. 6. Objects and Things ; or '-sensory contents'' and ' objects ofthought\ A second implication of the fundamental analysis is that the object is known for what it is, not necessarily as it is in its real nature, for there may be illusion, but at its face value, as blue or square or table or the number 2 or the law of gravitation. Like other living things the mind is selective, and according to the act into which it is thrown will be the object revealed to it, which enters into it, as Mr. Bosanquet so happily says, through the open door, or is seen by it through a window with glass of different degrees of transparence. To the mental acts of sensing, perceiving, imagining, thinking, correspond in the object, sensa (sense-data), percepts, images, concepts ; all inde- pendent of the mind though related to it in togetherness, owing to it their pe7xipi but not their esse.^ These objects (assumed for simplicity not to be illusory) are selections from a completer object which is discovered by the synthesis of many experiences. When I have the visual objects 'brown' 'square"* before me, I do not see the table, but only when by repeated experience I have connected these objects into a unity with ' solidity ' and ' wooden ' and the rest ; so that when I now perceive the table, that object is revealed to me in perceiving as the total of its constituents. In common speech, a thing means at least the continuum of its qualities ; and until we know what a quality ultimately is, we cannot say more. We can thus distinguish the partial 'object' from the complete ' thing '.^ But when we describe the partial object in terms of the complete thing, we are not saying * See latei^ection 9. ^^llJ^Bction of terms is used in much the same way by Mr. H. Barker. PMlmnsfKociety , N.S., vol. xiii, 1912-13, p. 258. As^ill be made clear in the next section (7) I am speaking in the above of definite objects, and I do not imply that * brown ' or ' square ' can ever be apprehended by themselves without a fringe. THE BASIS OF REALISM 15 what it is to acquaintance but speaking about it. The most incomplete objects are the objects of sensing. We may, if we please, distinguish the partial element of the whole from the whole as content from object ; and the only objection to this would be the introduction of a useless and misleading terminology. But those who distinguish the sensory content from the object of thought mean something different ; they mean that the real thing or object is meant or intended or referred to by thought, and that sensations and images are but directing guides to the nature of this object. Now I have two objections to this. The first is to some ^ extent a matter of language, though not entirely so. The content of a mental process should strictly or usefully mean those features which can be detected in the process as such, process characters. By process characters I mean such elements as speed, direction, configuration or pattern of a process. For example, if I am walking and diverge to look at a rose, the change in the process is described by the angle made by my new movement with the old. To call it a movement towards the rose is not a description of it in terms of the walking process itself. What the distinctive features of mental process are it may be difficult to say, but there is no reason why they should not be discovered.^ But no one pretends that a mental process as such is coloured or fragrant, and it is, I submit, an inconvenience to use a term which suggests that such characters are contained in mind. But if the term ' content ' is not thus used, but to mean that which the mental act is about, then I submit the object thought about is as much the content of the thought as the sensum is of the sensation or sensing. But the second objection is a more serious one. To distinguish — i:he sensory content as psychical from the object of thought is to con- sider the sensum not at its face-value but with the knowledge about it which we have in the knowledge of the thing to which it belongs. Because we know that there is a thing of which the sensational contents are but a fragment, we depreciate the sensory object into something less than and of a different order from the thing. But only extra-sensational apprehension tells us about the thing, and for sensing itself the sensum is as much a non-mental object as ever is the thing. We dare not use our greater knowledge to forego our philo- sophical innocence. Accordingly, to those who maintain the existence of sensory contents in distinction from objects of thought, we must ' So, for instance, towards an account of intensity attempts have jjjyi made by F. Brentano in his extraordinarily suggestive Untersuchungen zuri^nn^spsycko- logie, Leipzig, 1907, Essay 2, pp. 5S ff., and later from a physiological point of view by C. S. Myers, Bntish Journal of Psychology , vol. vi (Oct. 1918), pp. 137 fF. Also Holt, New Realism (on quality) ; Miinsterberg, Crruiidz. d. Psych., 1900, III. 16 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY reply as follows : Either the sensory content is a part of the thought object or content; or it is not. If it is a part of the thought content, for each party sense and thought would at any rate be on the same footing. This is not the meaning of those from whom I differ. But if the thing which is the object of thought and not a psychical content is on a different footing from the sensory content which is only a guide to it, what, it may be asked, is the warrant for this object ? Either it is experienced or it is not. If it is not, it is merely assumed or postulated. If it is experienced, it is correlative to some mental act of thought or meaning, of which it is as much the content as the sensum is the content of the act of sensing. The same thing is true if the act of meaning is an element only in a mental act of sensing or perceiving; if, for instance, it stands merely for the synthetic unity of mind which corresponds to the unity of the object. And accordingly the so-called object of thought is psychical. For us, both the sensum and the object of thought are equally objects, non-psychical ; they are equally objects meant, though they are not equally important.^ Doubtless it is difficult enough, with our natural and philosophical prepossessions, to treat the sensum as an object independent of the mind, for which the mind with its sense organ, through its act of sensing, is the mere vehicle of reception. Partly this arises from our theoretical ignorance of what exactly in the object the sensum is as compared with the percept. To call the sensum blue, as I have done, using a Leibnizian metaphor, a fulguration of the quality blueness is admittedly but a metaphor. And I am not yet prepared to supply the defect in theory. The sensum is so fragmentary and elementary. But at least we can say that whatever it may be, it is that which ^ The word ' thought ' appears to be used very loosely. Sometimes it means thinking proper (judging, conceiving, inferring), and this it ought to mean. Sometimes it is used for any (cognitive) act of mind. Here it is used for that in the mind which means or refers to an object, which is not a content. But what is this something in the mind? ' Meaning' again is used loosely. Strictly, one part of a complex means another part or the whole. The fox means his cunning. When I say the protestant religion I may mean the religion of the Church of England. But, above, meaning is equivalent to objective reference. This is a different sense. And in this sense a sensing act means its sense-object, and a thinking act its thought-object, and the word signifies nothing more than the compresence of the object with the mind. ^ On this whole subject, in which 1 have in view the teaching of Mr. Stout, see his important paper on ' Some fundamental points in the theory of knowledge ' (St. Andrews Quincentenary Papers on Philosophy and Divinity, Glasgow, 1911) ; also Mind, N.S., vol. 20, 1911, ' Reply to Mr. Joseph ' ; and the new (3rd) edition of his Manual of Psychology , 1913, Introd., ch. vi, and bk. i, ch. i. ?r THE BASIS OF REALISM 17 exists in the thing at the moment and place to which it is referred, and that it is equally and identically apprehensible by me and another person who should put himself into the same situation of place and time as I, and who is supposed for simplicity to be equally normal with me, and to be suffering from no special subjective condition different from mine which might differently affect his susceptibility to the sensory object. The difficulty is aggravated from two sources. One is the varying/ character of visual objects as compared with touch, and generally oi secondary qualities as compared with primary. The other is found in certain familiar illusions. Both kinds of evidence seem at first sight to compel the conclusion that sensory objects are psychical contents, though objective in their reference. But this conclusion is dispelled by examination. Take illusion first, and, as I must be brief,^ take the doubling of vision produced by pressing one eye to the side. Two objects to ^hJL sight but only one to touch. But shut the undisturbed eye, and ^ provided you look at your finger you see the displaced object in the /y^o . same place as you touch it. There is only subjectivity in the case of wu^f the two eyes open because we have then two different co-ordinations / v of vision and touch which are contradictory. For then there are two visual images of object and adjacent finger, but only one touch impression, and the object appears to be touched in two seen places. Thus the two seen images are the real look of the object when the normal co-operation of the eyes is suspended. This leads to the wider case of variations in vision and other secondary qualities though touch (itself also subject to variation under certain circumstances) remains unaltered. I see the table in different perspective according to my position. But this does not prove the visual object psychical — a mere content, but only that the object looks different from various angles. Substitute for the eye a purely physical object, say a soft mass of putty ; and let it be pressed against a hard square object. The corner of the square will affect the soft mass differently from the side ; the corner will reveal its real angularity to the putty and the side its smoothness. Now for the angel contem- ■ plating, our mind is related to the table in vision as the putty is related to the square. In both cases the appearances are real characters of / ^ For a further and fuller discussiou of sensory illusions^ as well as for the objectivity of images (a question I have not raised in this paper), see the paper in Aristotelian Proceedings, vol. x, 1909-10, ^ On Sensations and Images.' Mr. Stout's paper, to which this is an answer, is contained in the previous volume. ^r^ ^// 18 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY the thing. And so when the stick is seen bent in water, its visual • >» I character is bent because of the refraction of the light ; the illuminated yr,rjLM/fJ'^'t^^^\i^^^ is bent. But of course the touched stick is not bent. ^ /nr7 r*^**^ These facts and many like them do not justify the distinction of sensory contents as against thought objects. They rather point to the superior value of touch-experience and the greater importance of primary qualities, as in the first place apprehended by touch, over the secondary ones. For by touch we are in immediate relation with the spatial characters of things, while the other senses require not the thing alone but the additional presence of some other physical object, ' ether ' or air or some other so-called medium. Great as is the light thrown by Mr. Stoufs discussion upon this fundamental matter,^ the topic is irrelevant for our immediate purpose. For the primary qualities are in precisely the same position with regard to our minds as the secondary ones. Either both of them are mental or neither. Berkeley (and apparently Mr. Stouti) has chosen the first alternative. Realism maintains the second. (l^^^-^- w ^r^<> ^^rry ^ 7. ' Mind always a world ; its objects always fragments.'' So much for the fundamental thesis, the analysis of experience of an object into the mental act on one side, and the object on the other, and their compresence. But now comes my critic and declares the analysis to be a misdescription, and not a fundamental truth but a fundamental error. ' Speaking of fact aa I find it,' says Mr. Bosanquet,^ ' I should compare my consciousness to an atmosphere, not to a thing at all. Its nature is to include. The nature of its objects is to be included. When I came into this hall out of the smaller room in which we met, • the circumference of my mind seemed to expand." Yes ! because his mind came into compresence with a larger range of distinct objects. What fascination such ideas as the likeness of consciousness to an atmosphere possess for me, I have admitted in a similar case, and ex- plained how realism resists the fascination. The epigram at the head of (^ this section sums up the writer^ view. ' Mind is always a world ; its objects are always fragments.'^ My inclination is to meet it with the precise negative. Mind is never a world ; its objects are never fragments. But as this would be as misleading (though not as untrue) as the original, let us say rather : Mind and its objects are both alike and in the same sense worlds or fragments. So far as the object is a fragment, mind is a fragment too. So far as mind is a world, its 1 Manual of Psychology, 8rd ed., 1913, bk. iii, pt. ii, ch. ii. 2 Adamson Lecture, Manchester, 1913 (cited hereafter as A. L.), p. 27. ^ A. L., p. 38. THE BASIS OF REALISM 19 object is a world as well. This issue enables me to make good an incompleteness in the explicit statement of the analysis. In the perception of a tree, there is on one side the act of perceiving and on the other the percept tree. But the perceiving act is never enjoyed in isolation but in continuity with something else, which further experiencing shows to be also acts of mind continuous with the one mentioned and with others. The act of mind (already a com- plex in this case at least) throws out feelers towards its continuum, and the perceiving is but the salient feature in the enjoyment, to which the rest is a dimly enjoyed fringe. It is because of this that we must still accept the Cartesian cogifo as valid. I think ; therefore my thinking exists. But my thinking is experienced with its fringe. It is still mi/ thinking. Therefore I exist ; though only as the continuum of my acts, and not (so far as the cogito supplies evidence) as anything single and distinct from them. But the same thing is true of the object. The object tree is only the salient and interesting part of a larger whole with which it is continuous. At the least it is continuous with all surrounding space and time. As the mental act throws out feelers towards the rest of the mind, so does the sensed blue or the perceived tree, or the thought universal, throw out feelers towards its fringe. Included in this fringe is the spatial and temporal basis of the other qualities of the thing to which so simple an object as blue belongs ; and because of this the synthesis of qualities which is revealed in the thing by repeated and diverse experiences is no artificial combination, but already contained in the thing, and merely discovered by increasing knowledge, not invented by it. And now we can combine these statements of the mental act and its object. The oQect is given as a fragment of a larger whole. The mental act is given as a fragment of the mind. But the experience itself is the continuity of mind with its object (at least in space and time) and with the whole of which that object is a fragm6nt, including other minds ; and similarly it is the continuity of the object with its apprehending mind. How much is given of the fringe in the case either of the mental act or the special object, and with what distinct- ness of definition of elements within them, will depend of course upon circumstances. But the initial and fundamental fragmentariness of both mind and object is the fact, which when we realize it no longer vaguely as an adumbration but explicitly in a philosophic thought, we describe by declaring both mind and things to be fragments not merely of something larger than their own salient momentary existences but of an infinite whole; when we say, for instance, with Malebranche, that we see all things in God. B 2 J' XT 20 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY But if mind is as much a fragment as its object and in the same sense, the object, no matter how simple, is as much a world as mind. This is indeed but to repeat the same truth as is asserted in the frag- mentariness of each. The mind is in relation with, is compresent with, all the things it knows, and in that sense is their atmosphere, or envelops them ; and in the end, with thinking brought to the aid of sense, it knows the whole, although not in all that whole's richness of qualities, but only to such extent as its powers reach. But the external object is equally in relation according to its measure with the whole. The table envelops the whole universe, and is its atmosphere, so far as a table can ; if only that it is part of the same space and time to which they all belong. So true is Leibniz's conception that each monad represents the universe from its own point of view. Provide the monads with windows, w^hich Leibniz denied them. Only the appetitions of the monads remain to characterize the monads themselves. Their presentations are the real objects with which they are in intercourse. But each remains in this sense a world. But perhaps it is not wise to call things what they are not. Both mind and its object are metaphorically a world in themselves, and each of them stands in relation with more than itself and in the end with the whole world. But each of them is finite and more properly a fragment than a world. And each of them has its own self-existence, such as it is. It is both clearer and truer to say that each is a dis- tinct and independent portion of the world, which reaches out beyond itself into the whole, but does not forfeit its self-existence or indi- viduality thereby, if only because this reaching-out beyond itself is part of its individuality. But this is a topic which belongs to a later section, as well as the question whether in any sense not ' minds ' but ' mind ' is a world, and whether there is any such thing as mind in general. 8. The riches of mind ; and tertiary qualities. But though minds are no less fragments and no more a world than their physical objects, they are more perfect fragments and their world is more perfect. We have seen how mind is built on a substructure of physical and vital existence, and is more perfect than those physical or vital things which are without mind. But the same difference of perfection may be stated in a different way, from the point of view of what each level of existence 'knows'. The windows of things are variously glazed.^ * Or in Mr. Bosanquet's phrase (.4. L., p. 18) have 'degrees of transparence ' . As a friend reminds me, ' the windows which Leibniz denies to monads are not properly windows to see through but openings or holes ' through which any- thing could come in or go out'. It is convenient for me to retain the word in THE BASIS OF REALISM 21 Though each thing is in active relation with the whole universe, it only sees the universe in those characters of things which it is able to see, which its glass transmits. For the table, the whole world may be, let us say at a ventiu-e, accelerations under the law of gravitation, which let us suppose, again at a venture, to be universal. To a mind these same things are revealed with their colours or, if they are living things, with their life. And as one level of existence differs from another in what it is for itself, so within the range of minds there are various riches of endowment. To one mind the universe may be revealed as nothing more than something-or-other vaster than any single object, which makes itself oppressively or joyously felt. Another rises in thought to its explicit infinitude. One is tone-deaf, another colour- blind. A richly endowed intellect (I am confining myself to the more difficult case of intellectual riches) is like a person of fine manners who responds with subtle differences of behaviour to each varying subtlety in the human surroundings of his intercourse. Just so the finer mind is responsive to a greater wealth of objective fact, is more subtly discriminative in the differences of things, and in virtue of its past experience and hoarded wealth of mental suggestion and coherent and unified activity, or of some happy gift of divination which sends it in reasonable quest of fresh combinations in the objective world or even fresh objects, which perhaps it finds ; in virtue of all this sees with wider range and more deeply and delicately into things. A simple illustration is found in the difference between the good and bad observer of the same object. Both receive the same sensory impres- sion ; but in the one the sensory activities are supplemented by other (ideal) activities to which the corresponding objects compresent with those activities are those which are really present in the thing and are verifiable ; while in the other the supplementary activities mislead. The psychologist describes the machinery of mental activities or rather the functioning of them, for it is precisely these processes which are his peculiar subject-matter and not primarily their objects. None but a psychological pedant would indeed deny himself the liberty of describ- ing a process, when he is not specially concerned- with the analysis of its process-characters, in terms of the object to which it is rele- vant. He may still speak of the perception of a table when it is not his purpose to analyse the act of perception, but, for example, to show how the perception of the table in my room calls up the image of a both senses, as openings by which external things can exercise causality on any thing (I do not of course suppose that things ' come in or go out ' through them), and as windows by which they are revealed to that thing. ^2 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY table upon which in a council of war the map of the field of campaign is laid out. No single feature of our mental life which the psychologist has to explain is affected by the realistic theory which declares that all these features are characters of process and not of contents or objects. As Berkeley's idealism did not deny material things, but only gave them a new interpretation or rather orientation ; so our realism, in insisting \ that mind with all its wealth is in and for itself a complex of activities, makes no change in psychology but gives a different metaphysical orientation to its subject-matter. Thus the real thing which is mind is no less precious to realism than to its rival. But amongst the precious things which give value to the world are the tertiary qualities, and in particular beauty. Now it may be said, ' You have put secondary qualities on the same footing as primary ones and declared both to be physical. But some things are charming or lovely as well as red or round. But delight belongs to mind, and if all reality is physical the aesthetic object seems to be robbed of its most vital reality.' Nay, but the mind is, we have now seen, as real as physical objects and more perfect, and that objection disappears. But it is true that beauty is no easy thing to explain. We have to recognize in the aesthetic object a blend- ing of two reals, physical and mental, in which mind and body join, much in the same way as they are synthesized in the human person, and in which the mental element informs the physical thing, making it the embodiment of something real and complete, and (if I may avoid the doubtful word 'expressive') individual and effective. For the aesthetic object as physical is not aesthetic. It needs qualities which are imputed to it by the mind and are not in itself ; whereas when we perceive correctly the qualities imputed to the object actually are there. The picture is itself flat, but if it is beautiful it looks solid. Take as an illustration the comparison made by Mr. Berenson (and for all I know by others) between the Cimabue and the Giotto Madonnas that stand side by side in the Academy at Florence. The Cimabue picture is flat and looks flat ; the more beautiful Giotto looks three-dimensional and individual and effective : it has greater aesthetic value. The Florentines of the Renaissance, according to this luminous critic, excelled in depicting form to look real solid form, or (e. g. Botti- celli) in depicting real motion. The Umbrian painters (e. g. Perugino) excelled in « space-composition ', in rendering the ' sweep of space '. But the imputed elements are not in the painted mass. Or the marble Apollo may have solid form but it is not alive, and its life is the contri- bution made to the whole by the mind. Sometimes the imputed quali- ties are the human expression which is not at all in the physical object, THE BASIS OF REALISM 2S but is the mind's work.^ This co-operation of mind and object in the aesthetic thing is what gives to beauty at once its character of fiction and of value. As our bodies are organic to our minds, are at once the substructure without which they would not be, and the medium in which they are expressed ; so the aesthetic object, neither wholly physical, nor wholly mental, is a form of existence in which both these kinds are blended, and beauty is the real tertiary quality which is its distinctive character. Of the other tertiary qualities, goodness, which is a character of persons, and truth, which is a character of all real existence alike, I need not speak, but may refer to the fuller treatment of them and beauty elsewhere.^ II 9. Independence of objects. If the foregoing analysis of experience be^rue, experience itself declares that in apprehension an object is revealed to the mind which is non^niental and independent of it. It even declares that in sensory experience the mental act is the effect of the object, that the mind is passive in respect of the sensory object. Now no one doubts that the object is indispensable for the mental act ; the mind, as Lotze said, cannot grind without grist. But it is often ^ Compare the words of Shelley in the sonnet ' Ozymandias ' (the italics are mine) : — Near thera, on the sand. Half-sunk, a 'shattered image lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command. Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet sur\'ive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. 2 See two articles in Mind, N.S., vol. 22, 1913, on ' Collective willing and truth'. Beauty is discussed, very slightly I confess, but less slightly than here in the second of these two articles, which had not appeared when Mr. Bosanquet wrote. The passage on beauty (section 12) was written like the rest of the paper before I had read Mr. Berenson's four books on the Italian Painters of the Renaissance, or I should have written somewhat differently. I speak there too much as if the expressive element in a picture were always some human feature of character imported from the spectator ; and I have now learnt (especially from the book on the Florentines) that it is not always so. I do not know if Mr. Berenson, in insisting so strongly on the ^ tactile values ' of a great representation of form, that it makes you feel the objects represented as real and tangible, may not be describing what is a specially personal experience of his own, which need not perhaps be universal. For even if it is denied that we can directly see solid form as well as touch it, at any rate in the indirect vision of solidity, not all of us need to realize vividly the tactual solid character. M PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY maintained that the converse is equally true and that the mind is indispensable for the object, at least for the sensory object, if not for the object of thought. For completeness'' sake, as well as in view of what follows, I will endeavour briefly to remove this prejudice. It arises in part from a confusion between the notion of inde- pendence and that of absence of relation. It is clear that in the experience both object and subject enter into a relation, that of being known on the one hand and of knowing on the other. But dependence is a specific kind of relation. When A is dependent on B, we mean at least that without B, A would not have the qualities for which it is said to be dependent on B. Thus when we speak of a very dependent person, we mean that he can do nothing without the help of some one else. To be independent in any respect is for A to have these qualities in the absence of B. Now the object is clearly dependent on the mind for being known. But it is, as the mind itself declares in the experience, not dependent upon the mind for the qualities which make it what it is. The mind is indispensable to blue in so far as it is sensed, but not for its blueness. The case may be illus- trated from the commonest experience. The shilling which is in my possession depends on me for being possessed but not for being a piece of silver, a white metal with a certain atomic equivalent.^ The prejudice arises, next, from the selectiveness of the mind, which it shares with organic things in general and with things at a lower level. The mind apprehends only what it is interested in ; that is, what affects it in any way. But selection, while it creates the limita- tion of the mind to what is selected, does not or need not alter the object selected. When sulphuric acid is poured upon salt, the sulphuric acid selects the sodium from the salt, but the sodium which enters into the sulphate of sodium is precisely the sodium which was contained in the salt, though it owes its presence in the sulphate to selection by the acid. When an animal extracts oxygen from the air, the oxygen owes to the animal its removal from the air to the lungs, but it is the very oxygen which was in the air. The mind in like manner sees the table now square now oblong, according to the point of view. But these are real visual elements of the table, and only the selection is due to the mind. Now all mental action (at any rate * This consideration is used repeatedly by the ' New Realists ' in their treat- ment of what they call the 'egocentric predicament'. See especially Prof. Perry's paper. Of course the stamp of the king's head implies liuman minds but certainly the qualities of the silver do not. On the contrary it is because this is a metal, comparatively rare, and easy to handle, that it is made use of by men for currency. THE BASIS OF REALISM 25 when it is sensory) is a reaction on the object, and in respect of its cognitive character leaves the object unaffected in its nature, though it may select for its attention according to the direction of its interest the most different combinations of the characters of the object. Thus on the strength of the declarations of experience itself we see that objects are not dependent for their own characters on the mind which apprehends them, and have those characters when there are none to apprehend. We humans, who live at the level of the sixth day of creation, are so unwilling to go back to the fourth when there were no animals to see and hear. It may be objected that if the sense-object actually acts causally on the subject its effect would not exist in the absence of the subject. But this would be an error ; it would produce its full effect, but if the recipient were different, so would be the effect. A sound from a tuning-fork would not produce hearing, but it would set in sympathetic vibration a fork of the appropriate pitch. This is all that is necessary for our purpose, for it demonstrates that the object is independent of the mind. But it is well to go further, even at the risk of raising difficulties that will not be solved, and consider how the case stands with the independence or dependence of the mind. According to the vague general description of depen- dence given, mind is undoubtedly dependent on its objects. In sensory action the particular direction of consciousness is even determined causally by the object. In imagination, however, and thinking, the object is not causally operative but only compresent. We might feel inclined to say then, that the image and the thought are dependent on the mind, or at least interdependent with it. But this cannot be ; the image and the thought are themselves verified in their different ways by sensory experience, that is, by an object independent of mind ; and they are as much objective as the perceived table, though they may contain elements of error. ^All that the image and the thought owe to the mind is the particular selection of elements ; and the erroneous elements are arbitrarily selected ; but, true or illusory, they are equally objective and independent ; precisely as a steam-engine though due to my practical action is independent of me, and may destroy me if I do not humour it. The above general account of dependence would make the cause ' de- pendent ' on its effect, as well as the effect on the cause ; or the triangle 'depend' on its surrounding space. But dependence in common usage suggests causal dependence, and it is not consistent with usage to say that the cause depends on the effect or is determined by it. In this situation we might try to modify our account of dependence ; >^ 26 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY but this would mean a difficult inquiry, and I deliberately choose now the coward's part and evade it.^ But since dependence suggests that the dependent is an effect, and since this is not true of every sort of mental action, it is better to use a more general word and, borrowing a term from the 'New Realism", say that the mind implies its objects. The objects still do not imply the mind, except for their being known (i. e. implied) ; not, that is, for their nature. Such implication is not inferential, but experiential, attested by the experience itself. Thus if we have to speak of dependence at all, it is the mind which is dependent on objects and not objects on the mind. For the reasons given, I prefer to avoid the phrase. But though mind only implies its objects and does not always owe its action to them, yet we have still to note that in the order of creation, minds are strictly the issue, and the causal issue, of the physical order of things. For now that we have learnt that we experience real objects, as well as ourselves ; have learnt that the foundations of science are sound ; we may follow what we can learn from any source in physical science concerning them. And following analogy we must hold that beings with mind are descendants of lower forms of life, and exist because their apprehension of external things (and one another) enabled them to persist, and that conscious apprehension is but the last and most perfect form known to us of accommodation to pre-existing things, the greater perfection of man's receptivity to his surroundings and his more or less inventive reaction upon them securing him his happiness and his mastery of the world. We hold this in virtue of the same reasoning which inverts the old argument from design, and holds, not that the trees and rocks and lower animals were created for man, but that man's fortunate endow- ment enables him to survive by making use of rocks and trees and animals. If any one thinks that this doctrine savours of materialism, he v/ forgets that mi^d, though descended on its physical side from lower forms of existence, is, when it comes, a new quality in the world, and no more ceases to be original because in certain respects it is resoluble into physical motions, than colour disappears because it is resoluble into vibrations. But if he thinks (what is more serious) that this doctrine destroys the independence, individuality or self-existence of mind, he is confusing independence, not in the old way with unre- latedness, but with isolation. Man's implication of objects which do not imply him, and his genetic outcome from things of their order, no more destroy his individuality and independence, /than a triangle's * I could not attempt it myself, apart from a general inquiry into time. V THE BASIS OF REALISM 27 implication of its surrounding space destroys its individuality. On' the contrary, these things make him the richer individual. It was only in order to repel the notion that objects were dependent on mind, that we were forced to say that if we must choose which side, if either, is dependent, it must be mind. But dependence and inde- pendence are relative terms. Strictly speaking, there is nothing which is not dependent on other things, and in the end on the whole universe, in at least some of its aspects. For instance, the stone though not dependent on me, is dependent on the whole of space and time. But it is just because the stone is not aware of mind and does not imply it, that mind which does imply the stone is higher than it. The thing which carries mind is in its degree an independent individual, with its own self-existence. For take the worst case, that of the action on the mind of sensory objects which affect it causally. They' do but give its particular direction to the consciousness which they awake. They do not by themselves create consciousness. Conscious- ness owes its possibility to the organism of which it is a functional quality, not to the object which acts on it. Without the object there would be no act of consciousness; but without the organism there would be no consciousness to awake. The individuality of the man consists in the tendencies which precede the action of the object, the tendencies to react upon the object. The apple which I perceive makes me put out my hand to grasp it and eat it. That reaction has with me the character of consciousness, and in the reaction I am aware of the form and taste of the apple. ^ The basis of my indivi- duality lies in these tendencies to conscious reaction. Each several reaction in which these tendencies are set a-going implies its object and enriches the individuality. Sometimes the object itself it is which sets them at work. Sometimes they are set at work from within. But there are always the tendencies to act and to know. Just so the impulse of love implies a mate of whom it sets a man in search ; and the instinct towards one's fellows implies them and enables us to know them. Perhaps in the same way the impulse to worship implies a God, in searching for whom we get to know him. All these tendencies centred in our brain and supported by our body^ waiting for the touch which awakes them into consciousness, are for*us the properties contained within those boundaries of spice and time, which ^ This is what is meant when cognition is denied ^y be a distinct mental attitude, diflferent from conation. The element ia'^ thfccognitive com^|x, in virtue of which the conation needs to be called cogfeaia, is the cogidtWi, the object itself outside the mind. See paper on * Conatiernal Psychology ', BHtish Journal of Psychology , vol. iv, 1911. 9.8 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY make us individuals and the distinct and relatively independent things we are. The same account with proper changes might be given of every other form of finite existence. ^ 10. Minds and 'Mmd\ The minds we have been discussing are empirical existences, strictly comparable with physical things, but distinguished from physical things by their peculiar quality of consciousness or mentality. A mind is a continuum of processes which also are functions of an organic, physical body. An empirical exis- tence is contrasted with an a priori existence, not in the sense that what is a priori is not experienced, for there is nothing which is not either experienced or experiencing, but in the sense that there are certain characters of the world which are all pervasive, and are common both to things and minds. ^ And amongst these fundamental categorial characters I include time and space, whether as characters or as actual existences. But it is urged from the side of Idealism that the whole analysis is unreal and false, not on the grounds that have hitherto been discussed, which are relatively secondary, but for a more deep- going reason to which the distinction of empirical and a priori supplies in advance the answer. The very objects of the mind them- selves, it is urged, are, not indeed minds, but mind ; have characters in virtue of which they live in a medium of mind. The simplest object, the sensum blue, is really continuous in kind (it is not meant in space or time) with mind. 'Continuity to make every part permeate every other, retention to let no element drop out,' these are characters of the objects themselves ; ' and all this means mind."* ^ The blue thing has unity and life ; blue in it reinforces blue and so pro- duces the * effect "* called blue in the artistic sense of that word, the elements in it * work on each other through identity and difference '."^ — ' The reality of the universal ' * on which the realists insist so urgently, ' is a sufficient proof that the objects of mind may be alive with its vitality.' Accordingly to Mr. Bosanquet, the separation of the physical sensum from mind seems fraudulent, because the sensum is already mind. Now finite minds we know, and we can conceive an infinite mind. But it is not minds which are here in question but mind. The issue, therefore, is not whether finite minds are indispensable to the things which they know. All the same, it is easy to slip from the notion that all things live in the medium of mind to the proposition that ' objects of finite mind and finite minds themselves are reciprocally * See JI/mrf,vol. 21,1912, ' On the Method of Metaphysics and the Categories.' 2 A. L., p. 39. 3 ^ 2.., p. 33. * A. L., p. 36. THE BASIS OF REALISM 29 indispensable ^ ' and that is why I have tried to show that this aspect of the matter need no longer be regarded ; and that the proposition is untrue in fact. On the large and vital issue, I answer that the objection rests on a confusion between the distinctive character of minds, which is consciousness and an empirical quality, with the formal or categorial characters of things, which are contained alike in mind and things and are only most easily experienced in. minds. In insisting that the enjoyer and things which he contemplates are alike things beside each other in the world, not of the same perfection but on a like footing of reality, realism bids us also, while treating minds as things, look also to objects to see whether they do not, as contemplated, present features which the mind also presents in enjoy- ment. It bids us do what science does, and ask for general laws or features connecting all the things with which metaphysics is engaged. And it is rewarded by finding that such general features do exist. Continuity, occupation of space and time, substantiality, causality, to name only these, are in mind. Look outward and you find them in things. There is difficulty for us in the discovery, and hence such errors as that we impute substance or causality to things on the analogy of mind, instead of actually finding them there ; or the belief that we do not enjoy ourselves in space, but only in time, or that we even transcend space and time. The angels, who do not enjoy mind but contemplate it and things alike, would find no difficulty. They see, and we can too, that there is substance in the table, and con- tinuity at least in space and time ; and perhaps ultimately there are no other continua but these. And all categorial characters they find to be as much ingrained in the structure of all finite things, including minds, as the physicist finds gravitation in material things ; and perhaps with greater confidence. But while he finds substance and continuity, identity and difference, in things, the realist does not commit the mistake of declaring there- fore that things are, in their real and deep-seated nature, mind. Mind is for him a general name for the empirical character of consciousness wherever it occurs in finite minds or in an infinite mind, if such there be. He knows no other ' mind \ I have indicated what we lose by forgetting the earlier days of creation in favour of the sixth. But now I plead that we should sometimes consider the later ones. To the creatures of the eighth day the doctrine that all things are liv- ing in a medium of mind would sound as iinpossible as the proposition sounds to ourselves, who are no more than minds (and Mr. Bosanquet is one of our number), that all things are material. We know from ^ A. L., p. 45. 30 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY Homer that the immortal gods upon occasion laughed inextinguish- ably. One can fancy one almost hears the laughter of the angels over Mr. Bosanquet. No wonder that my critic, with this forgetfulness of the cate- gorial characters of things, should think that the objects of the realist, from percepts to universals, are abstractions, killed as he says and stuffed for examination^; or that he should think that their con- nexions and coherences are in fact, on our view, introduced by the mind itself in the fashion of Kant^s synthetic unity, on its erroneous side ^ or on an erroneous interpretation of it. The inner coherence of the table is in the table not in the mind, and in the strict sense there is no mind in the table nor even life. But I am guilty of no abstrac- tion in recognizing the independence of the table in the fulness of its reality so long as I do not fail to discover in it all the unity and coherence which it really contains in itself, and of which my mind is but a higher specimen, a specimen in higher material. When Mr. Bosanquet says that 'the reality of the universal is a sufficient proof that the objects of mind may be alive with its vitality', I imagine he means with the vitality of mind ; and I should answer, No ! but with their own vitality so far as vitality can be ascribed to them (if they are purely material objects and not living ones), in a metaphorical or extended sense. If he means with the vitality of the universal, I do not feel at present equal to any reasoned reply. I should doubt if a universal ' works ' by itself, but rather in and through its embodi- ments ; any more than the law works except through its agents or the minds of the people who obey it ; or than a mental habit works with- out the special act which sets it going. But if the universal does work, as such, it works as much if it is non-mental as if it is mental or alive. This reference to vitality induces me to add that it is not because they are connected, one function implying another, that vital functions are alive; but because these functions have the specific quality of life. Life does not consist merely in the relation of the functions. The functions are alive, and their relation is that deter- minate modification of continuity which is organic, and which is not found in a purely physical being, nor in a universal unless the elements of the universal are alive. You cannot call life a relation without making a relation into a quality. Mental activity in like manner is empirical in respect of its mentality. You cannot attribute mind to ob- jects which lack the fit empirical nature. There is a saying of Goethe's which Lotze quotes, reminding of certain sayings of Greek philo- sophers : if the eye were not sunlike how could it see the light ? The 1^. Z., p. 45. 2^.Z.,p. 35. THE BASIS OF REALISM 31 eye must indeed be susceptible to light for the mind to take in light. But we may not reverse the question, and ask : if the light had not an eye, how could it be visible ? The truth in this matter lies rather in a reversal of the suggestion that objects are full of mind, in principle the same as that reversal of ideas which explains why it is that the animals and plants are service- able for man.^ It is not true that objects are mind. What is true is that into the constitution of mind there enter the formal elements, and above all the fundamental ones of space and time, which enter also into physical and living things. The empirical existence mind is an outcome of and is built up upon the lower levels of empirical existence, in which also these formal elements are contained. The mind has a body of life ; and life has a body of physical and chemical properties ; and perhaps the secondary qualities have a body of primary ones. In this sense the empirical qualities of the lower level are carried up into the higher level. The formal characters belong to each level alike. Mind is the most perfect form we know of empirical existence in which these formal elements appear. But the empirical qualities of the lower level are not themselves contained in the empirical Hkiaracters of the higher. The formal characters, however, which PPBelong to all levels alike are thus carried up. It is for this reason that lower existences may seem to us to be ' mind ', just as animals may seem to exist for the sake of man. In reality, minds make use in the way described of the low er levels ; and if we confuse the categorial characters of minds and things with the empirical character of minds, we are forced to the paradox, as unwelcome to my critic as to common sense, that minds owe their * mind "* to physical existence. 11. The wider Issiies. It is no part of my purpose to attack idealism, but rather to expound realism and defend it on its own merits. But it will help this purpose if I endeavour to make clear the underlying differences between it and the form of idealism which my critic represents, and the larger issues which the contrast raises. This is all the more necessary because the language which he uses is such as verbally I could use myself, but with a total difference of orienta- tion. For I have habitually used language which declares that not minds only know, but in an extended sense a physical thing ' knows' other things to the extent of its receptivity. This follows at once from the analysis of knowing proper, the knowing which conscious- ness has ; and is when considered carefully only another way of stating that analysis. The cognitive relation proper is the compresence between the physical object and another thing, when that thing has ^ Above, section 9, p. 26. 32 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY the property of consciousness. The peculiarity of cognition arises not from the relation but from the empirical character of the subject. In this case the universal relation of compresence between finites is named cognitive after its term. We may extend the sense of cogni- tion, and calling compresence ' knowing "*, may ascribe * mind' to all things alike, in various degrees. It might seem therefore that the dissent from idealism is a distinction without a difference. I can only gratefully acknowledge the fairness and insight with which Mr. Bosanquet declares that the form of realism with which I am feeling my way and the other forms of realism current at the present time, have no truck with materialism and are in fact far nearer to idealism of his own objective type ; and that if on these views mind loses something of what it is commonly credited with (I have tried to show that in abandoning its pretensions mind establishes its reality and its perfection) matter receives much more than materialism credits it with. Moreover, it is possible even that the union of the body and mind which we find in the human person may turn out in the end to be typical of every form of existence from the lowest to the highest and perhaps of the universe itself as a whole. But in fact, identical as the language may be, when realism ascrib«B mind to physical things (I prefer not to do so myself, and whilWB allowing a physical thing to ' know ' not to call it a mind), the distinction from idealism is vital. For things are minds on this view, not in the sense of idealism, that they live in a medium of mind, are ' mind ■* and ' focussed in mind ', but merely in the sense that the objects with which they are in relation (say of causality), are pre- sented and revealed to them, as objects are presented and revealed to minds proper. They would therefore, if we use this language, not be ' mind ' but minds. They would have distinctive empirical qualities in virtue of which they enjoy themselves, and contemplate other things so far as is open to them. These empirical qualities are not consciousness, but since the distinction of enjoyment and contemplation which we know from consciousness exists on lower levels of existence as well, we may if we please, by an extension in the way of metaphor, call lower existences consciousnesses or minds. In vital respects this is not different from the method of Leibniz in regarding monads of different orders as minds of varying degree. But it is still widely different, even from him. For in the first place, his representations have disappeared and been replaced by the other monads themselves in so far as they are revealed to the single monad. And next, his doctrine of consciousness of different degrees is replaced by a series of empirical qualities not merely different in degree, or in variety, but THE BASIS OF REALISM 35 in kind, where only the character which is familiar as consciousness is really consciousness at all. For this reason, while it is legitimate always to say that a material thing ' knows"* in the extended sense defined, I prefer, in order to avoid this ambiguity, not to call a material thing a mind, but what it is, a material thing. At any rate it is not * mind ' but a mind. It would be the business of meta- physics to set out the relations of these various types of empirical existence to one another and to the fundamental categories ; while it is the business of the sciences to describe their empirical characters. The proposition that the truth is the whole might be accepted in appropriate meanings not merely by idealism, but by realism as well. And therefore the issue between realism and the idealism which takes these words for its watchword, and is not subjective but objective idealism, is not properly named the issue between idealism and realism. It is more properly the issue of Monism, or more precisely Singularism,^ and Pluralism. But let us retain the name Idealism. Now the different function assigned to mind in the two methods is an illustra- tion of certain fundamental issues. I will mention some of them, premising that they are in reality all reducible to one. They all turn on the second sense of perfection which was referred to in the opening section, in which * more ' or ' less perfect "* mean not higher and lower degrees of development, but on any one level the more or less complete or comprehensive, as for instance society is completer than an indivi- dual member of it. But these questions I shall not attempt to answer here, even if I could at present answer them satisfactorily at all. I shall merely raise them. (1) For idealism there is only one self-existent, the w^hole. Realism inquires whether the finites do not retain their self-existence, though that self-existence be relative. Can even the whole be self-existent independently of its parts ? And if it can, what has become of the parts ? This second question merges in the next. There is a further question whether, as idealism maintains, the whole is of the nature of spirit, which also merges into a later one. (2) According to idealism, the finites are appearances of the Real. In the character which they wear as appearances they are real, but in so far as they are mere appearances, they are not ultimately real, but are absorbed into the one reality. This is true not only of finite bodies but of finite minds. In such absorption into the Real they are trans- formed, and they do not retain in the Real the character which they ^ See J. S. Mackenzie, Mind, vol. 23, Jan. 1914, ' Meaning of Reality ', p. 26. The term Singularism is used by O. Kiilpe and by J. Ward. C 34 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY have as appearances. But this is gravely open to question. As before urged (sec. 1) in order to prove. that entrance into the whole transforms the part, it must be shown that this relation is one which destroys the individuality of that which enters into the relation. But experi- ence seems to show that at any rate not all relations have this conse- quence. For instance, a triangle is in relation to the whole of space, but so far from its being true that its participation in space destroys its triangularity, the triangle implies the rest of space and vice versa. This case has been cited before. Similarly, the entrance of the indi- vidual into a society of some sort or other, does not transform him, since he possesses social impulses, but rather fulfils him. These are examples of entry into intrinsic relations. With extrinsic relations, it is a matter of circumstances whether the relation transforms or not the individuality of the term. Thus a blow in the face may cause my death ; but it may only knock out a tooth and leave my individuality very much what it was. Moreover we should arrive, if idealism were well-founded, at the paradoxical result that the relation of the finite to the whole was extrinsic. But it may be questioned whether extrinsic relations are not merely such as lead to a redistribution of elements within the whole and whether they do not therefore subsist only between finites. Perhaps the relation of the infinite whole to its parts is always intrinsic, as in the example of parts of space. In that case the parts would be retained as they are, and not transformed. (3) According to idealism, then, the finite does not exist as such in the infinite whole. At the same time the whole is said to be of the nature of spirit. But though the empirical character of mind or spirit is possessed by the highest things we know, there is no evidence that there may not be higher empirical finite characters in the world ; not merely that there may not be vaster minds in the sense in which the human mind is superior to an elephanfs or a monkey's, but that there may not be finite things with an altogether new character, as life is new compared with matter. Still less can we assume that the infinite being may not be of an altogether higher order. Thus there may be a different alternative. The case may be, as with the human person, body and soul. The separate cells do retain their individuality within the physiological body. But a certain part of the body carries with it not mere life but consciousness. The whole may be constructed on this plan, in which all finites are preserved as such, and yet the whole may be new, because a part of it (an infinite part) carries a totally new character. (4) Space and Time are, for idealism, appearances and in some respects the lowest degree of reality. And not only does the whole THE BASIS OF R*L'AtlSM •*'"•*:••-*•.•:/•'•. 35 transcend space and time, but the finite mind, at least in some forms of the method, does so as well. But for realism the question arises whether these may not be at the foundation of all reality, and whether it may not be they which hold the world together, so that whatever else exists, exists in them. So far from the whole's transcending space and time, it may be only in terms of them that the world as a whole can be expressed through and through. Here it has been maintained that on the strength of its own deliverances the mind enjoys itself in space and time. These doctrines as to space and time, I need not add, are not held in common by all forms of realism. It is not implied that the above statements of the fundamental features of idealism would be accepted in precisely this form by idealism itself. I have sought merely to indicate the way in which some of its features strike my own mind, and the kind of questions which they raise there. And as I have become personal, I will end with a confession which is suggested by the last paragraph about space and time. I do not speak of other forms of realism, but only of that which I am expounding here. But whatever truth it may contain (and in the main I believe it to be true), appears to myself utterly incomplete and unsatisfying, to float unsuspended, and to be nearly valueless, till an inquiry has been made into space and time, their intrinsic nature and their relation to one another, and, following upon this, their relation both to the fundamental characters of exis- tence, and to the existence of empirical characters. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE Mind as Hhing'' and as ''charactej'\ In the text mind is spoken of sometimes as a thing, like other things, and sometimes as a peculiar character of an appropriately organized body, and in particular of an appropriately organized nervous system. This as I found from the discussion which followed the paper is apt to create difficulty, which I can remove by the remark that the designation of mind as a character of something, the brain or the nervous system, is secondary and the result of discovery. In perceiving an external object I enjoy my mental act (and in the end my mind as a continuum of such mental acts), as an existence compresent with the object. This is the primary experience. It is I believe a mistake to describe that experience as the compresence of the body with the object. I am only aware of my body in so far as I enjoy myself, or my mind, in compresence with my contemplated body. Accordingly the primary fact is that I, the mind, am compresent 36 PkOtJEEDlNGS OP THE BRITISH ACADEMY with the table. So far as I perceive the table I know nothing of my body. Primarily therefore the mind is enjoyed as a thing along- side of other things. But I soon discover that there is an intimate connexion between my mind, my body, and the table. If I close my eyes I cease to see the table. That is unless the contemplated eyes are open (unless I have the position sensa of the open eyes) I am no longer perceptually compresent with the table. In other words, in the act by which I contemplate the table, I now also contemplate the open eyes. This kind of discovery goes on, and I find that not only must my organs be at work for perception to occur, but also my mental acts issue in movements contemplated, at least in the form of kinaesthetic sensa ; and in the end when I have sufficient knowledge and thought to contem- plate the brain which I do not see, I find that my mind is in the same place as my brain, and my mental acts are conditioned by physiological processes therein. When I have arrived at this stage, and it is very late, I can say that my mentality is a character or quality of my brain, and then I cease to describe my mind as a thing, but regard it in its connexion with the body to which it belongs.^ But all this is discovery. And when I do not take into account my bodily conditions of mind I am still aware of my mind in enjoyment as the thing which it is in my primary experience. It is only by attending to the bodily intermediaries between objects and my mind that I can learn my essential intimacy with my bodily structure. The animals must soon be aware that, for instance, when their eye is shut the object disappears. But does a dog ever learn that his seeing depends on his eyes being open ? Does he ever attend to this con- dition, and can he ever reach the awareness that his mind is a charac- ter of his body ? I should say not. But we do attend, and so at last we create brain physiology and psychophysics. Hence when it is urged, as it was urged in the discussion, that what matters is not that there should be a mind compresent with the object, but a body with sensory organs compresent with it ; I reply that this confuses knowledge of the situation with knowledge about it ; and that in perceiving a table the body is not as such in the experience, till a later stage. * For the details of the process of fuller discovery I refer to the paper on ^ Self as subject and as person ' {Proc. Arist. Society, vol. xi, 1910-11, especially Section 5) or to Mind, N.S., vol. 21, 1912, ' Method, &c.* (Section 6). 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. JUN 31962 fil^?#^^ APR 2 3 1 966 7 6 tC'D LD ess PR 17 1966 LD 21A-50m-3,'62 (C7097slO)476B General Library University of California Berkeley