Page:Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience.djvu/60

52 of actual judgments, depends upon social agreement. If only one, or only a very few astronomers had been able to see spots on the sun, the judgment 'there are sun-spots' would have had no validity in science. The crank with his hobby may conceivably be right all the time, but such validity as his judgments might possess is something different from the validity which characterizes accepted judgments.

Just as science is not the private possession of any one individual, so a primitive view of the world is share<l in common. But philosophical views of the world to-day can not be said to be held in common to any great extent. In so far philosophy is at a disadvantage as compared with science, for there is not enough agreement in philosophical judgments to give them the character validity.

We have thus a cooperation of different minds as the basis of validity. But from a psychophysical point of view this means the cooperation of different nervous systems, or a social system C. Such a system C as this can have a history which no individual could have. Avenarius calls such a system a 'Congregal System,' and represents it by the symbol ΣC.

Now it is easy to ridicule this concept, but it is unquestionably a perfectly legitimate one. It does describe the situation. The situation involves the psychophysical aspect of experience, the history and evolution of experience, and the fact that the education of an individual depends in the very highest degree upon his relations with other individuals, and that judgments about objective things derive their validity from social cooperation in these judgments.

It seems to me rather a proof of the value of the concept of the individual system C that it can be so readily extended to include all those individual systems which do determine one another in their judgments, and thus do really constitute a system.

By virtue of such a system as ΣC, the experience of one generation depends upon the experience of previous ones, and the process of eliminating the E-values which are not determined by R-values is made possible. These E-values which are to be got rid of represent the remnants of primitive animism, which was, of course, a falsification of nature by an imaginative introjective process. The heritage of animism which we have on our hands is, Avenarius thinks, the soul-concept and its consequences in philosophy.

The soul is conceived to be something within the body,—it is the basis of a literal distinction between inner and outer. The concept of the soul is, indeed, not prominent to-day, but the distinction between inner experience and outer experience, internal sense and external sense, is common enough. If there had been no soul-concept, the course of philosophy would no doubt have been very different from what it actually has been; it seems very probable that