Page:Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience.djvu/82

74 throat and body, this commonplace statement is false. The situation contains not seeing, but visual and other objects, and if I am interested in the object on the other side of the room in such a way as to make me oblivious of myself, the situation as just then experienced by me contains no seer.

It is easy to understand, however, why we say 'I see the chair' and think we have a feeling of doing something. Owing to acts of mine, the content is constantly changing, I am continually doing things in order that particular contents may exist, as when I travel and take great pains to see all the picture-galleries, or all the Gothic architecture, that I can. And when I at last have come to something that I have long and eagerly wished to see, there may be such a lively pleasure and such a sense of purpose fulfilled that I say to myself, 'Now you are beholding it, now you have really got the experience you have been longing for.' In these cases an empirical ego is present, but it is another object in the field of experience.

This sense of personal efficiency expresses itself in a sentence having its subject in the first person and a verb in the active voice and, in the example used, the visual object in the accusative case. And now applying this manner of words to the simple case of 'seeing* the chair, we get what seems to me a very bad piece of psychology. The situation may contain ego elements and non-ego elements, but these are all objects within the content; and anything like a sense of effort or strain which might be called a feeling of the act of perception is simply another object which would be grouped among the ego elements. But in most normal cases (introspection is an abnormal case) there is simply the presence of the thing 'perceived,' When I look up, there is the chair and that seems to be the whole story. The chair is there before me, but I can discover no consciousness of it. The sound of the electric car is out there in the street, but there is no consciousness of it. There is the odor from a lamp, but consciousness of the odor does not accompany it.

The field of experience contains objects of endless variety,—trees, buildings, sensations, pains, pleasures, hopes, fears, mathematical relations and logical necessities. But in no ease of knowledge does an empirical inspection discover the object plus consciousness of it. If we mean, then, by consciousness something observable over and above the brute fact that the object is there wherever it is, we certainly mean what no observation can discover.

It may strengthen this conviction to reflect that the idea of consciousness is probably, as Professor James says, 'the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing soul upon the air of philosophy.' We speak of states of consciousness; our psychologizing forefathers spoke