Page:Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience.djvu/84

76 come to say 'it is my state or it is your state." "The most unequivocal instance is the dream."

So long as we keep within the limits of the experience of one mind, this seems to me a very adequate account of the matter, but the judgments with which scientists as such are concerned are judgments in which they have a common interest, and in which validity means the support of corroborative agreement. In the case of the single mind, the earlier judgment loses validity as soon as it loses verification by subsequent judgments. The individual who can not obtain the assent of other observers finds his judgment classified as idiosyncrasy.

It seems to me a very misleading analysis which does not take into account the necessity of verification by other minds, at least, if we mean to be empirical, and if we are discussing that type of judgment which is a judgment in science. Now that cognitive experience which for itself is rational and full of insight, yet which a later judgment of the same mind, or a judgment of another mind, characterizes as whimsical, is what the criticizing mind can not get hold of and make its own. It remains the private experience of another, a mental state, a state of consciousness. The experience that is 'definitely recognized as my experience' and presents a 'for-me relation,' and is best illustrated by the case of a dream, is so manifestly characterized by its essential privacy and limitation to one observer, that Dr. Perry's excellent account can lose nothing by accepting privacy as the characteristic property of consciousness rather than idiosyncrasy and error, and idiosyncrasy appears naturally as privacy as soon as other minds are taken into account. And error, in science, is the fact of rejection by other observers. What is rejected is the decision of a cognitive experience, and it is rejected simply because it is not shared, for if it were shared it would be not rejected, but affirmed.

In what I said above about the great variety of objects and the universal absence of any type of object that can be called consciousness of them, I find myself in substantial agreement with Professor "Woodbridge, and I can not see that I really differ from him in proposing to use the word consciousness in a different sense. Professor Woodbridge expresses greater confidence in saying what consciousness is not than in saying what it is. It is not ' a kind of receptacle' into which things can get. It is not, as the idealist