Page:Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience.djvu/85

Rh, the stuff and matter of all reality. But we can say that things exist in consciousness and express an intelligible and consistent meaning. When things exist in consciousness a new 'type of connection' is established between them. They are 'connected up in a new way.' " The peculiar way in which consciousness connects the objects in it is thus the way of knowledge actual or possible." "This peculiar form of connection . . . simply makes them known or knowable, and known with all their variety of distinctions from a thing to a thought." And there is 'apparently abundant right to conclude that when consciousness exists, a world hitherto unknown has become known.'

Now, I do not see why in the sentences I have quoted, the word knowledge or knowing or cognition could not be substituted for the word consciousness, and express even more clearly what is meant. Of course, in view of the fact that the article expresses a greater confidence in its negations than in its positive affirmations, I do not wish to interpret these with undue assurance, but the meaning, I take it, is that when consciousness occurs real objects become known, and the only difference it makes to the objects is that they are related in ways to which they themselves are indifferent, but which constitute knowledge. These relations are relations of mutual implication.

With all the negations of Professor Woodbridge I entirely agree, and I can not see that any of these suffer from substituting the word knowledge for the word consciousness. The question whether consciousness exists is simply the question whether these cognitive relations exist, and the suggestions of Professor Woodbridge toward a definition of consciousness really seem to me to have in view a definition of knowledge.

Professor Woodbridge recognizes as 'an important aspect of consciousness,' the 'isolation' of the 'individual consciousness.' It seems to me that he would simplify the statement of his own position and certainly admit nothing inconsistent with that position by accepting the criterion of privacy and isolation as giving the essential property of consciousness.

I shall, accordingly, use the word consciousness to mean experience that is essentially the private and unsharable experience of one person, and I shall conceive such experience, which for each one of us is a certain streaming of objects of the private tjT)e. as contrasted with objects that are public, and directly observable by any one so far as their own nature is concerned. This is the ordinary antithesis of subjective and objective, mind and nature, 'Bewusstsein