Page:Ethical Studies (reprint 1911).djvu/42

 of all physical enquiry, to view through the glass of an accurate introspection this nebula of the ordinary vision, till it breaks into points, which laws, not their own, move hither and thither in the limited space which once seemed to be fulness. I do not assert that the self is not ‘resolvable’ into coexistence and sequence of states of the mind. I am far from denying that the I or the self is no more than ‘collective,’ than a collection of sensations, and ideas, and emotions, and volitions swept together with one another and after one another by ‘the laws of association’; though I confess that to a mind, which is but little ‘inductive,’ and which can not view the world wholly ὰ posteriori, these things are very difficult even to picture, and altogether impossible in any way to understand. We can bring before the mind certain atoms in space; we can call them feelings, or ideas, or what we will; and we can say that we mean by the mind a given collection of these pictured atoms; and so far we do well enough. But then comes our first trouble. We have imaged to ourselves a collection of points in space, and that means we see the collection itself, as covering a given area, with other spaces and collections outside of it. Are we to say that the mind is in space? ‘Oh, no!’ we shall be told; ‘for that is to talk about things in themselves: our knowledge is relative, which means that we must confine ourselves to our given collection; the question is unanswerable, because unintelligible.’ And so, by talking ourselves about ‘things in themselves’, we change, so to speak, a subject of conversation which was beginning to be slightly improper, and continue, as before, to picture the mind as a collection in space of material points; or if time be spoken of, we have but, as it were, to give a turn to our kaleidoscope. And so far still we are doing pretty well.

But still we must not be too confident. We forgot for the moment that the units of the collection are, each one separately, a state of the collection (they are ‘states of mind,’ and the mind is ‘collective’), and we can see well enough that in a bag of marbles or a bunch of grapes the state of the marbles affects the state of the bag, and the state of the grapes is the state of the bunch; but it is very hard to see why each marble is to be called a state of the bag of marbles, and each grape a state of the bunch of grapes, unless we suppose an ‘entity’ inside the bag irresolvable into marbles, or an