Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/390

 376 GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD : tellectual development; it is perennial, irrevocable, and fundamental in the evolution of the race. 3. These two classes of phenomena, or experiences, those of which we designate the Ego as the subject and those which we feel obliged, or at liberty, to consider as phenomena of the physical organism, are experienced in such connexions in time, and with such characteristic colouring from feeling and conation, more or less inhibited, that they are inevitably regarded as standing to each other in actual dynamical relations. All our experience of the two classes of states tends to confirm this impression tends, if you please, to " rub it in hard," to embed it in the very marrow of the frame-work of experience. Observed changes, produced by other things upon the thing-like body, are followed by changes in self- conscious states ; and changes in the latter are followed by changes in the former ; while the very nature of the changes, as well as of the transitional feelings accompanying the changes, establishes in experience what we are forced to consider as a real dynamical con- nexion of the two. Nor is this the whole of the mind's irresistible conclusion. For man, whatever may be true of the lower animals or of the ancestors of man before they were human, is through and through metaphysical. If I may sum up in this phrase his whole mental procedure with regard to reality, call it the having of "innate ideas," or inference instinctive or logical, or belief, or what you will, man possesses, and cannot help constantly using, an "ontological consciousness". It is reality thai he imagines, infers, knows, believes in, as the sufficient and only account of his experience. He is, therefore, bound to be a metaphysician, what- ever psychology or any other science may hold to the contrary, with regard to the felt dynamical relations of these two classes of phenomena united in the one " stream of consciousness ". There- fore, he imagines, infers, believes in, and knows, two real beings, his body and his mind, to be dynamically related in the one experience. 4. On drawing the conclusions of this " ontological conscious- ness " out into popular language they amount to this : the being which is known as the subject of conscious states and the being which is known as the body belonging to that subject are known to exist in actual, reciprocal, causal relations. The full signifi- cance to experience of the problem w r hich is thus put before psychology and philosophy can be stated in no other way than just this. If we have any experience which entitles us to use such words as "reality," "connexions in reality," "cause," "causal connexion," "causal influence," etc., then our particular experience of the character of these two classes of phenomena, and of the relations which arise and maintain themselves between the two in the one stream of consciousness, entitles us to use these words when speaking of body and mind. 5. For, moreover, the very conceptions of " cause " and " causal relations" or "causal influence" arise in this self-same experience