Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/462

 or a blue beard, in exactly the same way in which the two latter differ from one another: the blue bead differs from the blue beard, in that while the former contains glass, the latter contains hair; and the ‘sensation of blue’ differs from both in that, instead of glass or hair, it contains consciousness. The relation of the blue to the consciousness is conceived to be exactly the same as that of the blue to the glass or hair: it is in all three cases the quality of a thing.

But I said just now that the sensation of blue was analysed into ‘content’ and ‘existence,’ and that blue was said to be the content of the idea of blue. There is an ambiguity in this and a possible error, which I must note in passing. The term ‘content’ may be used in two senses. If we use ‘content’ as equivalent to what Mr. Bradley calls the ‘what’—if we mean by it the whole of what is said to exist, when the thing is said to exist, then blue is certainly not the content of the sensation of blue: part of the content of the sensation is, in this sense of the term, that other element which I have called consciousness. The analysis of this sensation into the ‘content’ ‘blue,’ on the one hand, and mere existence on the other, is therefore certainly false; in it we have again the self-contradictory identification of ‘Blue exists’ with ‘The sensation of blue exists’. But there is another sense in which ‘blue’ might properly be said to be the content of the sensation—namely, the sense in which ‘content,’ like είδος, is opposed to ‘substance’ or ‘matter’. For the element ‘consciousness,’ being common to all sensations, may be and certainly is regarded as in some sense their ‘substance,’ and by the ‘content’ of each is only meant that in respect of which one differs from another. In this sense then ‘blue’ might be said to be the content of the sensation; but, in that case, the analysis into ‘content’ and ‘existence’ is, at least, misleading, since under ‘existence’ must be included ‘what exists’ in the sensation other than blue.

We have it, then, as a universally received opinion that blue is related to the sensation or idea of blue, as its content, and that this view, if it is to be true, must mean that blue is part of what is said to exist when we say that the sensation exists. To say that the sensation exists is to say both that blue exists and that ‘consciousness,’ whether we call it the substance of which blue is the content or call it another part of the content, exists too. Any sensation or idea is a ‘thing,’ and what I have called its object is the quality of this thing. Such a ‘thing’ is what we think of when we think of a mental image. A mental image is conceived as if it were related to that of which it is the image (if there be any such thing) in