Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/79

 THE DISTINCTION OF INNER AND OUTER EXPERIENCE. 65 not seek to deny. Inner experience could not consistently develop except in relation to and in distinction from outer experience. And what we call an outer experience must also have an inner side. Nor can there be doubt that in the historical growth of experience its two aspects have advanced pari passu. None the less it is difficult to regard inner ex- perience as merely outer experience at a more concrete and highly articulated stage of growth. If we set aside for the moment the question whether the distinction between them can be minimised in this fashion, we might still argue that, from the point of view of psychological development, it is inner experience which is primary and outer which is deriv- ative. A developed self-consciousness is mediated by the consciousness of objects, but in the last resort we must postulate a direct and conscious activity of the self as the ground and beginning of all progress in experience. There is a sense in which we must be immediately conscious of the operations of our own minds, and it is only as the result of inferential thought that we mark off a section of experience as outer. On this ground we should be disposed to modify Dr. Caird's statement, and to treat inner experience as fundamentally the more simple and elementary. From this standpoint development begins from an active self in relation to an environment, which gradually distinguishes that en- vironment from itself, and by the aid of conceptual thought defines a portion of its whole experience as external. But the further question remains whether a distinction of degree between outer and inner experience covers all the facts. Dr. Caird does not find anything in the object as determined in space which is not taken up into self-conscious- ness. The advance from outer to inner experience is just a process in which thought goes on to a more and more complete determination of things, till "it finds its own unity in the object "- 1 It is hard to see how on this view the individuality and uniqueness which we discover in ex- perience are explained at all. And in reference to the matter on hand this theory does not afford room for certain obvious facts. Inner and outer experience refuse to melt into one another in the way suggested. Mere reflexion on the inner side of an outer experience does not lead us to regard it as inner. A man, for instance, examining a statue critically in order to give his opinion of it reflects on the impressions he receives and recognises them as his own. Yet he would not call his experience an inward one. Even more decisively 1 Phil of Kant., vol. i., p. 470. 5