Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/84

 70 GEOKGE GALLOWAY: perception if the object only exists as experienced. On the other side, if we postulate an unknowable reality behind the things of sense, the unity of experience becomes inexplicable. There is one sense in which no sober idealist refuses to admit that the object of experience has a reality of its own. Among the objects of our experience are other human sub- jects who, we inevitably infer, have a reality for themselves. Entering into our experience they can never be dissolved into it, but persist beyond it. This is an admission of some significance. For it means that we recognise individual centres of thought, feeling, and will, which decisively influence our consciousness, while they are independent of it. Here we have a principle of individuality as object, whose qualities, as recognised and interpreted by us, are represented in it by modes of its own activity. And when we have admitted this we are bound in consistency to go further. The law of con- tinuity, as justly insisted on by Leibniz, forces us to regard the principle of individuality as having many stages and degrees of development. There is no break in the process by which life advances to consciousness and to self-conscious- ness ; and the line of separation between organic and what we call inorganic matter is a ravishing one. Moreover, the psychologist is compelled to postulate the reality of a sub- conscious mental world, in order to explain phenomena which are manifest above the threshold of consciousness. And it is reasonable to suppose that what is substantial in lower forms of life is one in kind (though very different in degree) with the conscious self in man. The latter would be the evepyeia of which the former was the Bvvafus. The real on which the ideational activity of. the subject works in con- structing the phenomenal world is, on this view, manifold spiritual substances or causalities ; and the diverse qualities of the world as given in experience, would be grounded in the various activities of these substances. The basis of the phenomenon termed matter is, on this theory, an inner life which is allied to our own consciousness. 1 The point we wi sh to urge, then, is that, if you accept the world of inter- sub jective intercourse as a fact, you cannot restrict the principle to the relations of human individuals with one another. The interaction of individuals not existing merely for each other, but each for itself, must also be possible at lower stages of development, and there is no break in the process of advance from the lower to the higher. Hence 1 C/., Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophic, p. 387 ; Stout, Manual of Psychology, p. 54.