Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/250

 236 CRITICAL NOTICES : objective space and objective time as systems of relations between the experienced. Objective time is computed in terms of objective motion. " The real world in space and time," the world of daily thought or of natural science, being in its whole span a construction, a necessary expression of the aggregate relations or total form of experience, its parts have equal tenure of reality, and it is idle to adduce the peculiar nature of the existence of all to disprove the existence of any. Prof. Fullerton asserts in effect that it is not true in any simple or ultimate sense that an experience of one consciousness takes place " at the same time " as an experience of another. It is true in a complex and analy sable sense. It is true, in that the cor- responding events in the physical world take place at the same objective time. In what sense then does a physical event " cor- respond " to a psychic? In a sense that gains its meaning wholly from experience, namely, that the one does not have its place in the physical system at all, unless the other makes its appearance in a consciousness : and vice versa. This is the force in saying that events in the brain are " directly correlated with conscious- ness ". We give a man's feelings and ideas a date in the cosmic system by reference to his body. Without the system, the "con- struct," the world would fall apart into forms of consciousness as between which even simultaneity and subsequence would be un- meaning. " Without the objective order, without the real world in space and time, there would be no world at all. in any proper sense of the word, no universe of things and minds, no system, no experience." 1 The author differs then most vitally from Berkeley and Mill in refusing to take time as ultimate ; a difference that one might provisionally and under protest at the word express by saying that he is an " idealist " as to time, and that they never were. (None the less one cannot resist the surmise that Mill would have accepted outright such a masterly advance on his own analysis.) This difference as well as the last quotation, suggest forcibly an affinity to Kant. We are reminded of the construction " according to rule," the " lawful context of experience," the conception that experience (that is, the experience of a world) is rendered possible only by the orderly construction. It is interesting that this affinity should exist without apparent debt, with antipathy to Kant as a thinker, and with rejection of the theory that such a construction involves a priori materials of thought. His immediate difference with Kant in the theory of the external 1 Setting out from the same premisses as Prof. Fullerton, Prof. Strong, in his important work Why the Mind has a Body, arrives at a widely different conclusion, namely an idealist panpsychism that finds the real seat of the operations of nature in a world of psychic " things-in-them- selves ". The divergence seems due to the different conception of time. Cf. Prof. Strong's brief and vigorous article " Consciousness and Time," Psychological Revieic, vol. iii., p. 149.