Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/252

 238 CRITICAL NOTICES I and Teleology brings us to a discussion of free will ; in which the author, always an analyst rather than a sceptic, completely sus- tains the popular consciousness of freedom, while offering a deter- ministic analysis of it. In the final chapters " Of God," the fine and formidable edge of his analytic instrument is applied to some species of current metaphysical theism. The author admits, how- ever, a remote analogy " beyond the present borders of science " by whiuh we may infer a divine mind from nature somewhat as we infer a man's mind from his body. In partially summarising a work whose chief want is of sum- maries I have dwelt upon the central theory of the external world ; at once the most difficult portion of the book and that upon which the rest depends. In doing so I have purposely made an omission. I have wished to show that this theory in no wise depends on a certain questionable principle or verbal practice of the author's. He refers, briefly but recurringly, to the totality of things, the entire world of our recognition, as " con- sciousness " consciousness, as he explains, " in the broad sense ". In the narrow sense, the term stands in antithetical dependence OQ the external world; "my consciousness, as my consciousness, simply disappears if the objective order be wholly abstracted, from ". But this is an antithesis within consciousness in the larger sense of the term. The mind of self, the minds of others, the contrasted objective order, are in this larger sense ah 1 equally consciousness-elements. "It is impossible to pass, in any intel- ligible sense of that word, beyond this realm." In short, he stands here, with Fichte, though evidently without indebtedness and without acceptance of the Fichtean notion of an "activity" behind experience. He stands with such contemporary followers of Fichte as Prof. Windelband and Prof. Eickert. His distinc- tion is essentially that between the pure ego and the empirical ego. And the objection is (Prof. Fullerton's own thought ex- tended to a larger sphere) that there is no reason to apply terms of a subjective cast to that whole in which the subjective is only one member in an antithesis. First in thought, say our author and the Fichteans, we must recognise consciousness, for thought im- plies it ; it is only secondarily and as a fact of experience that we recognise the individual consciousness- as such. First in thought, let us rather say, we come upon the world, existence, and it is only secondarily, by a distinction within that world, that we conceive consciousness. We come upon the idea of consciousness and of the individual consciousness at the same instant ; there is no difference between them. If there is no reason to say "my consciousness" or "his consciousness" there is never any to say consciousness at all. It is when I wake to the fact that the things of thought and sense are, as now realised, appearances in a group of appearances that we come to need the term ; and in that instant I set the assembled apparitions to which I apply it over against a sphere of possible reality distinct from them ;: