Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/226

 210 HOWAED V. KNOX: adjoined figure, 1 where the straight line AB represents the D B succession of mental phenomena ; and the curved (dotted) line CD any series of physical events which sometimes runs parallel (ef) with that stream, while at other times it is separate from it. For the purpose of reducing the chaos of sense to an intelligible order, we have to suppose that percepts answer to something which runs its course independently of perception, and consciousness in general. (In actuality, of course, no single strand of the causal web can be completely isolated from all the rest; so that our line CD represents an extremely artificial simplification of the case. This fact lends additional strength to the doctrine of the absence of routine in perceptions, but it is unnecessary to dwell on it just now.) For physical science, qua physi- cal science, the distinction between the stream of conscious- ness and the course of physical events is an ultimate one. The question whether this distinction, with the idea of in- dependent existence which it involves, can be philosophically reduced to a distinction between actual existence in con- sciousness and what may be called potential subjective existence, will be considered in part ii. At present we are only concerned with the fact that the distinction is a real one, and involves the idea of existence which is independent of consciousness. This idea of things existing independently of conscious- ness not merely, be it observed, independently of the in- dividual consciousness is, typically, the notion of external- ity. It is true that ' other-consciousness ' is external, in the sense of being external to my consciousness. But the orderly march of physical events does not enter as such into the conscious content of any one of us. The distinction between (a) the experiences which in point of time lead 1 This diagram bears much resemblance to one published by Professor James in an article in the Psychological Review for March, 1895, in illustration of a distinction much resembling at first sight the one here under discussion. The essential difference between the distinction in that article and the present one, is that the former treats of ' things ' as present to perception, and as thought of when not perceived ; whereas our distinction refers to events, being drawn between the changes of the physical world and changes in consciousness.