Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/410

 394 CRITICAL NOTICES: processes. This the psychologist must say, because such is the fact, in so far as the psycho-physical processes are normal. But to say this is not to say that introspection discovers any causal laws, or that the significance of consciousness is, as such, the causal efficacy of consciousness, or that you can explain how con- sciousness comes into being, or how it sustains itself in being, by analysing the profoundly interesting inner fact that while con- sciousness normally goes on, it always means something. What interests me, therefore, I confess, about the facts grouped together by our author as facts illustrating mental activity, is not that they prove any causal efficacy, but that they introduce us to the descriptive analysis of what goes on in the mind when one means something, or when a meaning grows clearer, or when a reasoning process occurs. It is precisely this analysis which has . heretofore been so neglected by psychologists, and which our author expounds in that portion of his discussion to which I must next turn. Here our disagreement, as stated above, will give place to an assent which is very frequently almost entire. III. Viewed, not dynamically, but in the light of an analysis of its. contents and modes, consciousness is subject to the general prin- ciple that its facts normally mean something, and that, since the meaning of past experience constantly tends to be taken up into the present meanings, and to be recombined in new fashions, consciousness normally tends towards what one may term the " evolution of meanings ". This teleological character of normal consciousness is comparable to that teleological character of the vital processes which is so fundamental a datum in biology. To this our author, like Avenarius, makes frequent reference. Pre- cisely as the biologist, however, makes little of the attempt to explain such teleology by means of " vital forces," conceived as self-sustaining causes, precisely so I myself should maintain that the parallel conception of " mental activity," or of the " self-sus- taining " causality of the conscious process, is of little service in comprehending the causal relations of mind relations which, logically speaking, must have psycho-physical totals for their least- possible units. But, on the other hand, the psychologist is as interested as the biologist in considering, in analysing, and in interpreting the teleological character of his facts and processes. Since, in the psychologist's world, this teleological character be- longs to the conscious aspect of the process, the psycho-physical nature of the outward expressions of the inner process does not now stand in the way of an effort to interpret what happens when inner meanings develop. To interpret what happens, to follow it through its successive stages, to study the laws of the evolution of meanings, and the laws that govern the growth of the significant series of states that, in their wholeness, constitute conation, just