Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/471

 phrase “immediate datum of consciousness”. To start from “consciousness” or from “thought” as immediately certain was for him to start from the end. He would have no starting-point except the empiriocritical presupposition. Upon this alone he constructs his theory as follows:—

He analyses the presupposition and finds that it contains three members: (1) the environment and its component parts; (2) fellow-creatures and the self; (3) human statements. Here it becomes necessary to make the reader acquainted with several symbols introduced by Avenarius. Every value which is accessible to description, in so far as it is assumed to be a component part of the environment, he denotes simply by R. In this sense Avenarius speaks of things in space, of physiological stimuli, as R-values. On the other hand, every value accessible to description, in so far as it is accepted as the content of the statement of another human individual, is denoted by E. The contents of statements are E-values.

Finally, that part of the more comprehensive system of nervous central organs in which are collected the changes which issue from the periphery, and from which issue all changes to be passed on to the periphery, is called C (central system). The more exact anatomical and physiological determination and limitation of this system Avenarius purposely reserves, because it has not yet been sufficiently ascertained by the exact sciences, and also because he has no need of it for his purpose.

If, now, we inquire in what manner the statement-values, or as we may say, the E-values, are conditioned by individuals and by the environment (that is, by the E-values), we find that the statements are conditioned only indirectly by the environment and its changes, but directly by individuals, and more especially by their nervous central organ, by System C and its varying states. But if this is the case the necessity becomes clear of first analysing these varying states of the nervous central organ. This is done in the first volume of the Kritik der reinen Erfahrung.

The human individual is assumed to be such that it is able to maintain itself within certain limits. This relative maintenance of the individual will be most closely connected with the maintenance of the most central system, and this in proportion as the System C is developed according to its functions. Here there is no attempt to attribute to System C anything like a striving to maintain itself. In pure description, without any admixture of metaphysical anthropomorphism, we can never say an organ strives for something—either for