Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/490

 comes first with the residual effects of change and the secondary processes. There may now be associated with the peripherally conditioned process, one which is centrally conditioned, the repetition of the first eliciting repetition of the second.

As we say that a sound has content and significance when we think something in connexion with the sound, so also the primary change-process receives meaning and content for an individual from the response of a whole series of secondary processes, which associate themselves to the primary, and this association takes place in a definite order. Thus the E-value is already forthcoming before the sound-complex is there. In the formation of the sound-complex the same process fulfils itself once more; sound-complexes themselves are at bottom only marks for our attention and signs for a certain order of characteristics. In this pure description we have no need of the “projection theory,” etc. Avenarius never says: “The content of my perception is there in space, where I see it, 100 paces in front of me”. How indeed can one say “I see my perception”? The content of a statement, e.g., “red,” is never in space; what is in space is the R-value, which is characterised for the individual by the E-value “red”. The individual characterises the R-value always by some one aspect (whenever it actually conditions change in his system C), either by “red,” or “hard,” or “real,” or “thing,” etc. For all these characterisations we need no “projection,” because nothing at all is projected. The brain-process remains the brain-process, and the external condition of change remains the condition of change; no projection is connected with the description and naming of the two and their relation.

Concerning the last writing of Avenarius, Der menschliche Weltbegriff (Lpz., 1891), I may be allowed to quote a few words from an essay published by a pupil of Avenarius, Mrs. D. Josepha Kodis, Ph.D., in the Psychological Review, vol. iii., 6, p. 609.

“An especially new point in this paper is the theory of ‘Introjection,’ by which Avenarius explains the growth and formation of the theory that a fundamental difference exists between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ experiences. Avenarius does not find in these two kinds of experience any ‘incomparability’ or any ‘fundamental dualism’. The idea of their essential difference has been derived, according to his opinion, from a kind of false materialism, which believed in the enclosure of the soul in the body or in a part of it,