Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/507

 THE GOAL OF KNOWLEDGE. 491 the analysis of developed knowledge yields the other ele- ment being the diversity of the content. Now if this is so wherein does our knowledge of the unity of the self differ from our knowledge of the unity of the thing? Here also psychology admits that there is no content over and above the attributes of the thing corresponding to its unity. But this does not mean that there is no unity. It means that the unity is to be looked for in the special form of relation which the attributes bear to one another that being most of a unity which is most organised and coherent. We may say if we like that this unity is a hypothesis we make in order to make the " thing " intelligible to ourselves, but again it is simpler to take it as one element or aspect which the nature of reality forces us to acknowledge in everything we know, the other being the differences or relations in which the unity reveals itself. A difficulty might indeed be raised in connexion with other selves. Is it meant that we have no more immediate know- ledge of our own than of other minds ? This, it may be admitted, is contrary to prevailing prejudices. For it is com- monly assumed that we start from an immediately given self and arrive later by a process of analogical inference at a consciousness of the existence of other minds. Yet one would have thought that recent psychological analysis, laying em- phasis as it does on the part which the recognition by others plays in the growth of self-consciousness, 1 would have led us to suspect this account. It is, of course, true that we interpret other minds and wills by the analogy of our own, but it is equally true that it is in the minds and through the wills of others that we come to know our own. The knowledge of ourselves is in as true a sense mediated as our knowledge of others. We may say if we like that we only infer the ex- istence of other minds as the hypothesis that best explains the facts of experience. Btft no argument can be brought in support of tjie view that the existence of other minds is hypo- thetical which would not apply equally mutatis mutandis to the existence of our own. Here, as in the case of subject and object in general, it is better to say that " others' conscious- ness " is one of the factors which the analysis of self-con- sciousness yields to the psychologist, "own-consciousness" being the other. They thus stand on the same level of immediacy, for neither is really immediate at all. 2 1 See e.g. Sully, Human Mind, ii., p. 100 foil. 2 One undoubted advantage of this way of putting the matter is that we cut the ground from underneath the form of solipsism which battens upon the ordinary psychological analysis.