Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/407

 ON MR. s. HODGSON'S METAPHYSIC OF EXPERIENCE. 393 over an intrinsic interest independent of its place in a system. Two questions, however, force themselves upon me in respect of it. First, is the order of knowledge here set forth a real order ? And second, are its results final, in other words, is experience in the sense here given to it a, final court of appeal ? Let me first however make clear in what sense I understand Mr. Hodgson to intend this analysis to represent a real order of knowledge. To describe it as psychology, to regard it as literally describing the growth and development of consciousness in the human infant is I think an entire misconception. Whatever views Mr. Hodgson may hold as to the historical order of the development of consciousness in the individual, this analysis is a purely metaphysical account of the elements which constitute experience and the description of a supposed percipient progressing in knowledge is not the fact set forth but the device adopted for setting forth the fact. Whether or not it involves any psychological theory we need not consider. What does seem to me involved by it is an atomic theory of knowledge, a view of experience that makes it consist of moments perfectly distinct, separate in thought if not in fact. A moment of experience in analysis is a simple content in time, its content is quality, its form is duration. Its time occupancy makes it curiously analogous to the conception of Matter as space occupancy, although unlike Matter the occupancy is not adverse. And just as the space element brings in my view contradiction into the conception of matter, so the time element seems to me to bring contradiction into the conception of the moment of experience. Time is infinitely divisible, but the moment of experience has duration, must we not therefore conceive it to occupy more than one part of time and consequently conceive the moment of experience to be composed of parts that are not experience ? Apart however from the question of its analysis is our knowledge of this moment immediate ? If all knowledge is reflective the nature of the moment as it occurs must be an inference and may be a wrong inference. Further, is knowledge constituted by these moments, and is there a real order of development from simple to complex in the manner set forth in this analysis? The first sensation that rises above the threshold of consciousness is to the supposed percipient an experience complete, so far as it goes, analysable and the subject of inference. As other sensations come and past experiences are retained, recollected and compared, know- ledge gradually assumes its complete form, that is to say, the utmost expansion consistent with the limitations of the