Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/501

 PHILOSOPHICAL TERMINOLOGY. 487 subject. But the obstacles to this thought are the feelings, especially that complex of sensations combined with feelings to which we give the name of will. 78. Unprejudiced self-knowledge now allies itself with the doctrine of descent to posit feeling as identical with the fact of life, and consequently as the constant and original element which is common to all living beings. Vital feelings are feelings of activity, and the apparently simple fact of the reflex action of human sense-organs to external stimulus is really the feeling of a most complicated and late-developed activity. It is not our business here to follow this Psy- chology into its consequences. All that we need to do, is to emphasise that a terminology, which adheres to its principles, is in confusion and conflict with a terminology which refers essentially to the simplicity of the soul-substance, and partly to its passive, partly to its human-rational nature. It is characteristic of the difficulty with which the biological point of view makes its way, that even the psychologists who have made most progress in this respect continue (1) to begin with the psychology of the senses, (2) to represent, or at any rate to treat, human psychology as universal psychology. 79. Connected with this, moreover, is the obstinate persistence of the view that intelligence belongs to the essence of the soul, a view held to be so certain by one of the most able investigators that he represents the willed adaptation of means to ends as the criterion of psychical facts in general (James). Finally, the confusion which often lies hidden in the terms consciousness, unconscious, sub- conscious, may be largely ascribed to the circumstance that the concept of consciousness is derived from human thought, but because thought is taken for the essence of the human soul, therefore "consciousness" is sometimes a state which can only be mediated by thought, as a rule by the re- collection of words, sometimes simpty psychical facts in so far as they are present. But because their presence is again thought of in analogy with thoughts, or at any rate with their elements (sensations and ideas), therefore the necessary concepts of involution and evolution, of growth and differen- tiation, of all those processes which denote psychical life just as they do physical life, do not get their appropriate validity and naming. 80. It is chiefly the doctrine of the will which suffers from this, as from the dependence of terminology upon customary language. If we take as our basis the concept of the vital feeling, and of the manifold organic feelings of activity into