Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/20

 6 THE EDITOR : both. These traces are not isolated ; they combine in a cu- mulative disposition which modifies in a characteristic way the content of consciousness when the last note is heard. But this, as Meinong rightly urges, is not enough. Not any modification of consciousness will serve our purpose ; and to say that the modification is produced by the preceding notes is not a sufficient explanation. The effect produced by the preceding notes must be capable of functioning instead of them for certain purposes. It must be capable of standing for them. In particular, it must be possible to recognise the equivalence. If, after the last note, we begin to hear it anew or to reproduce it in memory, we must be able to recognise the successive sounds as successive deter- minations in detail of what we had previously before our minds as an internally indeterminate total. I say internally indeterminate, because the whole must be so far determinate as to have for us a specific character by which it is distin- guishable from other wholes. I shall say no more on this question of indeterminate or implicit apprehension. Under one guise or another I am always talking about it. Indeed, I find it impossible to stir a step in psychology without it if I am not to tell deliberate lies. However, what I wish to bring out in this address is not the truth of my explanation, but the impossibility of the only alternative which has been explicitly put forward. Is it really possible for these hypothetic memory images, which Meinong and others talked of, to be present in consciousness, although we cannot ascertain their presence by any direct appeal to experience? It may be said that there are such things as subconscious presentations. This, I should be the last to deny. But the best evidence we have for the existence of such subconscious contents is that when we do attend to them we recognise their previous existence anterior to our distinguishing them. We are aware that we not wholly create them in act of noticing them. Now, in the present case, the reverse is the fact. However strenuously we may endeavour to detect the presence in consciousness of the prior notes of a melody at its close, or of the prior positions of a moving body when we are watching or mentally representing its motion, we fail to do so. It is not enough to say that Introspection fails to discover the presence of these alleged presentations. Beside a mere failure to discover their presence, there is positive success in discovering their absence ; what we really find is that they aren't there. Again the whole d priori argument for the existence of these presentations is based on the assumption that they are