Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/359

 Tin-: AI;SM],[ TK oi' HEGEL! NISM. - I "> ing its own existence, and placing it. among tlie other ohjc of its thought? We might argue in the same way that i-;innot he reality, because experience also is a thought category, appearing in its own definite place, and with its special function. Indeed, the attempt to limit the meaning of thought purely to a function seems to me to render impossible any theory whatever. It is not unusual to find recent expounders of Hegelianism defending them- selves against the accusation of reducing things to ideas, by insisting as strongly as common sense even on the distinction of the two. 1 But what now does this mean '<* Apparently 1 no more than the very obvious fact which I imagine no one will he rash enough to deny that the perception, or thought, of an object, is different from the act of recognising this an my perception or thought. There is such a thing as an objective experience this is the object -and there is the quite different experience which may follow it, of recognising the first experience as mine, and placing it with reference to the rest of my life and this we may call subjective. Now the argument seems to be I think must be unless we admit the separate existence of the object in a way the Hegelian persistently refuses to do that the objective experience cannot be subjective, or mine, because it does not definitely recognise itself as such ; the subjective experience is always an interpretation of the objective, and so a wholly new thing. 3 In other words, we are still referred each time to To say that a thought is the thing thought of, or tlutt m activity i* <iiitlu'r psychical activity, is tantamount to dissolving the continuity oi being," Jones, MIND, vol. ii., p. 4(30. " It is inconsistent ith the possibility of knowledge that it should IIK the reality which it represents," Lotzi', p. 22. ('/., also Dewey. MIND, vol. xi., p. 12. - ( /'., the first quotation above. ""Our inner experience is just our outer experience on its inner side, or it i< an experience in which that inner side is specially reflected on," Caird, h'nu.t. vol. i., p. 641. Cf. Watson, Kant, p. 48. I, therefore, ain only a part of experience, not the whole of it. Here, for example, is tlk- way Prof. Dewey attempts to escape from subjective idealism: Now the point I wish to make is that consciousness is here used in two entirely different senses, and that the apparent plausibility of the argu- luent rests upon their confusion. There is consciousness in the broa<l sense, consciousness which includes subject and object, and there is consciousness in the narrow sense, in which it is equivalent to mind. Ego, /.'.. to the series of conscious states. The whole validity of the argu- ment rests, of course, upon the supposition that these two are just the same that it is the individual consciousness, the Ego, which differentiates itself into the two kinds of consciousness, subjective and objective. If not, mind as well as matter, the series of psychical states or events which constitute the Ego, and are the scope of mental science, as well as that in which all sentient beings participate, is but an element in consciousness.