Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/412

 398 CRITICAL NOTICES: The only way to avoid Hume's sceptical conclusions and the thoroughgoing materialism of Avenarius veiled, but only veiled, by his protest against all ' isms ' whatsoever is to start with a truer and more living conception of the facts of the psychical life. The ultimate psychical fact, however one interprets it, is the Unity that marks one's interests and endeavours, and not the fragmentary part or phase of such an interest or endeavour. The psychical unit, I am bold to say, is, in last resort, the psychical organism. For a ' psychical process ' is merely an abstract expression for a modification of the activity of the self. No Psychology can be the psychology of mental processes in the abstract, but only the psychology of the mental processes of the individual. Such an obvious fact is not likely to be overlooked, and Mr. Petzoldt certainly does not overlook it (p. 76). He holds the Unity of Consciousness, by which he means the continuous time- identity of the ' me ' to be a fundamental or original fact (Eine ursprungliche Thatsache). Now this confession should logically have led to conclusions very different from those to which Mr. Petzoldt leads us. For our author tells us (p. 44) that one can- not ask the ' why ' of an ultimate fact : it must be accepted as pure actuality and nothing else (Fiir letzte Thatsachen giebt es kein Warum). Now since we cannot see any essential difference between an ultimate and an original fact, we should expect Mr. Petzoldt not to question this fundamental fact of the Unity of Consciousness, but simply to set about discovering how the Unity is to be conceived in order to prove fruitful in the explanation of mental development. But instead of this we are started on a shadowy chase after metafundamentals. We are told that the very possibility of this Unity requires the non-unideterminateness of psychical states, that this non-unideterrninateness is its logical a priori. If this is to mean anything at all, it can only mean that the Unity of Consciousness must be conceived as actually possessing this peculiar property, namely, that its mode of unifying mental processes is not through the agency of physical unidetermination. In this I would perfectly agree with Mr. Petzoldt. Unidetermina- tion of this physical kind is to my mind perfectly incompatible with any form of self-determination, where by self-determination I mean the power of choice and of control, the power to select and to reject, in a word, the power to be guided by one's ends and interests instead of being pushed from behind by some inevitable actuality. But the unidetermination of one psychical state by another is one thing, the unidetermination of psychical process by some interest or final cause with which the self has for the moment identified itself is quite another. It is in this latter sense only that the Unity of Consciousness can be said to provide a principle of determination for the otherwise disconnected facts of the conscious life. That there are great difficulties in the way of