Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/414

 400 CBITICAL NOTICES: experience but its disjecta membra, arranged in stages, if you will. We are treated to an ideal dissection and have in hand all the materials for an excellent classification, but that is all. Avenarius's fundamental grouping of the facts of mind under the two heads of ' Elements ' and ' Characteristics ' is intended to answer the purposes of such a classification. It affords a clearly analysed and comprehensive descriptive arrangement of the facts. By ' elements ' are meant mere sensations, feelings as such, sensations and feelings, that is, in abstraction from the meaning with which they have been invested. This meaning is, in a word, the characteristic. The element is what is characterised as having a meaning. And it is further important to note (p. 337 and pp. 256-258) that the meaning may belong to the object as that which makes it intelligible to the subject, or to the subject as that which gives a certain colouring or subjective tone to the attitude which the subject adopts towards its object. The term ' characteristic ' thus includes the two ideas of ' meaning ' and ' attitude-tone,' the one relatively objective and the other relatively subjective ; and its essential advantage for purposes of classification lies just in this generality. But, unfortunately, it loses in explanatory power what it gains in generality. Those who are familiar with the use made by Prof. Stout of the two ideas of ' meaning ' and of ' attitude ' in explaining the process of mental development will see at a glance where the difference lies between Prof. Stout's procedure and that of Avenarius. In the case of Prof. Stout there is a formative psychical principle behind all acquisition of meaning or variety in mental attitude the unity of conscious striving, oneness of Interest or Attention. We are able to trace the differentiations of interest or attention into the meanings that objects acquire for it and the attitude it assumes. 1 This comparison between the two modes of treatment, between that adopted by Prof Stout and that of Avenarius, may be car- ried a step farther. For to the fundamental division of psychical facts into elements and characteristics we must add another. Elements as well as characteristics may appear to us either as presentations or as representations, in the form, as Avenarius puts it, either of ' Things ' or of ' Thoughts '. This distinction appears in Prof. Stout's Manual as that between perceptual and idea- tional consciousness, and is worked out in the most concrete way in the closest relationship to mental development. Here again we have an analysis taking the form of the differentiating of a principle in contradistinction with the Avenarian distinctions and analyses which are abstract, descriptive, classificatory. In conclusion we must note that the Philosophy of Pure Ex- perience as represented by Mr. Petzoldt, though agreeing in all essentials with that of Avenarius and equally exposed to all the 1 For general information as to the meaning of the characteristics and their relation to the elements and their combinations, see especially pp. 139, 253, 262, 266, 308, 337; also pp. 163, 165.