Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/50

 36 P- H. BEADLEY : be stated as follows : " You have taken," it will be said, " no account of a fundamental difficulty. In the first place mere phenomena are quite discrete and lack all continuity ; and in the second place they at any rate are all mere perceptions merely given to the self. This, it is true, is not the case with regard to pleasure and pain, and as to whether these are or are not phenomena, we have our own view which you seem unable to understand. But at any rate, to speak in general, phenomena are mere objects, and the whole life of the self cannot be resolved into objects without a self, even when the laws of these objects are added ad libitum. And with your edu- cational advantages," it may even be added, " it seems strange that you should not see this." But I would reply that not only was I, if I may say so, brought up to see this, but I was brought up also to perceive something else as well. And the result is that I reject both the doctrines on which the objections are founded. Phenomena are not merely discrete nor again are all of them objects, and in short the true pheno- menalism has been completely misunderstood and perverted. 1. On the mere discreteness of phenomena I need say very little, since truer views seem now steadily making their way. What is immediately experienced is not a collection of pellets or a "cluster," as it used to be called, of things like grapes, together with other things called relations that serve as a kind of stalk to the cluster. On the contrary what at any time is experienced is a whole with certain aspects which can be distinguished but as so distinguished are abstractions. Now each of these wholes is an event, and each of its aspects is an event, but that does not make them discrete. Every whole and its aspects as experienced has a certain duration and so some continuity in time, and it has some qualitative identity through different times actual and possible. And the duration that is experienced at one time is continuous with that which is experienced after it and before it. For, without bur entering on any difficulties here as to the outward limitation of the experienced, 1 the identity of its content forces us to take it as continuous from experience to experience. In short, phenomena are legitimate abstractions, but they are not discrete reals. . And if they were merely discrete in and by. themselves, 1 1 refer here to the difficulty of drawing a line at which it ceases. The immediately experienced of course has limits, and it has very narrow ones. It is the same as the ' present ' in the sense of what is directly felt in any one 'now'. To confuse this with the 'present' which is formed by any ideal content so long as that is taken to endure unbroken, would be a very serious error. Cf. here my Appearance, p. 626.