Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/84

 70 HOWAED V. KNOX: from nothing to nothing a veritable chimara bombinans in vacua. In other words, Green quietly eviscerates the individual consciousness, as such, of its content ; and in this way, while outwardly admitting that thought has in some sense a development in time, elusively contrives to repudiate any concrete application of that principle. Why it should be any less criminal to make psychology impossible than to make knowledge of nature impossible, is a question which does not seem to interest him in the least. But to appreciate the argument in all the fulness of its futility, we must look at it in the light of Green's final con- clusion. It is claimed that there is an absolute difference between any " series of related events " and " the conscious- ness of the series as related ". It is claimed, in other words, that there is an absolute difference between thought and its object when the object is a series of events. Now, if this refers to the eternal consciousness, what becomes of such state- ments as the following? "Even if relations of any kind could be independent of consciousness, certainly those that form the content of knowledge are not so. As known they exist only for consciousness ; and, if in themselves they were external to it, we shall try in vain to conceive any process by which they could find their way from without to within it." 1 Are we then to understand that consciousness as here spoken of is consciousness sub specie temporis the consciousness which Green, half a dozen pages farther on, assures us is "as real as anything else," and which therefore is different from the object it refers to ? But this interpretation is precluded by the simple fact, that the argument under con- sideration, as has been -already shown, amounts to an assertion that thought is not in time at all. We are driven therefore to the conclusion, that consciousness as here spoken of is not consciousness in either of the two divergent senses of the term recognised by Green or, indeed, in any sense recog- nisable by mortal man. Thus Green's refutation of empiricism is found to be, on the face of it, a denial that there can be any such thing as psychology at all ; while on examination it " turns out to be a concatenation of words to which no possible connexion of ideas corresponds ". And it is perhaps not unworthy of remark, that in any case the whole argument is in flat contradiction with the characterisation of empiricism as a va-repov Trporcpov : 2 for so to characterise empiricism is to 1 Op. cit., 69. 2 Op. cit., 9. Cf. also 35, where the above contradiction conies out with special clearness.