Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/170

 PSYCHOLOGY AS PHILOSOPHIC METHOD. 159 We will see how the question stands if we state it other- wise. Does or does not the self-consciousness of man fall within the science of psychology ? What reason can be given for excluding it? Certainly few would be found so thorough-going as to deny that perception is a matter which that science must treat ; those however who admit percep- tion would find themselves hard put to it to give a reason for excluding memory, imagination, conception, judgment, reasoning. Why having reached the stage of reasoning, where the original implicit individual with which we began has been broken up into the greatest possible number of explicit relations, shall we rule out self-consciousness where these relations are again seen united into an individual unity ? There is no possible break : either we must deny the possibility of treating perception in psychology, and then our " purely objective science of psychology " can be nothing more than a physiology ; or, admitting it, we must admit what follows directly from and upon it self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is indeed a fad (I do not fear the word) of experience, and must therefore find its treatment in psychology. But this is not all. Not only does self-consciousness appear as one of the stages of psychological experience, but the explanation of the simplest psychological fact say one of perception, or feeling, or impulse involves necessary reference to self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is in- volved in every simpler process, and no one of them can be scientifically described or comprehended except as this invo- lution is brought out. In fact, their comprehension or explanation is simply bringing to light this implication of self-consciousness within them. This would be the last thing that the upholders of self-consciousness as the final unity and synthesis, the absolute meaning of experience, could deny. The organic nature of self-consciousness being their thesis, it must indeed reveal itself in, or rather consti- tute, each of its members and phases. The very existence, of any idea or feeling being ultimately its relation to self- consciousness, what other account of it can be given except its organic placing in the system ? If there be such an act as perception, a candid, careful examination of it, not of its logical conditions, but of itself as matter of experienced fact, will reveal what it is ; and this revelation will be the declaration of its relation to that organic system which in its wholeness is self-consciousness. We may then abstract from this relation, which constitutes its very being, and consider it as an object of perception, and, generalising the case, produce a