Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/26

 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL STANDPOINT. 15 as an external world over against the individual. But there are not two kinds of consciousness, one of which may be subtracted from the whole and leave the other. They are but consciousness in one phase, and how it is that conscious- ness assumes this phase, how it is that this division into the individual and the external world arises for consciousness (in short, how consciousness in one stage appears as percep- tion), that is precisely the business of Psychology to deter- mine. But it does not determine it by assuming at the outset that the subject is " me," and the object is the world. And if this be not assumed at the outset it certainly will not be reached at the conclusion. The conclusion will show that the distinction of consciousness into the in- dividual and the world is but one form in which the relation of subject and object, which everywhere constitutes conscious- ness, appears. This brings us definitely to the relation of the individual and the universal consciousness. ni. We have seen that the attempt to account for the origin of knowledge, at bottom, rests on the undoubted fact that the individual consciousness does become, but also that the only way to account for this becoming, without self-contradic- tion, is by the postulate of a universal consciousness. We have seen again that the truth at the bottom of subjective idealism is the undoubted fact that all existence is relative to our consciousness, but also that the only consistent mean- ing of this fact is that our consciousness as individual is itself relative to a universal consciousness. And now I am sure that my objector, for some time silent, will meet me with renewed vigour. He will turn one of these arguments against the other and say : ' After all, this consciousness for which all exists is your individual consciousness. The universal con- sciousness itself exists only for it. You may say indeed that this individual consciousness, which has now absorbed the universal again, shows the universal as necessary to its own existence, but this is only to fall into the contradiction which you have already urged against a similar view on the part of Subjective Idealism. Your objection in that case was that consciousness divided into subject consciousness and object consciousness, of which the former immediately absorbed the latter, and again subdivided itself into the subject and object consciousness. You objected that this was the express statement of a contradiction the statement that the subject consciousness was and was not the whole of conscious ex-