Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/461

 460 A. BAIN : But Mr. Ward does not seem to me to hold steadily by the Subject, as thus made up. Immediately after giving his tabular scheme, he says that "reproduction, association, agreement, difference, and all varieties of thinking and acting, are to be explained by the laws pertaining to ideas or pre- sentations, leaving to the Subject the one power of variously distributing that attention upon which the intensity of a sensation in part depends". Again he gives us three irre- ducible facts attention, feeling, and objects or presentations the two first being subject. He admits that it looks paradoxical to say that we have no knowledge but of pre- sentations ; and replies that attention and feeling are known indirectly by their effects upon presentations, while the subject qua subject cannot be presented. Now, it is our duty to receive any suggestions calculated to improve our nomenclature of the ultimate facts of mind. I accept the doctrine of the Subject in the meantime, with certain provisos. One is that it shall not be a nucleus and hiding-place of mysticism; another, that I may take it up and put it down as may seem convenient. I admit, however, that this last begs the question at issue, namely, whether it is any more than a verbal convenience, or useful fiction. Yet, I do not see any insuperable difficulty in making the mind the collective ' Ego,' when Mr. Ward admits that the three facts, Feeling, Conation, Cognition, include everything. Kant's pure Ego would seem to be a much more attenuated article than Mr. Ward's, which includes the whole of Attention, the whole of Feeling, and a somewhat uncertain share of Cognition. I do not find that, in the later disquisitions on Feeling and Will, much is made of the circumstance that these two go far to make up the subject, to which all knowledge from the outer world is addressed. At the same time, I am aware that the recognition of Subject in some such way as here proposed will be productive of comfort to many persons. Mr. Ward's next important innovation in the treatment of fundamentals is his mode of expressing the unity of con- sciousness by the term " continuum," as a substitute for the old designations train, series, sequence, transition. He thinks that by the usual modes, the discreteness of the successive individual presentations is made too much of, and the con- tinuity too little, lie argues that a mental succession must be treated as a whole, for two reasons. The first is grounded on fact, namely, that special attention to any single member diminishes the intensity of presentation of the rest, while the recurrence of one by association entails the re-presenta-