Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/480

 ILLUSORY PSYCHOLOGY. 479 be fresh in the memory of all readers of this Journal ; and first the article in MIND 41, " The Psychological Standpoint". i. We are told at the outset that " the nature of all objects of philosophical inquiry is to be fixed by finding out what experience says about them " (p. 2). Nothing can be more true. But then immediately follows, " And psychology is the scientific and systematic account of this experience ". That I for one deny. But assuming it for the present d.ryumenti gratia, let us see how the inquiry proceeds. The result reached or to be reached by this method is named by the writer himself Absolute Idealism (p. 12). And the conception, which is supposed to enable us to reach that conclusion from the broad basis of experience, is the con- ception or truly conceived fact of a real identity between the individual and the universal consciousness, or the individual and the universal self (pp. 10, 17, 18, 19). In the first place I remark that it is inconsistent with the claim of standing on experience alone to speak of " the postulate of an universal consciousness " (p. 15). If the existence of an universal consciousness is an indisputable fact of experience, it is a fact and not a postulate. If it is disputable, it can at most be an hypothesis, and then the grounds for assuming it must be alleged. With Mr. Dewey it is (pp. 18, 19) a presupposition essential to English philosophy and English psychology ; which circumstance is alone sufficient to destroy the claim which he makes for them of appealing to experience alone. That this really is Mr. Dewey's conception is plain from the first sentences of the following passage, in the latter part of which he develops his idea of the required identity between the individual and the universal consciousness : "English philosophy can assume its rightful position only when it has become fully aware of its own presuppositions ; only when it has become ci iiiscious of that which constitutes its essential characteristic. It must see that the psychological standpoint is necessarily an universal standpoint and consciousness necessarily the only absolute, before it can go on to develop the nature of consciousness and experience. It must see that the individual consciousness, the consciousness which is but 'transition,' but a process of becoming, which, in its primary aspect, has to be denned by way of 'contrast,' which is but a 'part 'of conscious experience, nevertheless is, when viewed in its finality, in a perfectly concrete way, the universal consciousness, the consciousness which has never become and which is the totality ; and that it is only because the individual consciousness is, in its ultimate reality, the universal consciousness that it affords any basis whatever for philosophy" (p. 18). I confess I am utterly at a loss to see either how Mr.