Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/486

 ILLUSORY PSYCHOLOGY. 485 ness is necessarily the only absolute before it can go on to develop the nature of consciousness and of experience. It must see that the individual consciousness .... is the universal consciousness, the consciousness which has never become, and which is the totality " (p. 18). This put briefly is neither more nor less than identifying man as a. conscious being with God as a conscious being, on the sole ground that man's consciousness contains all the evidence he ever has for knowing anything at all. It is true that man partakes of consciousness in general, but it is false to identify consciousness in general with universal consciousness. Nor can the view which I am now maintaining be fairly characterised as Subjective Idealism. This name would be applicable to it only in case it could be shown (as it never can) to involve and inevitably carry with it the further doctrine, that the real existence of the things known in any individual's consciousness depends on the existence of his consciousness, as confessedly their having a meaning for him depends upon it. The real existence of anything depends upon its having real conditions, and these form a system and a series of real existents and real events stretching back indefinitely, perhaps infinitely, into the past. But nothing warrants the inference that, because the individual can know of these conditions only through his present consciousness, he must therefore either have existed as a conscious being through all that period, or must now be creating and endowing them with past reality in his imagination. Still less, if possible, is the inference warranted, that a consciousness not the individual's was a necessary part of those real conditions. I mean that, if it be so, as it well may, the fact must be proved or rendered probable by some positive and indepen- dent evidence. It does not follow simply from the fact that existence is knowcible, or has a meaning, in consciousness only. There is nothing in consciousness, taking the term simply, to- show that it is the real condition of anything whatever, still less that it is Causa Sui, or, in Mr. Dewey's phrase, " the only absolute ". Once more, when we speak of consciousness as embracing all knowledge, we are necessarily and eo ipso abstracting from it as the bearer or Subject of knowledge ; and therefore it is a logical fallacy, a contradiction to our own procedure, to speak of consciousness as an universal knower on the ground of its being universal knowledge. Now Mr. Dewey objects to the presupposition that consciousness has an individual bearer (p. 3), but insists on the pre-supposition that it has an uni- versal one (p. 18). I mean of course that he supposes this