Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/491

 490 S. H. HODGSON : nature of the Psyche, it is always as an individual agency that it is studied, and always as either containing or actuating the proximate real conditions of the states and changes of states of consciousness in an individual being. Now it is true, and this fact it is which seems, if I may venture to say so, chiefly to have misled Mr. Dewey, that the series of states and changes of an individual's conscious ness is all-embracing ; contains, either as data or as results, his whole knowledge. And what is true of one is true of all alike, and of all as individuals. Nor do we positively know of any consciousness which is not an individual's. In studying psychology, therefore, even individual psychology, we seem to have before us the whole content of conscious- ness to study. And what is more, we have to study it in its entire historical concatenation and genesis, the whole picture which an individual forms of the universe, and the steps by which, during his life and experience, he arrives at completing it. Primd facie it seems obvious, that the study of an object so comprehensive as this can be nothing else than philosopluj. But this primd facie view of the case, tempting though it be, is nevertheless not the true one, and for this reason. A point has been silently dropped out of notice in taking it. This is, that the whole picture, in its entire historical con- catenation and genesis, is studied only sub conditions, subject to a restriction, namely, in its connexion with the individual agent as its proximate real condition. This individual agent has first to be distinguished, as an individual agent and real condition of consciousness, from and out of the entire picture of the universe, drawn either by himself or others, but always taken as a picture simply, or rather as a content of con- sciousness, abstracting from, any particular portion or portions of it which may come to be regarded as real con- ditions of the rest. An individual is conscious, let us say, from his birth onwards, but he cannot psychologise, however rudely, until he has first, however rudely, philosophised. I mean that he must first distinguish different parts of the content of his consciousness from one another, must perceive them as differents simply, before he can distinguish one part as condition of another. The perception or the thought, that one percept or complex of percepts is related to another as condition to conditionate, presupposes that those percepts have been already perceived as different from each other, for this is requisite to the conception of a con- dition being formed at all. The perception of self having feelings, and the perception of objects giving rise to feelings in self, are cases under this general rule. Now psychology