Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/140

Rh Prof. Volkelt proceeds rapidly from this point to a consideration of pure Experience as principle of cognition. Pure, mere experience is simply such knowledge as the subject directly has of his own subjective processes. Anything else shows itself on the slightest analysis to contain trans-subjective reference or trans-subjective elements. States of mind known by the subject as his make up pure experience; pure experience consists wholly in the successive and co-existent particulars of the individual's consciousness. There fall within it no propositions of universal validity; it manifests to us a discontinuous and disconnected multiplicity, with no common feature other than the more or less vague feeling that each state belongs to my consciousness, and so to one and the same consciousness (p. 87). Not that an Ego is given as a fact of experience; neither Ego nor Non-ego is a state of consciousness. Hume's excellent account of experience represents as a whole most accurately the point of view of mere, pure experience.

Prof. Volkelt has some interesting remarks, in this connexion, on Positivism and subjective Idealism as partial exponents of the point of view discussed. He rightly insists that in both cases elements are introduced which are not legitimate implications of the principle itself.

The principle of pure experience, then, warrants no objective knowledge, and the survey of it convinces us that, if there be objective knowledge at all, that, so far as its certainty is concerned, must be for us in the form of beliefs. There cannot be in its regard the absolute self-evidencing character, for, ex hypothesi, that which it evidences is not itself, but something trans-subjective. The knowledge remains within consciousness, and as claiming to disclose the trans-subjective has a certain mystical character (p. 136-7). We cannot a priori determine whether there are principles of objective knowledge in our consciousness. Their existence is only disclosed in a survey of what is given in consciousness. Here again I call attention, in passing, to the interesting analogy with the Cartesian procedure.

Such survey discloses readily to us, as possessing marked peculiarities, these conjunctions of presentations and representations which are accompanied by the thought of Necessity. In them we appear to be contemplating the nature of the facts indicated, not the subjective mode of existence of the presentations themselves. In so far as the necessity of conjunction is rested on the nature of the facts and does not flow from any other motive, moral, aesthetic, or the like, it may be called logical. It is the necessity of thought, exhibited only where thought is operative, that is, in conjunctions, not in the isolated elements conjoined. Necessity of conjunction, however much more it may involve as consequence of the character assigned to the conjoined, yields readily on analysis the two all-important characteristics of objectivity—universality and reference to existence beyond the individual act of