Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/379

 366 F. H. BRADLEY : itself into two parts with a relation between them ; and, if so, what fills each part, and what machinery can at once effect this distinction ? Until these questions are fairly met, the introduction of a subject into the early mind is not merely perhaps false, but is not scientific. The mere form of a subject could do nothing, and indeed for psychology is nothing; while to give the Ego a concrete super-sensible character would hardly serve better. For if this character comes into given experience, then it becomes mere presenta- tion that is mixed with the rest ; and if it somehow stays outside and touches only, so to speak, with the end of a re- lation the presented datum, then it falls outside empirical psychology. And with respect to Attention, or Apperception, or Activity, I have said something before (MiND No. 43) which I will not repeat. I should be loath to criticise the doctrine as, for instance, it has appeared in the writings of Wundt ; and, maintained as it is by Mr. Sully and, to a still wider extent, by Mr. Ward, it has become to me no clearer. Not only to my mind does it fail in part to be intelligible, but I find no adequate information as to the basis on which I am to suppose that it rests. The main point, I think, i& this : if attention is not an event or a law of events, has it a right to exist in empirical science ? Is it not simply a revival of the doctrine of faculties ? And I am afraid to go on until I have pointed out the vice of admitting faculties. It is not merely their number which makes them objection- able, and it is a very serious mistake so to look at the matter. The principle is the same with one as with a hundred. In its worst form the faculty is a something outside that inter- feres by a miracle with the course of phenomena. I need not say that in this sense it is embraced by neither Mr. Sully nor Mr. Ward, for with both of them Attention has a law of its working. In its more harmless form the faculty acts by a law, but the objection to it is that in this case it is idle. If it is merely an expression for a way in which things do occur, or it is used further to mark a condition of their hap- pening which is not yet known then at its best it is a bad way of stating a law. And it seldom stays at its best. It becomes a phrase offered in explanation of phenomena be- yond that field from which it has been drawn, which phe- nomena the mere law would at once be seen not to explain. I feel no doubt that Wundt has used his Apperception in this way, and little less that Mr Ward has partly followed the same line, and that Mr. Sully is at least somewhere on the brink of doing so (cp. MIND No. 40, p. .490). And I have thought it right to speak plainly because, if I am wrong,