Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/440

 SUBJECT AND OBJECT IN PSYCHOLOGY. 427 togitans, a very different thing. Kant, instead of giving a direct -and independent analysis of the cogito, the experiential fact upon which everything hinges, expends his ingenuity in inventing conditions of the cogito, conditions which make cogitatio possible, and analysing them ; that is, in inventing a system of hypothe- tical faculties, belonging to a hypothetical Transcendent Subject, the combined action of which shall have the ergo sum as their apparent or phenomenal result, a result which shall be explicable only as a manifestation of the supposed noumenal and trans- cendent reality. This surely is a false direction in philosophy ; it is psychology superseding philosophy by making an unphiloso- phical assumption. Common both to Descartes and Kant is the purely a priori assumption, that a simple state of consciousness not only announces its own existence, but announces and must announce the existence of its cause, a conscious being. And by an a priori assumption I mean one drawn from notions prior to philosophy, the fund of notions which are the stock-in-trade of uncorrected common sense. Both philosophers alike are penetrated, domi- nated, saturated, by this totally unfounded assumption ; an assumption, be it noted, which Kant spent the whole latter half of his life in elaborating into a theory, the Critical and Transcen- dental Philosophy. The truth is that the notion of the Ego as a res cogitans, a real agent, is a derived notion, but not necessarily on that account a false one, derived from the content of the cogitatio. If that be so, then the true business of philosophy is to trace the steps by which it has been first derived, and ultimately established, as a familiar and indubitable notion of common sense. Everything in philosophy depends upon whether you assume this notion a priori, or deduce it from experience. The kindred errors, as I needs must call them, of Empiricists and Transcendentalists alike flow from making an assumption of it. The former, in place of the simple fact of Eeflective Perception, cogitatio, substitute a Mind in presence of external things, and the latter a Thinking Subject constructing and constituting them. It is true that, at the beginning of the inquiry, cogitatio must be taken simply as a fact, with its genesis or possibility as yet unexplained, and all questions as to it postponed. It is better to postpone the question than to answer it at once by an assumption supposed to be indubitable. And I think it is obvious, that assumptions like these must vitiate the whole course of the speculations founded on them, to say nothing of the contradictory character of the assumptions to one another. In reality philosophy and psychology alike spring out of ordinary pre-philosophic experience, by applying analysis to its phenomena ; and they divide between them its goods, the parti- tion being based on the analysis. Not that the goods, the phenomena of common sense, when analysed, are done with, out