Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/441

 428 S. H. HODGSON : SUBJECT AND OBJECT IN PSYCHOLOGY. of court, or valueless. Far from it. They remain as the means whereby to test the accuracy and exhaustiveness of the analysis. Knowledge is book-keeping, so to speak, by treble entry common sense, science and philosophy. The accounts of all three must tally. There are no other lines of thought but these three, their modes and combinations of modes. The common-sense ideas of agent and agency, for instance, or those of reality and the real, are at once a standing challenge and a standing test of philosophic and scientific analysis. Either philosophy or science, or both, have to give back to common sense these which are its own ideas- analysed. The ideas and their analysis are but different ways of regarding one and the same common universe, the very existence of which, as their common object, is known to us in no other way besides the three mentioned. The analysis of an idea means the constituent ideas, parts or elements composing it, with the manner of their combination. If there is anything in the idea, which is left out and unaccounted for, neither explained as an illusion, nor its equivalent given in the analysis, its place must be marked as unfilled, the idea left to that extent a blank, and the required element acknowledged as unknown. Agreement, between the three lines of thought, with regard to all ideas whatever, is the final end proposed by the investigation. The common-sense idea " I " is no exception to this law, and some attempt at analysing it has been made above. According to that analysis, whenever the words Ego or "I" are used either in philosophy or in psychology as of course they must con- tinually be, seeing that in no discussion can we get on without them it should be remembered that they express a mixed being ;, namely, unity of and in consciousness plus that part of the operation of the Subject which is required to sustain it. Now a, part is not the same thing as the whole, and the operative agency in the Ego is not the whole Subject. It is probable that many operations of the Subject never attain to be accompanied by distinct consciousness at all. And to determine what particular portion, or what particular operation, of the Subject is that which is accompanied by the perception of self, is perhaps one of the most important and difficult problems in psychology. But it is time to return to our main question. The Ego is an agent so far forth as it is part of the active operation of the psychological Subject ; and the Ego has objects so far forth as it is itself part of cogitatio or consciousness. But no argument for the immateriality of the Subject can be drawn from the fact, that the Ego, taken per se and primarily, is a mere unity of and in consciousness, that is, has that sort of immateriality which consciousness, the world of thought, has in contrast to res existentes, the world of reality, which is commonly thought of as material. If the Subject is immaterial, its im- materiality must be of another kind from this, must be the immateriality of an agent, and not that of a state of con- sciousness.