Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/581

 568 j. WAED : identical totality is not a mere sum or series of experiences, , b, c, d- } but that, contrariwise, these experiences only become a whole when regarded as the experiences of one to whom pertains whatever activity experience implies.' However, we must take Mr. Bradley as we find him, and he refuses to distinguish psychi- cal facts from others by the characteristic of subjectivity. Passing from the definition of psychology to psychology itself, Mr. Bradley maintains that the relation of subject and object is not essential. The properly psychological reasons given for this call for special consideration. It is urged, "in the first place, that in verifiable experience we occasionally have states where this relation of subject and object wholly ceases to exist ". But the main point is put in the following questions, which Mr. Brad- ley asks to have fairly met : " Where experience does give us a reference to self . . . that self has always a content. ... If this reference exists at the start, what is the content of the subject ? Is it likely that experience, at its poor and blurred beginning, does divide itself into two parts with a relation betw r een them ; and if so, what fills each part, and what machinery can at once effect this distinction? " (P. 365. fin.) An answer to these ques- tions sufficient to rebut Mr. Bradley's main objection is not, I think, difficult, and shall be attempted presently ; but, in fact, these questions are only formidable on account of the preposterous misconception, as it appears to me, on which they rest. In de- fining psychology, Mr. Bradley identified presentation with exist- ence simply : he now identifies existence with mere presentation. Accordingly there is no self or subject except where there is self- consciousness and so long as there is self -consciousness. ' Once upon a time there was Nobody and Nothing ; but after several adventures Nobody received sundry interesting presents, and picked out several things, albeit he remained Nobody still. By and by, however, thanks to their strange collisions, there somehow supervened a mirror, and then Nobody managed to distinguish himself, and was Nobody no more.' A philosophic little romance in this style seems to be at the bottom of Mr. Bradley's assump- tions. Before answering his questions, therefore, I should have to ask him if he admitted the distinction of (1) self as existing, or, if he prefers it, self as knowing self, and (2) self as known by self; and I should have to ask him again if he admitted that terms such as Presentation, Experience, &c. (which we may sym- bolise by O), are necessarily relative to something else (which we may symbolise by S). If he denied these distinctions, I should ask him, without them, to make but one of his clauses clear viz., "Where experience does give us a reference to self". If he allowed them, I think his first point would be sufficiently disposed of by saying that it simply meant : We are not always self-con- scious ; " a reference to self " is not an invariable portion of what is given us. Turning to his " main point," I should ask leave to call his attention to a remark I ventured to urge upon his notice