Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/587

 574 j. WAED: enough have a feeling so interpreted when the self-group con- tracts instead of expanding. To me Mr. Bradley's exposition in detail reads like an unintentional travesty of Herbartian psycho- logy by one who has tried to improve upon it without being at the pains to master it. But the objections I urged before are independent of its details and are not removed by the omission of all reference to final cause, to desire, or to the distinction of real and ideal. Much as Mr. Bradley strives to get all his facts into the one plane of presenta- tion, his language continually shows that he has to admit other facts outside that plane. But the consequences of this admission seem to me hidden from him by the ambiguities of the words " feeling " and " given ". Perhaps, too, that ' slippery word ' rela- tion, as Professor James happily termed it, must bear a good deal of tbe blame. What is " given " is sometimes what there is for the psychologist, and sometimes what there is presented for the sub- ject whose states of mind the psychologist describes : Mr. Bradley seems never to know which of these two standpoints he is occupy- ing. As to " feeling," a collation of passages would show that with Mr. Bradley as with the rest of mankind pleasure or pain is not anything in itself. Neither is it an attribute of presentation com- parable with intensity, duration and quality, or else it would be as much a contradiction to talk of presentations that had lost their feeling-aspect as it would be to talk of presentations that were minus intensity, duration or quality. From the whole that feels, however, feeling cannot be separated. So far from being presenta- tions, pleasure and pain are rather the effects of presentations on this self, "brought" or "given" to it by them. This absolute and invariable subjective implication of the vord feeling cannot be dis- posed of by calling feelings presentations, so long as it is true that all other presentations have or attain objective implications, and feeling proper never does. And it is because of this subjective implication of the word that what is interpreted as energy or will Mr. Bradley, as it were instinctively, calls feeling too. This fact also is outside the plane of presentation proper. Everybody would see at once that to refer the origin of the idea of activity to an expansion that was only presented would be almost a contra- diction : when the expansion is said to "begin from within and to give a certain feeling, &c.," it is not so evident that only presenta- tation is meant, and that the order of events is first the expansion and then the feeling of effort ! But, as just said, the word "relation" it is, I suspect, which has served Mr. Bradley the worst. A writer who essays to settle the fundamentals of a science like psychology, and in particular to exhibit the analysis and genesis of such a conception as activity, had need be very careful with this word " relation ". But it never gives Mr. Bradley a moment's pause. Psychology is concerned only with certain facts, "regarded merely as events which happen," and these facts are presentations or "relations existing between"