Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/621

 608 CKITICAL NOTICES: (2) retention and reproduction of elements previously given ; and (3) the inner unity of recognition. A fact of consciousness is for our author not an isolated event, as Hume and his followers seem to think, but something essentially bound up with other elements. In other words, the world of consciousness is strongly marked off from the material world by the inner unity of its elements a unity through which they are seen to belong to one and the same subject, and which has its typical expression in recollection (Erinnerung). Hence the author follows Kant in regarding synthesis as the fundamental form of all consciousness. While thus recognising the unity of conscious life as something sui generis, Dr. Hoffding thinks we may find its correlative or, as he does not hesitate to say, its parallel in the constitution of the nervous system ; and he winds up his discussion of the relation of body to mind by seeking to bring out this parallelism, and to in- terpret it by the hypothesis of a double-faced unity, made familiar to English readers by Lewes and others. In so doing he takes considerable pains to distinguish between the legitimate scientific use of such a hypothesis and the adoption of it as a final meta- physical interpretation ; but he hardly succeeds in showing that it is possible to transcend the phenomenal distinction of the mental and the material without encroaching upon the territory of ontology. Of greater psychological interest is the way in which he applies his conception of consciousness as something essentially complex and united to the most elementary psychical states viz., sensations. The various grades of mental life from the unconscious to the clearly conscious are made to illustrate the same essential characteristics of consciousness. The detailed exposition of the several directions of the mental life is always interesting and instructive. It may be sufficient here to single out some few of the more important points. Under Sensation Dr. Hoffding, conformably to the general idea of consciousness just indicated, lays a new emphasis on the law of relation, or, as Dr. Bain has phrased it, the relativity of mental states. And here he meets with good effect Prof. Stumpf's recent criticism of this principle. The latter distin- guishes sharply between the sensation as something independent and absolute and the mind's judgment on the same. But our author reminds him that " every proper judgment is preceded by the immediate reciprocal relation of the sensations themselves, in which we have the very first form of conscious activity which in the higher stages we call comparison and judgment ". And he adds that " for so elementary a relation as this, language has formed no suitable expression ". The simplest act of perception is for our author the recognition or identification of a sensation, an operation which involves no consciousness of the external origin of the sensation. What is ordinarily called a perception is according to this view a " compound perception ". The rela- tions of the several elements in the perceptual process and the differences between this and "free representation" are set forth