Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/99

 86 J. DEWEY : analysis into real entities as Mr. Hodgson believes me to be, I should suppose that they were actually distinct as concrete exist- ences. But, sticking fast to what Psychology teaches me, I must hold that they are aspects, analytically arrived at, of the one existing reality conscious experience. Mr. Hodgson finds no difficulty in making the separation. He assumes and speaking from the metaphysical standpoint would naturally assume that there is " a stream of changes and states " which " come to an individual," and " out of this as data is built up ordinary experi- ence ". So he regards this " stream " as in some way individual, while the world built up out of it the content may be distin- guished from it. To me it seems that this " stream " is built up along with, and mostly out of, the experiences of the everyday world. Stream and world are equally psychological constructions, built up by psychological processes. It must be from Metaphysic (it cannot be from Psychology) that Mr. Hodgson gets a " stream" which is given ready made. Psychology would tell us that the " stream " is essentially due to projections out from the present by a psychological mechanism in the form of memory and expec- tation. Consciousness is not a moving body, which, flying through time, leaves a trail behind it, as does a rocket in space. When the idea of an absent person is suggested to an infant, the child does not conceive this as an idea, but looks about him to localise the person. His life is a present one, and it is only through a psychological development that he comes to have experiences placed as past and anticipated as future. The experiences of time and of " streams '' are due to psychological dynamics. The process by which the individual comes to connect certain experi- ences with himself as a being continuous in time, and to separate them from others which he refers to existences in space, is one of the problems of psychology. What is the bearing of all this ? Simply, that we have no ready-made distinction between the indi- vidual agent and the world of experience over against him, but that each is built up out of a common material by contemporane- ous processes. A correct psychology would teach Mr. Hodgson, it seems to me, not only that the ordo ad individuum and the ordo ad universum are built out of a common stock, but that the process is a reciprocal one, so that our ideas of ourselves as individuals, nay ourselves as individuals, are made up out of our experiences of the world, and vice- versa. The agent is not the agent which it is without the content, not only in the sense that it bears that content and no other, but in the sense that this content reacts upon it and is organised into it to make it what it specifically is. If Mr. Hodgson will make an absolute separation between the individual as agent and the content of consciousness as general, he will find that all that is left to the agent is : x is experienced . and is interesting, where it is impossible to give x any definite values. Its analogies we may hypothetically find in the conscious- .ness of an oyster.