Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/19

 ON SOME OMISSIONS OF INTROSPECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY. 7 the first instance, and as an empirical fact. It presents itself as a continuum. It is true that by it are revealed to us a multiplicity of what we are pleased to consider separate objects; but it ought to be proved, not simply as- sumed, that the proper way of describing this fact is to say we have a cluster of feelings as numerous as the objects, and not to say that we have a, feeling of the cluster of objects, however numerous these may be. The whole cluster is, if apprehended at all, apprehended in one something. Why not as well in one subjective modification or pulse of feeling, as in one Ego ? Of course this native and natural way of describing the stream of knowledge ought not to prejudge the results of analysis made later on, and such analysis might show an Ego, and ever so much besides. But the ordinary plan of talking of a plurality of separate feelings from the first does prejudge the question, and abandon altogether the empirical and natural-history point of view. And see the fruits of prejudging a matter like this, see the two schools at work ! The Empiricists, whether English or German, start with their pluralism of psychic entities, ideas or Vorstcllungen ; show their order and connexion with each other ; and then treat this order which in the first instance appears as an object visible only to the psychologist, and recorded by him as a sort of physical fact as equivalent to a mental fact apprehensible from within the series, and resulting in a modification of the manner in which the entities feel the id- selves. The Rationalists immediately protest that the conclusions in this account are not warranted by the premisses, that the ideas or Vorstdlungen, assumed as distinct psychic factors out of which mind is to be built up, must be kept pure during all the processes through which the psychologist leads them ; and, that if kept pure, the reciprocal order or relation in which they may happen objectively to exist, will in no degree affect their manner of being felt. If the idea red is the idea red, it will be just that idea and nothing farther, whether the idea green has preceded it or not. The bald external fact of its sequence to green and its con- trast to green will not make it aware of itself as a fact so sequent and so contrasted. Such awareness, if realised at all, could only be realised by a third psychic entity, to which the green and the red in their purity should be alike external and yet alike present ; be known as separate and contrasted, and yet have the separateness overcome and the