Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/386

 374 EDMUND MONTGOMERY : nature of either an intelligible, i.e., super-mental, or a sensible, i.e., extra-mental, object, is necessarily mistaken. The sense-compelling powers as noumena or things-in-them- selves are not directly revealed in the sensorial awakenings which they stimulate. These awakenings are altogether incommensurable effects within the specific organisation of an autonomous subject. All conceptual realisations are thus likewise due to powers within the organic individual systematising and unifying the whole range of its own per- ceptual awakenings. They are certainly not due t@ recogni- tion of conceptual types pre-existing in an intelligible world, or of generalities inherent in the particular objects per- ceptually symbolised. Whatever relations between the experiencing individual and the source whence the stimulating influences emanate may be truly recognised, must evidently have already been potentially subsistent through pre-established correspond- ences between its own organised functional capacities and the system of powers capable of specifically stimulating the same. From this natural point of view our consciousness would consist in mental states which can be aroused in us, through the instrumentality of our organism, by a world of corres- ponding external powers. They would therefore signify, in reference to ourselves, the bearings of such powers on our own being ; in reference to the external powers, as such, however, they would simply serve us as signs of their special nature and of their sundry mutual operations on each other. The actual correspondence would obtain between our own organisation as thing-in-itself and the other things-in-them- selves, forming together an inter-dependent universe of such things-in-themselves or rather of power-complexes. Our mind would realise primarily through specific sensory stimulation from outside and then also through intrinsic stimulation relations pre-established between our own organism and the other things. This mental realisation would take place, because the specifically stimulated sensory functions are at the same time also the subject's sensorial affections, which, by means of organically pre-established interdependence within the nervous system, become, on spreading stimulation, significant of a more or less extensive range of relational correspondences between our own being and the world of which it forms part. Imagine our organism to be an instrument most delicately attuned at its receiving surface to what appear to us as external vibrations. The foreign powers, more or less at random, in a more or less fragmentary manner, more or less