Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/449

 j. SULLY' s OUTLINES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 437 more meanings than one, and what is called external reality is but one species. All of them signify, however, the opposition of self in its momentary phase, of self recognised as real, and of the correlative term, whatsoever that may be a term the nature of which is the content of the individual's knowledge at the moment. Now, the recognition of the reality of self is not a simple fact, either of knowing, or of feeling or of acting, but a compound of all three. Belief is only the special name for the sense of reality which accompanies each recognition of self as in opposition to some determined object. So long as the difference between the mental life and its surroundings is obscure or imper- fect, so long does ' primitive credulity ' lead the individual to take as real whatsoever enters into his conscious experience. So soon as memory enables him to distinguish between the momentary phase of his experience and its continuous existence, so soon is there possible a distinction between that which is believed in as real and that which is determined as ideal. The numerous features by which external reality becomes for us a fact of experience, give additional complexity to belief and allow us to draw the familiar distinctions between perception and imagina- tion which we are accustomed to take as exhausting the opposi- tion of real and ideal. I do not say that perceiving and imagining have the same content so far as knowledge is concerned, and that the one is accompanied by belief which is wanting to the other, for every characteristic of the total state affects the content, but only that in the one the elements for determining reality are given and that in the other they are absent. The elements them- selves vary much in the course of development, but, so far as external reality is concerned, always relate definitely to the body. It is because the feelings and the will enter so potently into the determination of the body as a known fact, that belief may be so readily described as a kind of feeling or even as an active state. To Mr. Sully's treatment of Imagination the main objection I should have is his tendency to look upon the ideas as separate images, entities of some peculiar kind, and to disregard the important consideration that they are always ideas of something, that is to say that here we have repeated the complex fact of a mental state in which is given the opposition between the subject and the content represented. Language is hard, and it is diffi- cult to avoid saying that the mind has ideas, as though ideas were things which the mind contemplated, and yet the expression is most misleading. The mind, one would rather say, is its ideas. It is only through memory and reflection that we come to distin- guish our mental life as a unity and to contrast with it the sepa- rate phases as something belonging to it. But on this and on many other topics suggested by the chapters on Imagination, I cannot now remark. It is with some satisfaction that one sees the small space 30