Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/75

 THE METAPHYSICAL METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY. (58 called upon to say given by what or to what. I use the word > denotatively, to designate what I mean, abstracting from that part of its connotation which involves a giver and receiver. These notions of giver and receiver, source of per- cepts and percipient, will have to be found in the experience, by analysis. I am not to be taxed with denying my own indi- vidual existence, nor with substituting for it an universal con- sciousness or Absolute Ego, or any other form of the Abso- lute, nor yet with supposing that things exist only as modes of my individual' consciousness, which involves their depen- dence on it, a theory which has been characterised as Solip-, (all which things would be violent assumptions), be- cause I put away, as matter of method, all questions of what experience depends on, until I have first satisfied my- self what the content of experience is, at least so far as to know what is meant by dependence, as part of that content. This point, with regard to the agent in consciousness, Soul, Mind, Ego, or Subject, call it what you will, I would particularly insist on. It is not denied that there w something tkere, agent or agency, which we may denote by those names. The method merely requires us to know something of what it is, before saying hoic it comes or what if "V-s, or whether the connotation of those names is a fiction or a fact. So long as it is held to exist without being known, we are at the mercy of every charlatan who roundly asserts this or that about it, on the authority of his own insight. One says black, another white. One vows that it is spiritual and incorruptible ; another that it is material and perishable. Now these four things are not matter of immediate inspec- tion pure and simple ; they involve inference, or at any rate interpretation of inspection. What the present method does is to require, that the immediate marks, by which such pro- perties as these are attributed to the Subject, should be assigned. By what marks do you attribute agency, or know that it is an agent ? It does not follow that it is unreal because we have no positive knowledge of it. But let us know where we stand, and what we are doing. Again, the alternative Ontologist or Psychologist which formed the decisive question in philosophy in the early part of this century, does not arise on my method. That alter- native arises from putting the question how comes experience, with or prior to the question what is experience. The dis- tinction between psychology and ontology, ontology then standing for philosophy, fell between two theories of the genesis of experience, the psychological which referred it to individual conscious agents in presence of an external world,