Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/78

 06 SHADWOETH H. HODGSON. been occupied with analysis in the wider sense, in which it includes the whole subjective aspect of experience. We have now to distinguish the two groups taken in the narrower sense from each other, and show how they combine and interlace, which will be also showing how the distinction between nature and genesis is the guiding thread of the method. In passing to this second head of the subject, we are not passing from analysis to genesis, but from the sub- jective aspect of experience as a whole, and subject to analy- sis as a whole, to the relation between the nature and the genesis of its parts, as two divisions of the whole subjective aspect. It is analysis which distinguishes between itself and genesis, just as it is light which manifests both itself and objects. The relation between analysis and genesis in the narrower sense, or between the two groups of questions which are contradistinguished from each other, is what I have now to do with. What, then, is the meaning of the question how comes so and so, of the genesis of a thing, or the dependence of one thing on another? It means that, having separated in thought some one portion of the stream of consciousness from the rest, and analysed it ad infra, we proceed to ask what preceding or accompanying portion or portions of the stream are those without which it, being what it is, would not be when and where it is. Those portions are its sine qua non conditions, and on them it is said to depend for its genesis. The whole sum of such conditions of a given thing is called its cause, a definition of cause which Mill again has set his mark on, and which is perfectly sound when taken as a definition of method, to which I now restrict it. We begin by analysing a given thing, or portion of the stream of consciousness, and in order to assign its conditions, and bring them into relation with it, we have to analyse the con- ditions also. Every part or feature in the analysis of a given thing has its correspondent (I do not say similar) in some feature or features of its conditions. They then make with it a whole, consisting of a process or chain of causation or dependence, which is now analysed both in its parts and in their concatenation, so that our knowledge of it as a whole is again analytical. Analysis is the beginning and the end of the whole proceeding. We have thus a method which brings the whole stream of consciousness under examination. But perhaps you will say to me, Why restrict yourself to conditions, when the first step of separating and analysing a given portion has been taken ? Why not proceed to ask what its effects will be, what it will do, how it will behave, what it will be followed by ? Why go backwards in the