Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/80

 68 SHADWOETH H. HODGSON. effects of a given thing, yet we come upon them in looking for the conditions of other given things ; they appear under the name of conditions of B, instead of under the name of effects of A. But they appear as the connexion between A and B just the same. Two things must next be noted, first, that this method of inquiring into the conditions of given things, or portions of the stream of experience, not only covers the whole ground of experience in the large, but also covers it down to the minutest portions. It is perfectly exhaustive and flexible, a telescope or a microscope at pleasure. Secondly, though covering the whole ground, it tells us nothing whatever of the nature of action or causation or efficiency. We know nothing from it of what makes a cause causal, or what a cause is in itself, or qua cause. At the same time it does not preclude us from knowing it, if experience should ever give us that knowledge. These are questions with which, as method, it has nothing to do, and which it leaves just where it finds them. All it does is to provide for experience being rightly and sufficiently examined. The content of consciousness is the object-matter of the mechanism, or inherent logic, of consciousness. Hitherto, you will observe, I have spoken indifferently of things or portions of the stream of consciousness, implying that the method was applicable generally, without distinc- tion of content. That was my intention. But you may perhaps question its applicability to realities. You may say that it is applicable only to consciousness as such, to our thought of things and not to things themselves ; in fact that it is a method of what some would call subjective logic, or idealism, and nothing more. I proceed, then, to show that it is applicable, not only to things and thoughts indiscrimi- nately, but to both severally. But for this purpose I must of course presume, that this distinction is already drawn and established. To show how it is drawn and established would be to apply the present method, instead of merely describing and explaining it. I adopt, then, as admitted, the psychological distinction between material things and sentient beings, on the one hand, and states and trains of consciousness belonging to sentient beings, on the other, such states and trains of consciousness being the medium whereby sentient beings come by a knowledge both of them- selves, and of material things. You will observe, that this medium of states and trains of consciousness is what we have hitherto been occupied with ; it is what we have called experience. And out of its content we are now supposed to have contradistinguished two classes