Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/317

No. 3.] object to it if he uses "mind" in the same sense in which physiologists use "brain." To physiologists the word "brain" practically means cerebral phenomena; that is, all the brain they make use of in their explanations. If Professor Ladd will use "mind" simply as a designation of mental phenomena, he will agree with Professor James. If he says that mental phenomena cannot exist without a metaphysical ground or condition, and that therefore we ought to take it into account in all our study of mental phenomena, then he ought to hold that we should take into account the metaphysical ground or basis of material phenomena in all our study of them, and that the distinction between science and metaphysics should be abolished.

Professor James's view that all our so-called ideas at any moment form one undivided mental state Professor Ladd dismisses very briefly. He calls it " the extraordinary way in which the unity of each 'thought' [that is, 'field of consciousness' no matter how highly elaborate and complex] is insisted upon, to the prejudice and neglect of careful analysis of the many elements or factors that may enter into the constitution of that thought," and with that he leaves it.

But is it true, extraordinary or not? Do the mental states of which I am conscious at any moment constitute one undivided and indivisible whole? Or is each sensation, each thought, each distinguishable element of consciousness separate from, and independent of, every other? We may classify the answers to this question under three heads: the Associationists say that the various perceptions, reflections, etc., of which we are conscious at any one moment are independent bits of thought that seem to be one because they exist together; the Transcendentalists, Pure Egoists, and Spiritualists say that they are separate and independent, but that they are bound together in the unity of consciousness by their metaphysical basis, by that entity or being which constitutes the metaphysical possibility of there being such facts as human states of consciousness at all. Professor James says that they are parts of an indivisible whole — that you might as well look for a break, or crack, or rent, or division in a toothache as in the total field of consciousness within our view at any moment.

The theory of the Associationists has been refuted so often, — by Professor James, among others, — that it seems useless to waste time upon it. It is based, as has been shown a thousand times, on a confusion of relations between parts of the total field of consciousness with a consciousness of these relations. What do they mean by thoughts coexisting together? Either the together is a meaningless pleonasm and their theory is false because the great majority of coexisting thoughts do not seem to be parts of a whole, or it adds something to the thought of coexisting; coexisting and coexisting together being different things.