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304 Ladd's criticisms. "The problem of self-consciousness," he says, "is not one of blank unmediated correspondences between certain series of particular thoughts and other series of particular known brain-processes. It is the far graver and profounder problem of trying to tell how there comes to be an actual distinction made between thoughts and thinker; and how some thoughts are irresistibly referred by the thinker to the thinker as not himself but his thoughts; while other thoughts are referred by the same thinker to things as knowledge which the same thinker has of what is not his thoughts." This " far graver and profounder problem" must be solved — according to Professor Ladd, since he excludes Professor James's conception — either by description of the facts of consciousness or by metaphysical explanation of them. So far as it can be solved by description, psychology, as natural science, has no more difficulty with it than psychology conceived in any other way. The ascertainment and description of the various elements in the stream of consciousness, and the ascertainment of their nervous correlates, constitute the entire business of psychology as a science. Say that the explanations of such a psychology do not explain, say that the discovery of the ultimate laws of coexistence between thoughts and brain-states leave us with far graver and profounder problems on our hands, and I shall admit it. But the same is true of every other science. If every science had completely solved its problem we should still need a metaphysic of the universe.

From the point of view we have now reached it ought to be unnecessary to show that Professor Ladd has completely misapprehended Professor James's suggestion that we "'pool' our mysteries into one great mystery, the mystery that brain-processes occasion knowledge at all." It is admitted by all parties that brain-processes occasion some kinds of conscious action. What a priori right have we to limit the occasioning power of brain-processes? If matter can occasion so much, who can say, apart from an actual investigation of the facts, that it cannot occasion all? To say that from the very nature of certain facts of consciousness their occasion cannot be found in brain-processes, is to lay claim to a far greater knowledge of the brain and its capacities than any one can consistently lay claim to who insists so forcibly and emphatically as Professor Ladd does on our ignorance of cerebral physiology.

Even from his own point of view, I do not believe that Professor James's suggestion is open to his criticism. Why is it that the soul acts now in this way, now in that, remembers now this and now that? Professor Ladd would surely admit that it is because of a difference in its environment, a difference in the conditions with which it is confronted. A complete explanation of the activities of the soul cannot be given — he would surely say — until we know, not only what the soul is, but the