Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/505

No. 5.] than subjective idealism in a new guise. We know objects because we are those objects. “Motion” is used as a convenient middle term for the unification of the consciousness-of-motion with consciousness itself. To recur to Hertzen’s comparison of the brain to a hall with a multitude of gas-lights, we may say that each light, if its molecular motion were of the kind that is identical with consciousness, would simply be conscious of itself, not of the other lights. If molecular motions in the brain are identical with consciousness, they also would be conscious of themselves, but not of one another or of anything else. There would still be wanting a being that could know and compare them together. But such a being, possessing a consciousness-of-objects, would be other than the objects-of-consciousness. If it be said that such a being may be found in the higher centres of the brain, it must be answered that these in turn would be conscious of themselves but of nothing else. Hence, in the last analysis, objective knowledge is shut out. But nothing is more certain than that objects-of-knowledge are other than the knowledge-of-objects. Correlative, they may be; identical, they cannot be. If they were identical, not only would knowledge be motion, but motion would be knowledge.

We may find some aid in comprehending the origin of psychic phenomena by an examination of their simplest forms and lowest terms. In adult man they are exhibited in their reatest complexity. In the child they are more rudimentary, but still they are highly complex. No period of human infancy discloses their simplest forms. We cannot trace their development from the embryonic stage. But we can follow the thread of analogy suggested by embryology. Every human child, on the physical side, is developed from a pair of unicellular organisms, one of which seems to have no other part to perform than to quicken the development of the other in certain specific ways. What are the psychic manifestations of unicellular beings? The question may seem to be a vain one, but Binet has undertaken to