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508 the conditions of perception or knowledge; they are unquestionably the immediate data upon which the perceptive judgment reposes. Mr. Spencer, it is true, guided by his idea of evolution, projects his imagination into "the dark backward and abysm of time" and seems to teach that "the simple consciousness of sensation, uncomplicated by any consciousness of subject or object, is primordial," and that, as he puts it, "through immeasurably long and complex differentiations and integrations of such primordial sensations and derived ideas, there develops a consciousness of self and a correlative not-self." But, as he adds, "it is one thing to say that in such a creature the sensations are the things originally given, and it is quite another thing to say these sensations can be known as sensations by such a creature." Such an argument "identifies two things which are at the very opposite extremes of the process of mental evolution." It is, in fact, only the psychologist who in his reflective analysis is conscious of sensations as sensations distinguished from and referred to their external causes. And we have here an example of what Professor James has dubbed "the psychologist's fallacy par excellence,"—the confusion by the psychologist of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report. Mr. Spencer lays his finger most effectively upon the fallacy in the present case. But for myself, I question whether he does not go too far in admitting an undifferentiated sensuous consciousness as the primordial fact in the evolutionary process. It is in vain that we project our imaginations towards such a hypothetical beginning: it has nothing in common with what we understand by knowledge, and is therefore perfectly unrealizable by us. Being thus totally heterogeneous, it cannot form a step on the road to knowledge: I mean that it does not in any sense pave the way for it or render the emergence of cognition easier to conceive. Whether we interpolate this hypothetical sensuous consciousness as a time-prius or not, the appearance of perception or cognitive consciousness—the consciousness we know—remains equally an unexplained beginning, an absolute.