Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/58

42 Professor James falls upon the neck of a disciple of Herbert Spencer, and is reconciled to what he is himself pleased to call "Chromo-philosophy," the presence of a third party upon the scene is simply profane.

Passage after passage might be quoted in illustration of the author's confession that the bed which he so carefully prepares is too narrow to give a comfortable repose to the facts which he admits. This is strikingly true in the account which is given of the nature of the fact of knowledge. We are told, in general (I, p. 197), that psychology only "assumes that thoughts successively occur and that they (the thoughts) know objects in a world which the psychologist also knows." But how thoughts can know "objects in a world"; and in what respect the psychologist's knowledge of this world differs from the knowledge of the objects, in this world, by his thoughts; and how the knowledge of the psychologist is going to be identified by himself with the knowledge of the objects by the psychologist's thoughts; — we find it difficult to understand as a matter of cerebral psychology. Professor James makes, on this point, little or no attempt to assist us. For in the chapter on "The Stream of Thought," in stating what is implicated in the primary fact that "thinking of some sort goes on," he takes the most pronounced spiritualistic positions. "Every thought," says he (p. 225 f.), "tends to be part of a personal consciousness." And now the elementary psychic fact appears to be, — "not, thought or this thought, or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned." The "immediate datum of psychology," "the universal conscious fact," is no longer "feelings and thoughts exist, but I think, and I feel." This "I," moreover, necessitates some sort of a continuity of mental life, permanency of being, or — at any rate — conscious identification of past and present as alike belonging to "Me." "Within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly continuous" (p. 237). But knowledge is of Things; and "human thought appears to deal with objects independent of itself; that is, it is cognitive, or possesses the function of knowing" (p. 271). But it (the stream of consciousness, or better the "Thought," spelled with a capital) "is always