Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/69

55 as a particular 'psychic event' or phenomenal content. Elsewhere we are told that "what is, shows"; which apparently means that what is not discoverable as present to consciousness in the form of a particular phenomenon at any stage, must not in any sense be ascribed to that stage as real or actual.

If this interpretation is correct, it would seem that Professor Baldwin has for the moment forgotten his functional or genetic standpoint. For, as I shall attempt to show more fully later, that point of view does not construe mind in terms of psychic contents which can be pointed out as definite modes of existence. If mind is to be described functionally, the structural test of what is real cannot be invoked. It is impossible, then, to settle the matter off-hand by Berkeley's favorite prescription of looking into our consciousness and seeing what is there and what is not. A logical function, as the mind's process of realizing truth, cannot be called upon to show itself in the form of a particular psychic event, or other mode of phenomenal existence. To make this the test of logical presence is obviously exactly parallel to Hume's famous demand that the particular impression be pointed out from which the idea of the self is derived.

It is evident that the logical result of taking Mr. Baldwin's statement of the canon of Actuality thus literally, would be to dissolve all inner connection of ideas, and to throw us back on the principle of Association. But this is only one part of his teaching. For he had previously laid down as the first canon of genetic logic, the principle of Continuity,—"all psychic process is continuous." The corresponding fallacy of Discontinuity "consists in the treating of any psychic event as de novo, or as arising in a discontinuous series; so the fallacy of the historical distinction in principle between 'sense' and 'reason.'" It is clear from this statement, as well as from other passages, that what is here emphasized is something more than the merely temporal or psychological continuousness of the developing experience. Nevertheless, I find it difficult to understand just how Professor Baldwin conceives the principle of organization or the nature of the continuity. The difficulty is that the terms employed in repudiating the