Page:Philosophical Review Volume 20.djvu/224

210 do we infer that the consciousness supposed to be correlative with the manifestation of being in inorganic matter resembles our own? Why may not all the characteristics of our consciousness be due to the higher organization of the activities of being which accompany the higher organization of the correlative phenomena? Moreover, I suspect that the hard-headed scientist will think that this view chimes as ill with his method and results as the much-criticised idealism. For note what it means. Phenomena constitute for our author a world in consciousness, and this world "develops at the same rate that consciousness develops in the world. If there was no consciousness above that of an amœba there could be no phenomenal world above an amœba's comprehension" (p. 364). And why stop with the amœba? Before any organic life existed there would be no world above the comprehension of inorganic matter whatever that might mean. But when the scientist talks of those remote times he is talking of our phenomenal world, and at the same time telling us what happened then in the phenomenal world.

I admit that the view has a certain fascination,—to trace consciousness back to petites perceptions, and even to more elementary and primitive activities, and to view it as evolving pari passu with the evolution of phenomena,—but I must confess that I find myself unable to carry it through. And although our author tells us that consciousness is not "on the same level" with phenomena, or empirical reality, I cannot but think that in this whole way of envisaging the development of consciousness he is putting them on the same level more than he is aware of. One source of difficulty seems to me to lie in the conception of consciousness as self-contained, so that to reach other consciousness one must do so via the transcendent. True, I cannot feel another's feelings, or be conscious of another's consciousness in the same way that I am of my own; but sometimes (although perhaps not in the present instance) I can think another's thoughts. Consciousness, in other words, in being itself is already beyond itself, the so-called transcendent is, here at least, the other pulse of the consciousness transcended. And this mutual implication of consciousness in other consciousness would seem to be assumed in the view of phenomena held by the plain or unsophisticated man (to whom Professor Read does not hesitate on occasion to appeal) and in so far to carry the weight of "social assent." For he surely takes it for granted that the phenomenal world is a common world; and if Professor Read should then tell him that phenomena are in consciousness, and that consciousness is individual, and that empirical reality is a common world only in the sense that it has for all a common ground in a condition of transcendent being, would he not properly reply that we make dates,