Page:Philosophical Review Volume 27.djvu/251

No. 3.] that the latter is therefore determined in part by the activity of the subject. This activity is a fundamental realization, but when considered from the conceptual standpoint of Empirical Psychology, it appears to consist essentially in attention. If, then, we are fully to realize the concrete meaning of the concepts we apply to experience, we must examine them in the light of this mutual interaction of subject and object.

The consideration of the subject implied in experience brings in its train certain ethical and teleological concepts which are meaningless except in application to such a subject. The failure to take the existence of the subject fully into account in the analysis of experience, thus leads to the inevitable result that certain most important characteristics of existence are entirely overlooked or regarded as invalid conceptions. It is owing to their preoccupation with the objective side of experience that the New Realists look upon the notion of teleology, for example, with such doubt and suspicion. Bertrand Russell regards it as possible for a system to be both mechanical and teleological, according to the point of view. Such a supposition evidently entirely invalidates the generally accepted notion of teleology, and we shall therefore examine it hereafter.

When concepts applied to experience are analyzed genetically, the meaning of them as thus determined is invariably found to contain more, and to strike deeper, than that determined by the scientific method. The former seems to throw considerably more light on the true nature of existence than the latter. This is illustrated particularly clearly in the case of causality. Experience is a unity, comprising a duality of subject and object, and we cannot fail to get more and more out of touch with its true inwardness, if we lay stress on one side of it to the exclusion of the other; for all separation of subject from object, though necessary to a certain extent for purposes of analysis, is to that extent artificial. The problem of continuity brings out most clearly, perhaps, the difficulties raised by this artificial separation.