Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/36

20 There is one sense only in which I can see an intelligible meaning in speaking of the world of my consciousness as a sphere that excludes the real world: and that is, if by the world of my consciousness be meant—certainly not what actually exists in my consciousness—but the abstraction with which the psychologist professes to deal, the stream of mental events regarded apart from their content. But if this is the meaning of the world of my consciousness in Mr. Seth's sentence, that part of the proposition belongs to psychology and not to epistemology. In epistemology the world of my consciousness ought surely to mean the world of my consciousness as that actually exists, i.e., a series of images, ideas, etc., with their content, i. e., with their objective reference. Even if we took the world of my consciousness to mean the abstraction dealt with by the psychologist, the difficulty would not be entirely removed; for, as already said, the series of my mental states is supposed to be a series of events which form part of the real world, although only one aspect of the really existing fact is considered by the psychologist as such.

But the difficulty in Professor Seth's proposition does not end here. What does he mean by the "real world "—"so far hypothetical" even—which excludes the sphere of consciousness, and is excluded from it? There is certainly a real world which does not enter into my consciousness; but what is the real world which does not enter into any consciousness, if it be not that abstraction of real things, objects taken apart from their existence as objects for any subject, which ordinary language and the various special sciences find it convenient to assume? But epistemology as a philosophical science is surely bound to correct the convenient abstractions of the "abstract understanding" and to attempt to deal with the whole truth.

"At no point," says Professor Seth in another passage, "can the real world, as it were, force an entrance into the closed sphere of the ideal; nor does that sphere open at any point to receive into itself the smallest atom of the real world, quâ real, though it has room within itself ideally for the whole