Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/545

529 hypothesis. My psychological hypothesis may still need to be stated at some length. The philosophical doctrine can here only be hinted at. I first maintain, then, that, apart from the social consciousness, we should possess no such idea as we now possess of the external physical world. More in detail, I maintain the following view as to the origin of our present notion of externality:—

Apart from the social consciousness, if left to my private experience, I should indeed come to know what Mill called the "permanent possibilities of experience." I should expect them to be repeated in definite ways in response to definite acts of mine. That fire burns, that stone walls resist, that objects seen can under certain circumstances be grasped; all this I could and, if sufficiently intelligent, should learn in isolation. But, so I maintain, these "permanent possibilities of experience," although indeed they would be objects for my intelligence, although, were I only supposed to be intelligent enough, they could conceivably become very elaborate and significant objects, much as music and decimal fractions and the moral law are objects to me now, even when I think only of their inner significance,—still, as I insist, these objects would lack an important note of my present external world, since I should not conceive them as social objects, objects existent for other persons besides myself. And it is the social consciousness that defines a most important attribute of externality. None of the qualities of external things, upon which the psychologists who consider the isolated consciousness have insisted, neither the persistence, nor the involuntary intrusiveness, nor the vividness of our perceptions of the external, nor the feeling of resistance which our muscles give us when we touch objects, nor the regularities of our experience of the physical world, seem to me characters sufficient to explain our present consciousness of external reality. Pains and passions are vivid, but we all nevertheless refer them to the inner world. Grief may be intrusive, involuntary in its coming, vivid, and persistent. Yet we call it still an internal fact, unless, as at a great funeral, where many mourners weep together, the community