Page:Philosophical Review Volume 31.djvu/275

No. 3.] manifold of sense. This real must be able to maintain itself under analysis, must yield the secret of permanence in change, must in short be intellectually indestructible while amenable to all available scientific tests.

Where shall we look for it? The most natural procedure would be to re-examine the modus operandi of sense perception. At least it is in sense perception if anywhere that success awaits our efforts. We know, or think we know, how the mind responding to stimulation, fixates, selects, substantializes, generalizes even in the most elementary experience of an object. We are fairly confident, too, that the object as known, however concretely real it may seem to us, is no more than a simplified substitute for the objective actuality, and that nature is indefinitely richer than our experience of it. We know that the degree of complexity and definiteness attained in our sense object depends on our responsiveness to the stimulations, and that this in turn depends on a complex of factors that we may without undue laxity of expression call 'taking notice.' Let the stimulus be what it may, the response depends on interest and attention. The result then is value-content. The value is the permanent element. As soon as the object ceases to interest us or hold our attention, it ceases to exist for us. Every feature recognized in the object is an aspect of value. In using the term 'value' to designate the real in experience, we indicate that as value, reality may be positive or negative, but never neutral. That is, it may be something we desire or something we would avoid; but when we become indifferent, it disappears so far as we are concerned. We also commit ourselves to the doctrine that external reality as known—the only reality we can possibly have occasion to discuss—is projected into the world by the experiencing self. From this point of view the distinction between the limited complexity of the thing as apprehended and the exhaustless wealth of the cosmic object, need cause no embarrassment. The latter is simply the ideal we form of a reality which not only meets our present interest and fills out our present capacity to take notice, but can give definite content to any and every possible interest. But what of the trans-subjective