Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/446

430 Its presence is vouched for in its sensuous immediacy by a real, though unique, experience of activity, and this actual envisagement is regarded as the sole evidence and meaning of its reality.

When Professor Ladd comes to treat of the identity, unity, permanence, etc., of Mind, the impossibility of finding any meaning for these conceptions in something that is merely temporal and particular is at on^e evident. For if 'Mind' has no significance apart from what is actually presented in the concrete psychological content, how can these terms be used at all of a process that is frequently interrupted, as in sleep and swoons? How shall we predicate unity, or identity, or permanence, of such intermittent functioning? This is the crux of the chapters with which we are now dealing. The notion of the unconscious or subconscious functioning of the mind might seem to afford an escape from the difficulty, but this view the author explicitly rejects. "To speak of unconscious psychoses or mental states as belonging to the mind, is to use words that are quite unintelligible. The states of consciousness as they are known require no such hypothesis" (p. 295). Although much could be said in reply to the author's summary refutation of unconscious processes, it is not necessary for our present purpose to enter into any discussion of the matter, and I prefer to quote at once his own solution of the main question with which we have been dealing: "The existence which unconscious minds have, if they are to be thought of as having any existence at all, can be nothing but a certain abiding relation to all reality. Unconscious finite minds exist only in that 'World-Ground' in which all minds and things have their existence" (p. 392). Further explanation and proof of this statement are reserved for the present. Until these are forthcoming, any critical comments would seem to be out of place.

There is, however, one characteristic of these discussions upon which I have already touched, but which is so important, and appears so often in other chapters of the book, that-it seems to demand explicit mention. That he himself has been kept from falling into the slippery paths of the 'abstract thinkers' and 'dogmatic metaphysicians,' Professor Ladd ascribes to the firm foundation of scientific psychology upon which his conclusions have been reared. I venture, however, to think that the desire to keep close to scientific psychology has rendered his speculations half-hearted, and has induced him to reject as an 'unreal abstraction whatever cannot be envisaged as psychological content. It sounds like an indisputable proposition to say that a metaphysics of Mind must be based upon a scientific psychology. And if this simply means