Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/423

Rh bodies are in states of vibration, and that the vibration may be made visible. And it concludes that the objective activity is not what it subjectively seems, but is proximately interpretable as a succession of aërial waves. Thus Crude Realism is shown that while there unquestionably exists an objective activity corresponding to the sensation known as sound, yet the facts are not explicable on the original supposition that this is like the sensation; while they are explicable by conceiving it as a rhythmical mechanical action. Eventually this reinterpretation, joined with kindred reinterpretations of other sensations, comes to be itself further transfigured by analysis of its terms, and reëxpression of them in terms of molecular motion; but, however abstract the interpretation ultimately reached, the objective activity continues to be postulated: the primordial judgment of Crude Realism remains unchanged, though it has to change the rest of its judgments.

In another part of his argument, however, Mr. Sidgwick implies that I have no right to use those conceptions of objective existence by which this compromise is effected. Quoting sundry passages to show that, while I hold the criticisms of the Idealist to be impossible without "tacitly or avowedly postulating an unknown something beyond consciousness," I yet admit that "our states of consciousness are the only things we can know," he goes on to argue that I am radically inconsistent, because, in interpreting the phenomena of consciousness, I continually postulate not an unknown something, but a something of which I speak in ordinary terms, as though its ascribed physical characters really exist as such, instead of being, as I admit they are, synthetic states of my consciousness. His objection, if I understand it, is, that, for the purposes of Objective Psychology, I apparently profess to know Matter and Motion in the ordinary realistic way; while, as a result of subjective analysis, I reach the conclusion that it is impossible to have that knowledge of objective existence which Crude Realism supposes we have. Doubtless there seems here to be what he calls "a fundamental incoherence." But I think it exists, not between my two expositions, but between the two consciousnesses of subjective and objective existence, which we cannot suppress and yet cannot put into definite forms. The alleged incoherence I take to be but another name for the inscrutability of the relation between subjective feeling and its objective correlate which is not feeling—an inscrutability which meets us at the bottom of all our analyses. An exposition of this inscrutability I have elsewhere summed up thus: