Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/236

216 216 PSTCEOLOGY. THE BELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHEB OBJECTS are either relations to other minds, or to material things. The material things are either the mind's own brain, on the one hand, or anything else, on the other. The relations of a mind to its own brain are of a unique and utterly mysteri- ous sort ; we discussed them in the last two chapters, and can add nothing to that account. The mind's relations to other objects than the brain are cognitive and emotional relations exclusively, so far as we know. It knows them, and it inwardly welcomes or rejects them, but it has no other dealings with them. When it seems to act upon them, it only does so through the intermediary of its own body, so that not it but the body is what acts on them, and the brain must first act upon the body. The same is true when other things seem to act on it — they only act on its body, and through that on its brain.* All that it can do directly is to know other things, misknow or ignore them, and to find that they interest it, in this fashion or in that. Now the relation of knowing is the most mysterious thing in the world. If we ask how one thing can know another we are led into the heart of Erkenntnisstheorie and metaphys- ics. The psychologist, for his part, does not consider the matter so curiously as this. Finding a world before him which he cannot but believe that he knows, and setting himself to study his own past thoughts, or someone else's thoughts, of what he believes to be that same world ; he cannot but conclude that those other thoughts know it after their fashion even as he knows it after his. Knowledge be- comes for him an ultimate relation that must be admitted, whether it be explained or not, just like difi'erence or re- semblance, which no one seeks to explain. Were our topic Absolute Mind instead of being the con- crete minds of individuals dwelling in the natural world, we could not tell whether that Mind had the function of knowing or not, as knowing is commonly understood. We 'mediums,' as not yet matters of common consent.
 * I purposely ignore 'clairvoyance' and action upon distant things by