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 CHAPTER II

MENTAL IMAGES

WHAT is a mental image? The question is a difficult one. It seems to be a copy or a likeness of something; but of what is it a copy? The common notion is that it is a copy or likeness of something which is external to the mind and exists apart from the mind. But if we think more carefully about it this conception of the image seems less satisfactory. If it can legitimately be called a likeness at all, it must be a likeness of an object as experienced, and not as it exists apart from experience. Indeed, are we justified in saying that psychic and physical phenomena resemble one another ? It would seem that the two orders of phenomena are so entirely disparate that a resemblance of a fact in one series to an object in the other is out of the question un less, indeed, we accepted some form of idealism, or the ex treme view that the reality known is constituted in the act of knowing. Those who believe in the thoroughgoing dualism of mind and matter should hesitate to say that the image resembles the object How can a conscious process, which is supposed to have no spatial character at all, be like an external, extended, space-filling object? What prop erties have they in common? It would seem that they are fundamentally and absolutely unlike; that there is no com mon term and no possibility of comparing them. There is no way for the mind to get outside itself and compare its own conscious process, the image, with the object as a thing wholly apart from consciousness. What is that external world, as existing wholly apart from consciousness, and what is it like ? We have no means of knowing. The ques-

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