is primarily and pre-eminently practical. Obvious as this must appear to those who look at the facts of life in the light of the theory of evolution, yet it is a truth that was for the most part overlooked so long as psychology was studied mainly in its bearing on philosophical problems. But the notion of an independent realm of truth existing sub specie aeternitatis has literally no place within the purview of a psychology that knows its business. Here we find no such thing as mere cognition: the uninteresting is not known but ignored, and the interesting leads at once to response, and sooner or later to adjustment-in the race, at all events. Success is then completed experience or expertness, and in general prepares the way for a new advance. So far the true is the useful, and the criterion is not theoretical but practical. Looking broadly at the progress of life, as it ascends through the animal kingdom and onwards through the history of man, it seems safe to say that knowledge is always a means to ends, is never an end by itself-till at length it becomes interesting and satisfying in itself. Psychologically regarded, then, the sole function of perception and intellection is, it is contended, to guide action and subserve volition-more generally to promote self-conservation and betterment.

Consciousness and Experience.

5. For psychical life so regarded, 'experience' is the obvious term, and the term which in our ordinary affairs is the one usually employed. But in psychology the far less appropriate term 'consciousness' holds the field, and its manifold ambiguities are something of a scandal. It is continually confused with self-consciousness, which was its original meaning1; and thereby the errors of intellectualism, which we have just discussed, are apt to be perpetuated and a part of experience mistaken for the whole. "Everybody knows what consciousness is," we are told, "for everybody is conscious." But this is only true when it becomes trivial: every experient is experient. A mouse, we believe, feels and strives: feeling and striving are then factors of its experience, but we have no reason to think that they are objects of its knowledge. They may become such for

1 Cf. e.g. Locke's definition :-"Consciousness is the perception of what passes in a man's own mind," Essay II, i. § 19.

a man, no doubt; but there is much, even in his experience, of which we should say that he is conscious no longer or not conscious as yet. For in ordinary language we tend to speak of being 'conscious of' only what we specially attend to in this sense the adept is no longer conscious of the painstaking efforts by which he first acquired his skill, and the tyro is not yet conscious of the subtle differences to which, as a connoisseur, he will come to attend. In psychology, however, consciousness is regarded as admitting of indefinite gradations. Indeed this is often given as "its capital and pervading idea. ...Consciousness is co-extensive with mental life" in so far as "that life is considered to rise or to fall in degree1." Variations of intensity are certainly characteristic both of the psychical and of the physical: this fact alone then will not serve to define them, nor will it alone enable us to distinguish the one from the other. But we hear not only of degrees of consciousness, but also of operations of consciousness, states of consciousness, contents of consciousness and form of consciousness; and here, obviously something more than variations of intensity is implied. As instances of operations-perceiving, remembering, comparing, desiring, resolving, and the like would probably be cited. But, though it does not strike us as strange to speak of consciousness of remembering or of desiring—since for a self-conscious subject such reflective cognition is possible-it does seem forced to speak of consciousness remembering or desiring; for the self-conscious subject does not say: My consciousness remembers or desires, but, I do so. If, then, it is the subject of experience that is active, why should activity be attributed to consciousness, which after all is but an abstract term; not a conscious being, but the state of being conscious, which surely implies a conscious being?

The answer to this question is to be found not in the facts of experience but in the history of psychological theories concerning

1 So Bain, who gives this as the first of thirteen meanings of consciousness, a topic, which on account "of the subtleties and complications involved in it" he reserves for a closing dissertation, Emotions and Will, 3rd ed., 1875, P. 545. Again, Fleming: "The meaning of a word is sometimes best attained by means of the word opposed to it. Unconsciousness, that is, the want or absence of consciousness, denotes the suspension of all our faculties. Consciousness, then, is the state in which we are when all or any of our faculties are in exercise." Vocabulary of Philosophy, 3rd ed., 1875, p. 105.

them. It is to be found, that is to say, in the reaction against the Cartesian doctrine, that experience is nothing but modes of a res cogitans. The conscious substance, it was held, lay beyond the pale of science, but the modes were supposed to remain within it; in other words, as we have already seen, the Cartesian analysis of mind was retained, though its philosophy of mind was rejected'. This was a very naïve proceeding, for—as just said the so-called modes of consciousness are themselves neither conscious nor active, and without the explicit recognition of either subject or object are really unmeaning. Two alternatives were then open. Having eliminated the subject of experience along with the substance, some psychologists proceeded to hypostatize or personify consciousness, and assigned to it the rôle of subject; these are the psychologists who talk freely of operations of consciousness and states of consciousness, and tell us that "everybody knows what consciousness is."

Others have preferred to restore the missing reality from the object side; and they first resolve all the 'modes' into ideas or presentations, and then from such 'mind-stuff' and its interactions they proceed to build up experience in a quasi-mechanical, quasi-chemical fashion. 'Content of consciousness' is the favourite phrase of these psychologists. Often they allow that such content of consciousness implies 'the form of consciousness,' implies, that amounts to saying, a conscious subject; but they attempt, on methodological grounds, to justify the omission of all recognition of this which is only 'the general condition' of the content's existence and not a part of the content itself. Such a plea rests upon a complete misapprehension of the psychological standpoint. The empirical psychologist, it is contended, should imitate the procedure of the natural or objective sciences. But this he cannot do; for the two standpoints, as we have just seen, are entirely different. The language the physicist uses is simply: there is this or that—a, b, c, or d. But the psychologist cannot by saying: there are such and such presentations or

1 Cf. above, p. 12.

2 For this doctrine I have suggested the name of Presentationism: it is often called Sensationism or Associationism; the first because sensations are regarded as the elements or atoms of which its contents of consciousness' ultimately consist: the second because the combination of these elements is supposed to be effected by a sort of cohesion' among those that are contiguous and by an 'attraction' of those that are similar.

feelings or movements-as if they were independent entities --bring out the characteristics of his own standpoint. To this end his statements must (and always do), either explicitly or implicitly, take the form: The individual experient has such and such presentations, feels thus or thus, and acts in this wise or in that. And this is 'the form of consciousness': to eliminate it is to ignore the concrete experience of the individual subject altogether, and to abolish what is characteristic of psychology. When its 'absolute presupposition' goes the content is no longer content of consciousness in the psychological sense.

The form of Experience and questions of method.

§ 6. To deal adequately with experience we must combine what is positive in both these alternative views. The so-called operations and states of consciousness are not mere modes in vacuo: they imply an active and affectible subject, and it can only conduce to clearness to make this fact as explicit as possible. The so-called contents of consciousness again, though not necessarily actions or affections of the subject, are never objects per se: to be contents of consciousness they must be objects for a subject. The form of consciousness cannot, then, be expressed by contrasting consciousness with unconsciousness in respect of intensity; nor by contrasting psychical phenomena with physical, the inextended with the extended, nor indeed by any single term which does not recognise the duality of subject and object. The one term that does recognise this duality most simply is experience. And experience we find is not merely nor primarily cognitive; neither does it always attain, nor is it ever entirely confined, to that joint-knowledge which the term con-sciousness originally denoted.

own.

The most complex form of experience that we know is our We find simpler and ever simpler forms of experience as we pass backwards from man to the higher mammals, and from these to the lower mammals and birds, and thence to reptiles and fish. Long before we reach the end of the chain of animal life however it becomes a moot question whether there is any clear evidence of the presence of experience at all. Experience appears, that is to say, to be a comparatively late result of

organic evolution, and human experience to be the summit of a long progressive series. Now this idea of gradual evolution has certainly exerted a powerful influence upon modern psychology. It is the less surprising therefore-especially when we remember the defects of the older psychology-to find that the attempt is now frequently made to treat psychology wholly according to the historical, or as it is oftener called, the genetic, method. In biology such a procedure is possible; for the protozoan as well as man, the paragon of animals, is equally accessible as an organism. But the only experience immediately accessible to us is our own, and this in spite of its complexity-is the first we know and the one we know best. Lower forms of experience, notwithstanding their greater simplicity, we know later and know less. Accordingly all attempts-regardless of this difference—to treat of human experience as merely the culmination of a long but entirely objective development, have so far been marked by serious defects. The start is avowedly physiological—from what is metaphorically described as 'organic behaviour,' meaning thereby such adaptability of organism to environment as seems to be determined solely and completely by the organism's structure, and from its apparently automatic and invariable character to require merely mechanical explanations. Later on, psychological conceptions are gradually introduced to eke out the shortcomings of the mechanical interpretation, when the spontaneity of the behaviour and its varying adjustment to varying conditions suggest that the machine is more or less under guidance.

So, as we advance, we pass as it were insensibly from biology proper to psychology proper, from the living protoplasm of the Amoeba to the living experience of man. We began with mechanism and we end with mind. But the psychology, when we reach it, is apt to be of the Presentational or Sensational type, since a psychology of this type can be most readily equated to the physiology from which the exposition set out. We have, that is to say, a 'physiological psychology' of the very worst sort; where physiological and psychological conceptions are for ever coquetting with each other, and where, as a result, unseemly hybrids are not infrequent1. If it be a sound maxim to proceed

1 Cf. e.g. Huxley's 'ideagenous molecules' as a physical basis of memory,' Collected Essays, I. p. 239.