PART I THE CONTENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS CHAPTER I THE MIND AND THE WORLD IN COMMON THOUGHT AND IN SCIENCE It is impossible for the mature mind to turn back to the experiences of infancy, and directly to recall, by an exercise of memory, the beginnings of its conscious life. When we have attained to an age at which reflection is possible, and at which the impulse to reflect makes itself felt, the dawn of consciousness has passed into oblivion; and he who is curious to inquire how the world looked to him, when he first rolled an unmeaning eye at it, must be content with information gained in roundabout ways. As far back as we can remember, the world of our experiences has not been so very different from the world in which we now habitually live. It was formerly, it is true, a more indefinite and a more incoherent world, less marked by clear distinctions and less orderly, more full of acutely delightful and acutely distressing surprises, more exciting and more mysterious. Memory gives us a series of pictures imperfectly representing the successive stages by which the more sober and orderly world of our later experience came into being. But as we journey into the past the pictures become more and more indefinite and incomplete, and the series comes to an end before their general outline has passed over into a something more rudimentary and of a quite different nature. The world which we can recall is always a world of things, among which we find one peculiar and interesting thing not to be placed precisely on a par with the rest, the self, which tastes, touches, and possesses things—the sun around which other things are made to revolve. That this series of experiences has been preceded by other experiences in which such distinctions do not exist, and that they are the result of a development from an experience of the world-if one may call it such-in which there are as yet no objects with definite relations to each other, may be satisfactorily established partly by reflection upon the series of experiences which we can recall, with the developments to be there observed, and partly by observation and interpretation of the actions of human bodies. which reveal minds just passing through the earlier stages of their existence. Thus, there is good reason to believe that the distinction between the self and the not-self, a distinction which thrusts itself upon the attention of the developed mind with such insistence that we are inclined to read it into the experience of every mind, however rudimentary—there is good reason to believe that this distinction, like a multitude of others which make their appearance in later life, was not present at the dawn of consciousness at all. But, however it may be with the infant mind, the mature man always finds himself in a real world of real things, and he distinguishes between himself, as knowing and acting upon things, and the things over against which he stands as a something apart and different. As has been said, he can remember no time at which he did not make some such distinction. Unless he be accustomed to reflective thought, it sounds to him highly absurd to speak of a conscious experience in which such distinctions do not obtain. Can there be, he asks, a pain that is felt by no one? Can there be knowledge, or even anything faintly resembling knowledge, unless there be something known and some one who knows that something? His experience at every moment seems to fortify him in this position. He looks at the pen which he holds in his hand, feels it, is sure that he knows it, and that it is he that knows it. The pen seems capable of existing by itself, but surely it cannot know itself. It appears too immediately evident to call for proof that every act of knowledge requires the two participants, the knower and the known. When he suffers, he is convinced that he feels the pain, and he knows that he and the pain are not identical. He regards it as quite impossible to doubt the reality of such experiences, which repeat themselves everywhere in his mental life, and he listens with some impatience to any argument which seems gratuitously to cast doubt upon their reality. That men actually do have such experiences as those cited it would be folly to deny, and something may be said for the plain man who turns a deaf ear to the metaphysician, charm he never so wisely. We do know objects, and in the act of knowing, if we think about the matter at all, we are conscious of distinguishing between the knower and the objects known. One can have no legitimate quarrel with this experience, in itself considered, nor is it reasonable to attempt to explain it away. The only reasonable thing to do is to try to analyze it, and to indicate clearly just what elements it contains; in other words, to show plainly what the experience really is. That one may have experiences without being able to analyze them successfully, and that most men make little attempt to analyze their experiences, is matter of common observation. An experience unanalyzed is only half possessed, and may easily give rise to serious misconceptions. It needs but little reflection to convince the man who feels so sure of the existence of the knowing self, of the object known, and of the activity exercised by the former, that there is much in his experience that is vague and indefinite. Some distinctions he readily makes which are not made by the child. For example, where it never occurs to the child to define in any way what he means by the self, the unavoidable half-conscious reflection to which one is impelled by everyday life leads the man to, at least, a dim consciousness of what is to be included under this name and what is to be excluded. The child does not distinguish between mind and body; the self is a something vaguely distinguished from other objects, and in it the body stands out as the most prominent element, but there is no conscious distinction between the bodily self and the mental, with the consequent recognition of the latter as the true self which knows and acts upon things, and from which all other things, including the body, must be distinguished. To the man these distinctions have become more or less familiar. Vague and indefinite as his ideas are, he has arrived at somewhat the same way of looking at things as that adopted by the psychologist; and, indeed, it is not unreasonable to regard his view of the mind and the external world as constituting the beginnings of a science of psychology. He believes that he has a mind, though he has no very clear notion of what it is. He believes that this mind is intimately related to his body, which is a thing outside of his mind. He believes that through this body it is related to an external real world, from which it receives influences and which it can influence in return. In this |