Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/254

PERCEPTION OF CHANGE AND DURATION A REPLY. I MIGHT perhaps consider it simply as a compliment, that the able Editor of MIND should have devoted his Inaugural Address, as newly elected President of the Aristotelian Society (see MIND for January last, pp. 1-7), to discredit, though without naming it, my central doctrine of Eeflective Perception, a doctrine which is destined, in my opinion, to render obsolete the hitherto prevailing method in psychological thought, I mean the method of taking consciousness and its supposed immaterial Subject together, un- distinguished from each other, and examining them as together distributed into various mental functions, or functions of the mind. And as a compliment perhaps I should have been contented to regard it, could I have forgotten the marked acerbity of the two determined attacks, on Dr. Stout's part, which have preceded the present one, both of them founded, like the present, on misconceptions. That a psychologist habituated, like Dr. Stout, to the prevail- ing method should find it difficult at first to avoid misconceiving my meaning, and so be led into sheer misunderstanding of even the plainest language, was probably inevitable. At the same time the skill of the rhetorical artifice, which he employs in the present address to impart that misunderstanding to others, is, to say the least, remarkable. " I am acquainted," he says, at page 1, "with only one metaphysical writer who has answered these questions " [those relating to former and latter parts of a time- series] " without ambiguity or haziness. Mr. Shadworth Hodg- son, in the wonderfully acute and penetrating analysis contained in the second chapter of his Metaphysic, has defined his position on this point with refreshing clearness. He explicitly affirms that, in perceiving a time sequence, the presentations of prior stages of the sequence must persist in later stages with a difference only in vividness and in time position. Save only in these respects, there is a sameness in point of kind between the presentations as they originally occur and as they are retained in memory." The expression " refreshing clearness " is admirable. It gives readers to understand that Dr. Stout cannot possibly have mis- taken, and therefore has not misstated my meaning. But in reality his statement far outruns the grounds for it in my chapter ii. In the first place he makes no mention of the fact, which I am careful to notice, that I am not speaking of memory proper, but only of memory in the sense of retention, the mere rudiment of memory in the proper and usual sense. And secondly, there is no such ambiguous and apparently sweeping statement, either in that chapter or elsewhere, as that "in perceiving a time sequence, the presentations of prior stages of the sequence must persist in later stages, with a difference only in vividness and in time position ". In chapter ii. I confine myself to the simplest