Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/360

346 A. K. ROGRES : the peculiar nature of the knowing experience itself, to the exclusion of any reference beyond itself ; and so when I attempt to say anything about an experience, e.i/., that a certain objective experience was in reality mine, I am told that this recognition is a quite new fact of experience, and that this new fact it is which is subjective, not the former one. 1 But to this the answer is, that when I say the former experience was mine, I am talking of the former experience in its own existence not of the later experience which knows and interprets it. And if I am not doing this, then, as I say, I may be able to act, but any theory is impossible, for I am shut up just to the present experience, and my apparent knowledge of anything besides, including the past experi- ences whose actual past existence is a necessity to give meaning to a theory which is based on them, is a delusion. If this be so, Subjective Idealism is abandoned, and Absolute Idealism is assumed. The essence of Subjective Idealism is that the subjective consciousness, or mind, which remains after the objective world has been subtracted, is that for which all this objective world exists. Were this not so were it admitted that this subjective mind, and the objective matter are both but rli'iin iita ii'ithin, and both exists only I'm' roiixrivun- ness we should be in the sphere of an eternal, absolute consciousness whose partial realisation both the individual subject and the external world are," MIND, vol xi., p. 11. It seems to me that we have escaped from Subjective Idealism only by defining that theory in a way which is wholly different from what is ordinarily meant by it. If, by myself, and my experience, I mean only the special and limited class of experiences in which there is present a distinct recognition of something as a part of my life, then it is true that experience contains more than the me. But I deny entirely that this is what we do mean. When I declare that an objective experience was mine, I mean just what I say that the actual objective experience, in its own existence, was a part of my life, without any reference what- ever to this new experience of knowing it. There is no difficulty in this if we distinguish between what is psychologically subjective i.e., certain phases of the psychological experience in which my knowledge is dealing with my own life ; and what is metaphysically subjective i.e.. certain experiences, both subjective and objective iii the psychological sense, which form the unity of a life history, and as such exclude other objects of our knowledge. Prof. Dewey assumes that the psychological is the only valid meaning, but this is not something to be assumed, but proved. To say that this inner experience in the larger sense cannot be distinguished from our consciousness of the world (Caird, Kant, vol. i., p. 646) is either false or irrelevant. It is true that it is not separate from inu- consciousness (better, knowledge) of the world; it is, however, distinct from the trorld, and to deny that it is so is to identify the world vith our consciousness, and so to escape from Subjective Idealism only in name. 1 " The want of knowing, like every other, must take place beftn interpretation, and therefore the relation of the subject and object is prior to the distinction between them which the process of interpretation brings to light," Jones, Lotze, p. 108.