Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/380

366 E. E. c. JONES : theory which now appears to be as much a blunder as it has been found to be a hindrance. It has been as embarrassing to the psychologist as to the naturalist, making the question of the relation between body and mind hopelessly perplexing to the naturalist, and that of the perception of an external world equally baffling to the psychologist. To trace home and unmask a view so worked into past and current thought, so generally accepted without question, so embodied in the very vocabulary which the critic has to use, was an enterprise requiring extraordinary insight, patience and courage. It will probably prove to have cleared out of the way many confusions of thought. Part iv. takes up afresh the examination of the theory that ' ' if we are to exhibit the sum of things from the beginning and connect each to each completely, we must start from matter and motion " (ii., 99), but it now approaches the question from the formal or more general side, and proceeds to inquire expressly into the nature and assumptions of knowledge. We turn to actual experience, and endeavour by reflexion upon it to escape from the perplexities of Dualism and that Agnostic Monism or Eevised Materialism which those perplexities have brought into fashion (ii. viii.). When we analyse experience, what we do find is not a Dualism of Matter and Mind, but a duality in unity of Sub- ject and Object. And Experience does not begin with a disconnected manifold, but in every concrete experience, as there is one Subject so there is one Object ; " the Subject is continually in touch with one world, one environment, . . . given a subject or centre of experience, and such an objective complement ; then the most salient feature is their inter- action : the feelings that objective changes induce in the Subject and the Actions to which such feelings lead ". Our difficulty in this investigation is that the relation between Subject and Object in Experience is fundamental and ulti- mate. " To enounce," says Dr. Ward, " that Experience is a whole or more precisely a continuity, that it consists in the correlation of Subject and Object as its universal factors, is a statement that seems to tamper with no facts and to involve no hypotheses " (ii., 130). It is further maintained that every concrete experience is self-conservation, is Life that subjective selection is deter- mined rather by the ' worth ' than by the ' content ' of objects, by their value and interest to the Subject, than by their intrinsic characteristics, that Conation is more funda- mental than Cognition, and that even spatial and temporal relations involve elements due to activity initiated by feeling.