Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/582

ME. F. H. BKADKEY'S ANALYSIS OF MIND. 569 before (No. 45, p. 62), viz., that a machine is not itself a motive power. Then, if he rejected the distinctions just mentioned, I should ask him to explain how he conceives the relation of ex- perience, whether poor or rich, that is no one's experience to the machinery that divides it into somebody and what somebody experiences. If he accepted these distinctions, I should propose to recast the question, which, as it stands, is ambiguous. " What is the content of the subject at the start ? " I should take to refer to the psychologist's conception of the subject as esse reale, and I should reply : The subject is, at first as always, that which lives, which thinks and feels and acts, which attends to and is pleased or pained by its sensations and movements. The question : By what machinery does experience at the beginning divide itself into two related parts, subjective and objective ? would also require emendation. Experience does not divide itself, but is so divided because of the interest of the subject in certain presentations and in certain relations of presentations. If we could imagine a subject incapable of pleasure or pain, but otherwise passing through the same ex- periences as ourselves and provided with the same machinery of " regularities, redintegration, blending," &c., it is difficult to see how the differentiation of subject-experience and object-experi- ence could ever begin. How it has begun and developed for a subject that feels and that acts under the prompting of feeling is a question Mr. Bradley deals with himself (pp. 368 ft'.). Here in the main we agree, 1 except of course that Mr. Bradley thinks he has disencumbered himself of the difference between the esse reale and esse intentionale of the subject. But where this diffe- rence is itself in question, to argue that at the outset there is no subject because "for the soul" there is then no distinction of self and not-self, might be characterised as Ignoratio Elenclii, Contradictio in Adjecto, or Petitio Principii, according to the reader's taste. In keeping with this rejection of a subject that acts and feels is Mr. Bradley's further doctrine that activity, as well as feeling, is a mere presentation. Wundt's theory of apperception he holds beneath contempt, and the present use of the term " activity " is, he insists, " little better than a scandal and a main obstacle in the path of English psychology ". I should have thought the chief obstacle in the way of English psychology had been its neglect of psychical activity, and the chief merit of psychology in Germany had been essentially that very doctrine of appercep- tion which, as developed by Wundt, Mr. Bradley is loath to criticise. He demands a definition of activity, and offers one of his own. For my part, I doubt if activity can be defined in terms that do not already imply it. Mr. Bradley's definition (p. 371 Jin.) is so far from clear to me that I am driven to suspect some 1 Cp. Ency. Brit., art. " Psychology," pp. 84 ff. 37