Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/63

50 j. WAED : objects or contents of his consciousness conscious states or states of consciousness. Further, although at the outset Prof. Bain has distinguished Feelings as made up of states from Intellect which consists of poivers, yet he passes by an easy transition from discrimination to a " consciousness of difference," and then to a "feeling of difference"; by similar stages his second intellectual function becomes "the con- scious state arising from agreement in the midst of differ- ence " (pp. 82, 83). Nobody confounds painting with pictures or singing with songs, yet here we have just such a confusion of the activity implied in consciousness with the objects or products of that activity. Nay, in some sort the case is even worse. When we are told that as intellectual the mind discriminates, we expect to find that, apart from this activity, the "states" of which it is conscious are not discriminated. But presently we see the tables turned : the function seems now to belong to the " states," and not to whatever is conscious of the states : the singing arises from the song, and not" the song from the singing. True, intellect is not creative, but only, as the word implies, selective : it can only differentiate where there is difference and assimilate where there is similarity. Every process presupposes appro- priate material ; but the process is more than the material for all that. Here we have process, material and product continually confused, because all alike are styled states of consciousness. Nothing hides so effectually as familiarity : once committed to this one term, therefore, it is small wonder if the constant element, the activity implied in ' conscious,' the * I think ' which, as Kant said, must be conceived as accompanying all- my presentations, should drop out of sight, and the relations established among pre- sentations should come to be regarded as the direct outcome of their interaction. We are then at the other pole. In place of a subject conserving or retaining its presentations, we have these, under certain circumstances, " tending to grow together or cohere" (p. 85); and instead of this subject comparing its presentations and connecting them, we have these, whenever they recur, " tending to revive their like among previously occurring states " (p. 127). In his doctrine of the Will Prof. Bain advances if any- thing still more upon his predecessors : e.g., in singling out movements as a characteristic class of presentations, in emphasising the connexion of movement with feeling, and tracing the growth of voluntary power step by step as idea- tion advances. For all that, there seems here also the same inevitable confusion due to an inexact terminology and an