Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/596

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574 GREAT BRITAIN' AND AMERICA. but tacit or occasional recognition of the environment, psychology has to do neither with the internal connec- tion nor the external connection, but " the connection between these two connections." Psychology in its sub- jective aspect, again, is a field entirely siii generis. The substance of mind, conceived as the underlying substratum of mental states, is unknowable ; but the character of those states of which mind, as we know it, is composed, is a legitimate subject of inquiry. If this be carefully investi- gated, it seems highly probable that the ultimate unit of consciousness is something " of the same order as that which we call a nervous shock." Mind is proximately composed of feelings and the relations between feelings ; from these, revived, associated, and integrated, the whole fabric of consciousness is built up. There is, then, no sharp distinction between the several phases of mind. If we trace its development objectively, in terms of the corre- spondence between inner and outer phenomena, we find a gradual progress from the less to the more complex, from the lower to the higher, without a break. Reflex action, instinct, memory, reason, are simply stages in the process. All is dependent on experience. Even the forms of knowl- edge, which are a priori to the individual, are the product of experience in the race, integrated and transmitted by heredity, and become organic in the nervous structure. In general the correspondence of inner and outer in which mental life consists is mediated by the nervous organism. The structure and functions of this condition conscious- ness and furnish the basis for the interpretation of mental evolution in terms of " evolution at large, regarded as a process of physical transformation." Nevertheless mental phenomena and bodily phenomena are not identi- cal, consciousness is not motion. They are both phenom- enal modes of the unknowable, disparate in themselves, and giving no indication of the ultimate nature of the abso- lute. Subjective analysis of human consciousness yields further proof of the unity of mental composition. All mental action is ultimately reducible to " the continuous dif!erentiation and integration of states of consciousness." The criterion of truth is the inconceivability of the nega-