or acquaintance, or awareness, between the subject, “an entity which is acquainted with something,” and the object, “any entity with which something is acquainted” (p. 438. Cf.p. 1). But nothing can be known about the subject-term of this relation. ”Subjects,” he says (p. 441), “are not given in acquaintance’; nothing can be known as to their intrinsic nature; “they are known merely as referents for the relation of acquaintance … and other psychical relations.”
For this conclusion Mr. Russell argues almost exclusively by reference to “Hume’s inability to perceive himself “supplemented by the observation,” I think most unprejudiced observers would agree” (p. 440). It is very difficult to treat this argument seriously. If Mr. Russell is really concerned to eliminate the self from knowledge he should certainly take into account Kant’s Third Antinomy and Transcendental Deduction of the Categories as well as Part IV of Hume’s Treatise, Book I. He should analyze the full implication of ‘knowing the subject’ at all, even as mere ‘referent.’ He should explain the difference, on which, in his argument against neutral monism, he so strongly insists, between A’s experience and B’s experience. Finally, he should endeavor in concrete cases to reduce to mere ‘referent’ the ‘I’ which he so constantly invokes, as, for example, in the statement: ”Memory makes us call past experiences ours. When we can remember experiencing something we include the remembered experiencing with our present experience as part of one person's experience.” By this statement, Russell certainly is assuming that ‘I am the same at one time and at another’ and thus no mere referent; and he makes the same tacit implication of a really experienced ‘I’ in the attempt to explain “a certain unity important to realize but hard to analyze in ‘my present experience’” by defining ‘I’ and ‘now’ in terms of ‘my present experience’[1] (pp. 5–6). The truth is that Mr. Russell, though an expert logician and often a good (if amateur) psychologist, does not always distinguish between logical validity and actual experience. No formal difficulty is involved in treating the subject as a referent and in regarding consciousness as a relation distinct from the subject. But, inconvenient as the fact may be from the standpoint of the logical formula, consciousness as actually experienced and as normally described is a self being conscious.
- ↑ Italics mine.
