tion of distance, in the perception of far-away objects;[1] third, the fact that ”in selective attention what physically is, psychically is not”;[2] fourth, the effectiveness of the future event in purposed action;[3] finally, the ”self-continuing” aspect of pleasure[4] and the self-checking tendency of pain.[5] The first three of these are “incompatibilities of cognition” from which Sheldon derives the conception of mind as “a unity both inclusive and exclusive, or preferential.” From the incompatibilities of affection–conation he argues that mind possesses “an organic systematic character that makes [it] into an independent agent.“[6] For he rightly insists that ”there are no impersonal bits of consciousness,” that ”there is no consciousness that has not selfhood”;[7] and he stresses over and over again “that individuality which constitutes a self.”[8] His general conclusion is that “materialism, conceived in exclusive terms, denying unique spiritual being, is false.”[9]
But at this point Sheldon’s argument makes a sharp turn. He reminds us that the mind “occupies space and time,” that “it acts upon the external world,” that “it resides in living organisms and extends itself far beyond the limits of those organisms, without losing its place in the latter.”[10] The student of philosophy will recognize this as little other than Henry More’s conception of the extendedness of spirit. But Sheldon, so far from concluding that extension is spiritual, teaches explicitly that “mind is material, because it displays all the positive attributes of matter,” that while “dualism is right in declaring that mind as compared with the matter of our sense-world is unique; dualism and spiritualism are quite wrong … when they deny materiality and substantiality to mind.”[11] And he enlarges this initial doctrine of mind as “material” by a hypothetical conception of matter in a new sense. “There might be,” he says, “a kind of body which … would be material because it offers resistance and possesses inertia’? which would yet “have one surface in two places at once”; and “there might well be atoms,” unlike those “which the evidence of sense observation leads us to believe in … equally material, because equally potent
