Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/389

BRIEF CRITIQUE OF " PSYCHO-PHYSICAL PARALLELISM ". 375 with the laws of its development, perceptions and apperceptions of things the visible or felt parts of the body included and states of self-consciousness are alike experienced as connected together. Nor is this connexion simply temporal, a sequence of time merely. It is true that the different items of the one experience do, in fact and as actually experienced, follow each other in time. They exist in the " stream of consciousness " as a sequence. This is true. But it is also just as true that they appear in consciousness as connected in what is irresistibly believed to be a dynamical way. Certain feelings of activity or passivity, certain conations and so-called deeds of will, are essential elements of some of these experiences. Nay ; it may the rather be claimed that such feelings and conations are inseparable from every state of consciousness. It is these, chiefly if not wholly, which give to the reality of our experience the appearance and, as I believe, the experienced fact of a dynamical connexion existing between certain items of this experience. I am not now dealing with the explanation of this apparent dynamical connexion ; nor am I attempting the detailed introspective or experimental analysis of the experience of it. I am only stating the fact that the different items of experience appear connected, within the unity of the conscious life, in a dynamical way. 2. Just as patent as the fact of this temporal and dynamical connexion of the different items in the one so-called "stream of consciousness " is the fact of a certain diremption of the experienced phenomena by the activity of discriminating consciousness. The phenomena actually become divided ; and the act of division is both a condition and also a product of the growth of intellect. Two great classes of the phenomena come to be distinguished. These are the phenomena assigned to things as their subject, and the phenomena assigned to the Self. And this distinction, so far as it rests upon data of experience, is not confused, but the rather con- firmed by the fact that certain of the psychoses come to occupy a rather unique position in the sum-total of experience. Their very nature is such that for certain purposes of classification the dis- criminating consciousness of the individual may set them in a sort of opposition to the Ego and speak of them as belonging rather to the body ; while for other purposes it may feel inclined and entitled to regard them as part of the same Self. Thus, in some sort and to some extent, all adult intellectual development regards the body as not identical with the Ego but, the rather, as the body of the self. There is, of course, no time in this connexion to estimate the meaning and the value of this diremption of the one experience and the resulting classification of the phenomena ; or to defend it against the attempts made to minimise its importance in view of recent investigations in the fields of comparative, genetic, or abnormal psychology. The distinction, however it arose, exists as the one unchanging test of soundness of intellect. It is essential to in-