Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/75

THE DISTINCTION OF INNER AND OUTER EXPERIENCE. 61 Beyond doubt intersubjective intercourse has been necessary to develop a distinction which implies conceptual thinking. But the part in introjection assigned to an " involuntary error " due to common thought and language is hardly intelligible and appears to be superfluous. Evidently some psychical growth is presupposed in the act of interpretation by which common thought places the thoughts and percep- tions of another within him. The process of inreading would be meaningless unless each individual had already some key to it in his own experience. 1 Generalised experience implies a society, but it is not credible that men in society elaborated a distinction which did not somehow rest upon and appeal to the life-history of individuals. What facts then led to the historical genesis of this dis- tinction? One of the earliest would be the distinction of the body from surrounding objects. The beginnings of this separation take us back to the animal world. An animal would have no chance of survival in the struggle for exist- ence if it did not note the difference between visual changes due to movement on its own part and those due to move- ment on the part of the object. 2 But man might have consciously differentiated his body from surrounding ob- jects without recognising a soul or life within the body. The phenomena of sleep and dreams must have decisively contributed to this further result. In the lower culture dreams are regarded as real occurrences, and are attributed to a second or shadowy self within, which can leave the body and return to it. In giving clearness to, and in mark- ing off, the experiences of this inner self no doubt the utterances and testimony of other individuals were highly important. Then the voice and the breath coming from within seemed a witness of the reality of the soul in the eyes of primitive men. 3 When conceptual thinking had given some fixity and generality to the notion of a soul, we may conjecture that the phenomena of error and illusion facts which must have been soon noted because practically so important were treated in the same way as dreams and attributed to the inner self which of course was still con- ceived in a material way. A conscious contrast between 1 A similar objection is urged against Avenarius's view of introjection by W. Jerusalem, in his suggestive book, Die Urtheilsfunction, vide p. 245. 2 Stout, Manual of Psychology, p. 323. 3 There seem to be reminiscences of ancient beliefs about respiration in the Ionic school. Anaximenes, for example, supposes the soul to be com- posed of air, TJ fywxr) (pT)(riv, f) fffjierepa dr)p ovaa (rvyKparel 77/1x09 (Hitter and Preller, 20). Heraclitus speaks of it as a bright exhalation, d