Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/246

232 CRITICAL NOTICES: the unwearied appeal to the concrete, and much else, must be omitted. It takes the form of an inquiry into what is meant by "a real thing," and begins with the classic point of departure, "this table before me". "When I speak thus, I am not talking about a little copy of such a table in, or somehow connected with, my brain a representative, which is unlike the real table, but in some inconceivable way stands for it. ... The real external table is, then, a something in our experience. It is given in conscious- ness. When we have said this we have, to be sure, ruled out a possible source of error." But " if we simply maintain that the table of which we are speaking is, since it exists in consciousness, a state of consciousness or part of such a state, and rest content with that statement, we seem to obliterate completely the useful distinction between things and our ideas of things ". The table is more than this one experience of colour-sensations which is all I have of it in sensation at the moment ; it has a wealth of character besides. And the other elements of experience that appertain to its character, even some that are necessary to the very conception of " a table," have at the moment that I perceive it not the quality of sense but the quality of imagination. Psychologically viewed, the sensible table-characteristics and the imagined are thus different. Viewed as table-characteristics they are on the same footing. More- over, when I withdraw beyond reach or sight of the table, not only some but all of its characteristics have the quality of imagination and not of sense ; yet, despite the change in it as a mental phe- nomenon, as a table it remains unchanged. Evidently we have a trained disposition to ignore the psychic transformation ; that is, when we are considering the things, and not our own situation. " So little does it appear to be necessary to mark this distinction when one is discussing real things, that most persons experience an emo- tion of surprise when it is pointed out to them that their conscious- ness of things is largely made up of imaginary elements. They are interested in things, not in their percepts as percepts." When percepts become imaginations we " pay no attention to the fact that they are in themselves to be differentiated from sensations. The qualities of things, as we call such elements of our experience as are conceived to have a place in" the physical system, "are not conceived as existing now in the sense and now in the imagination ; they are simply regarded as forming a constituent part of that system ". " It is their content, so to speak, which belongs to the construction, not the content with the added characteristic of be- longing to the class called imaginary." Prof. Fullerton does not mean of course that we can extract the content from its imaginal embodiment, any more than we can extricate a picture from its oils ; only that we base no action and no thought, in such moments, on the circumstance that the content appears in the guise of imag- ination and not of sense. This seems what is meant by saying that " we abstract from the degree of vividness with which [it] may happen to appear in consciousness '.