removed from my own experience than the hypothesis itself. And, since the content of my assumption is the matter of another individual’s experience, though the hypothesis introduces a duality or plurality, it does not cause a dualism in the philosophical sense. Nothing is assumed which is not or cannot be experienced either by myself or by others.
The proof that the natural consciousness involves no dualism demands, however, a fuller analysis of its various elements. The first distinction which Avenarius notes is that between things and thoughts.[1] Here, again, there is duality but no dualism. The portrait of a friend which is before me is comparable with the appearance of my friend which I recall in thought. I can note that the features, etc., are the same or different, and can state the outcome of the comparison as similarity or the reverse. If we interpolate the image between thing and thought we have a series the members of which are comparable with one another. And being, as the natural consciousness admits, thus relatively comparable with one another, there cannot exist that absolute heterogeneity between thoughts and things which some philosophers have asserted. The chief difference between them is, indeed, merely one of time. The sense-experience of, say, a tree, is a first experience; the tree as it reappears in thought or image is a second experience. Were the two absolutely different experiences we could no longer speak of the image as the reappearance of the original experience, and yet at the same time we should have to make it dependent for its occurrence on what, as absolutely different from it, could never account for it.
Avenarius’ next distinction is between what he names the absolute and the relative points of view.[2] Both may be adopted without desertion of pure experience. In the absolute point of view the self is left out of account, the parts of the environment being apprehended in and for themselves. A tree, for instance, is then apprehended as existing in space in definite relations to other things, as changing with the seasons, and as being in all these relations and changes independent of the presence of the self. It may even be known as having been planted before the self was born. The world thus experienced is apprehended as having a past that survives itself in thought and a future that anticipates itself in
