he practically equates the self with the brain. As the brain is an agent that reacts upon its environment and yet at the same time is an object existing in space, it very conveniently combines his two conflicting views of the self—as subject or character when it is felt as active and as self or content when it is experienced as object. In this way he is enabled in the Kritik to adopt, from a physiological point of view, that subjective and active standpoint which in his Menschliche Weltbegriff he by implication entirely negates.
Throughout the whole discussion the vagueness of the term experience stands him in good stead. Sometimes it means experiencing and at other times the experienced, the latter meaning being emphasised when the nature of the self is in question. These two meanings of the term experience practically coincide with his important distinction between the absolute and the relative standpoints; and these two points of view are not in his philosophy really reconciled. For when he allows as legitimate the demand that experience be ideally completed in thought, he makes an admission which he cannot successfully combine with his assertion that nothing exists save in relation to the self. The ideal completion of given reality which results from the analysis of material bodies into elements which no human senses can apprehend, or from following the earth back to a time when no human being existed upon it, is, strictly, not a completion of experience but only of what is experienced. It completes only one of the two aspects which Avenarius has asserted to be inseparable. It leads us not only to what has not been experienced but to what can never by any possibility be experienced by beings like ourselves. But here again the ambiguities of the term experience come to Avenarius’ rescue. He argues that thought is as genuine a form of experience as sense-perception, and so in the end falls back on the timeworn argument of subjective idealism, that thought and reality are inseparable, because reality can only be conceived in thought, and thought involves the presence of the thinker.[1] Not, therefore, any original and profound re-establishment of realism, but only the restatement in its crudest form of the familiar position of subjective idealism is the final outcome of Avenarius’ positive speculations. He entirely fails to solve
- ↑ Der Menschliche Weltbegriff, Anmerkung 58, § xiv.; Vierteljahrsschrift, vol. xix., “Bemerkungen,” note 2 to p. 144. Avenarius’ statement of the same argument in materialistic terms (resulting from his equation of the self with the brain) in the “Bemerkungen” (Vierteljahrsschrift, vol. xix., pp. 136-143, §§ 176-188) is significant of the opposite, and conflicting, trend of his system. Its idealism is in conflict with the underlying materialism.
