Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/67

IV. PRESENTATION AND REPRESENTATION. BY HENRY KUTGERS MARSHALL. Sec. 1. No careful reader of the works of modern philo- sophers and psychologists can be unfamiliar with the notion that each presentation is new and unique. Thus we read in Mr. Shad worth Hodgson's Metaphysic of Experience 1 : "It is a mere common blunder, caused by looseness of common- sense thought, to suppose that one and the same experience is ever recalled or repeated. A numerical identity of two experiences, one past and the other present, is a self-contra- diction : an event of any kind once gone is gone for ever. But neither is their identity in point of content complete. Simi- larity of content, between two or more experiences, so great as to render them indistinguishable except by the place which, )wing to their context, they are perceived to occupy in a single series of experiences, is the utmost that can be meant by calling them identical." So we find Dr. William James 2 holding that " no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before. Every thought we have of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears a resem- blance of kind with our other thoughts of the same fact. When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle, ap- prehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared." Few psychologists to-day would fail to agree to the truth )f these assertions, but, as will presently appear, there is no general acknowledgment of a thesis which is a corollary of these statements ; viz., that in its very nature each presenta- tion to a given Self in each moment is necessarily a new form of presentation. Sec. 2. This view is strongly corroborated if we agree that there is a thoroughgoing correspondence between our 1 Vol. i., p. 166. 2 Psychology, i., p. 230 ff.