Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/377

DR. WARD'S REFUTATION OF DHAIJSM. (2) A simultaneous series of psychical changes or processes accompanying them. (3) The relation between (1) and (2), which is assumed to be not a relation of interaction. The only correspondences of the physical series that we know of are correspondences between states and processes of nerve tissue, and states and activities of consciousness, and the view that these are not a relation of interaction, is not due to experts in physiology or psychology, but is a result of accepting the assumptions of the mechanical theory. There would seem to be great difficulty in giving, in definite and precise terms, any parallel account of the psychical series with all its qualitative diversity and quantitative vagueness. And there is the further difficulty that "if this psychical series is to be my experience as it is for me, or yours as it is for you, then all those external perceptions which, arc the physicists' prime data, and all the conceptions whereby they are summarised, belong to it and are the outcome of its processes. 1 So regarded, the}' form a unity ; within this unity we find indeed a duality, that of the correlative subject and object, but we find no dualism of external and internal, physical and psychical, matter and mind. To come within the range of such a dualism and to justify any notion of parallelism, we must leave the properly psychological standpoint of my experience as it is for me, or your experience as it is for you. We must take up instead the standpoint of my experience as it is for you, your experience as it is for me. Then, indeed, as I am for you primarily a portion of the physical world, and you in like manner for me, it becomes natural to locate each one's experience inside his skin, his environment being outside it ; to say that of the chairs and tables, moon and stars, and the rest of this external world he has ideas ; to ask the puzzling question how these ideas are produced or whereabouts inside that skin the thinking thing is ; and finally to take his body to pieces in the hope of answering the question. But this is still not the worst; for once accustomed to speak of one's fellowman's experience as made up of ideas in that man's head, one is led by parity of reasoning to think the same of one's own experience. And there is at least one further source of confusion still, when from concrete experiences in which the individual percipient is plainly recognised, has his name, place and date and his manifold idiosyncrasies, we pass to what is known as the scientific or objective standpoint, where the 1 Italics are mine.