Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/51

A DEFENCE OP PHENOMENALISM IN PSYCHOLOGY. 37 then on the other side I would urge that the disease could have no possible remedy. The idea of a self or Ego joining together from the outside the atomic elements, and fastening them together in some miraculous way not involved in their own nature, is quite indefensible. It would be the addition of one more discrete to the former chaos of discretes, and it would still leave them all discrete. The idea of anything being made wholly from the outside into something else, whether by an Ego or by God Almighty, seems in short utterly irrational. '2. And as phenomena are not discrete, so phenomena are certainly not all objects. 1 This is another mistake, or in some cases it is another aspect of the same fundamental error. If all phenomena were objects or mere perceptions, and were confined to what in any sense is before the mind, then of course phenomenalism would be untenable. So understood it becomes a gross error which, if not now in principle exploded, will I imagine never be exploded, and far from maintaining phenomenalism in this sense, I consider it a thing with which one need hardly trouble oneself. But really phenomena are not all perceptions, they are not all objects given to a self, they do not all come before the mind, and to regard them so is, I venture to think, a radical mis- take. And this mistake is, I venture also to think, very hurtful and a serious obstacle, wherever it exists, in the path of psychology. I will state the doctrine briefly, or I will rather state the manner in which I am forced to understand or per- haps to misunderstand it. We have (according to this view) on one side the experi- enced, and that, if for the moment we disregard pleasure and 1 If "object" were understood in abstraction as mere object then we may say that in strictness no psychical phenomenon would be an object. But this point need not be considered here. If I am asked what we are to call the experienced so far as it is not the object of a perception or cog- nition, I should say that the words " feeling " and " to feel " are obviously BOggested. If we take the words in this sense we follow both the common usage and the literary associations of the English language. We violate both of these if we try to confine feeling to mere pleasure or pain, and a violation of this kind in the end must produce confusion. I think it was certainly ill-judged when instead of " feeling " I used ' presentation ' (MlND, No. 47), for that term tends, I presume, to suggest the presentation of an object. In fact, in MIND, No. 48, a laboured criticism of many pages was produced mainly to show that, presentation being so understood, what I had written was something like nonsense. If, ou that understanding, it hid not been nonsense, this would have been certainly something like a miracle, and certainly nothing to my credit. But in the present unsettled state of our terminology to assume of any writer that he uses words in the sense which we think the proper one, seems likely to lead to waste of time.