Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/25

14 J. DEWEY : is the whole of our conscious experience, including both subject and object world, is that the term Mind is used in two entirely different senses in the two cases. In the first it must be individual mind, or consciousness, and in the second it must be absolute mind or consciousness, for and in which alone the individual or subject consciousness and the external world or object consciousness exist and get their reality. The root of the whole difficulty is this. It is the business of Psychology to take the whole of conscious experience for its scope. It is its business to determine within this whole what the nature of subject and object are. Now Subjective Idealism identifies at the outset, as may be seen in the passages quoted, subject with "Mind," "Ego" and object with "Matter," " Non-Ego" "External World," and then goes on to hold that the ' scope ' of Psychology is the former only. In short, the psychological standpoint, according to which the nature of subject and object was to be determined from the nature of conscious experience, was abandoned at the outset. It is presumed that we already know what the " subject " is, and Psychology is confined to treatment of that. It is assumed that we know already what the ' object ' is, and Psychology is defined by its elimination. This method, as psychology, has two vices. It is ' ontological,' for it sets up some external test to fix upon the nature of subject and object ; and it is arbitrary, for it dogmatically presupposes the limitation of Psychology to a series of subjective sta It assumes that Psychology instead of being the criterion of all, has some outside criterion from which its own place and subject-matter is determined, and more specifically, -it (/**// mr* that tin; xtn<1i>oint of Psychology v'.s ncci'^iii'ili/ intJlriiluitl. ,,r sub- jective. Why should we be told that the scope of Psychol is subject consciousness, and subject consciousness be defined as the totality of conscious experience minus the object world, unless there is presupposed a knowledge of what subject and object are? How different is the method of the true psychological standpoint! It shows how subject and object arise within conscious experience, and th by develops the nature of consciousness. It shows it to be the unity of subject and object. It shows therefore, that there cannot be "two kinds" of consciousness, one subject, the other object, but that all consciousness whether of " Mind," or of " Matter" is, since consciousness, the unity of subject and object. Consciousness may, and undoubtedly does, have two aspects one, aspect in which it appears as an individual, and another in which it appears