Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/27

16 J. DEWEY : perience. It was only as it was asserted to be the whole that any ground was found for subjective idealism ; but only as it was regarded as a remainder left over from subtraction of the object world does it correspond to actual experience. Now you have yourself fallen into precisely this contradic- tion. You do but state that the individual consciousness is and is not the universal consciousness. Only so far as it is not, do you escape subjective idealism ; only so far as it is, do you escape the thing-in-itself. If this universal conscious- ness is not for our individual consciousness, if it is not a part of our conscious experience, it is unknowable, a thing-in- itself. But if it be a part of our individual consciousness, then after all the individual consciousness is the ultimate. By your own argument you have no choice except between the acceptance of an unknowable unrelated reality or of subjective idealism.' This objection amounts to the following disjunction : Either the universal consciousness is the individual and we have subjective idealism ; or, it is something beyond the individual consciousness, and we have a thing-in-itself. Now this dilemma looks somewhat formidable, yet its statement shows that the objector has not yet put himself upon the psychological ground : there is something of the old ' ontological ' man left in him yet, for it assumes that he has, prior to its determination by Psychology, an ade- quate idea of what ' individual ' is and means. If he will take the psychological standpoint, he will see that the nature of the individual as well as of the universal must be determined within arid through conscious experience. And if this is so, all ground for the disjunction falls ;r.vay at once. This disjunction rests upon the supposition that the individual and the universal consciousness are something opposed to each other. If one were to assert that the mean- ing of the individual consciousness is that it is universal, the whole objection loses not only its ground but its meaning ; it becomes nonsense. But I am not concerned just at present to state this; I am concerned only to point out that, if one starts with a presupposition regarding the nature of the individual consciousness, one is leaving the psychological standpoint. In forming the parallel between the position attributed to the writer and that of subjective idealism, the supposed objector was building wiser than perhaps he knew. The trouble with the latter view is that it supposes that c sciousness may be divided into " two kinds," one subjective, the other objective; that it presupposes, at the start, the nature of subject and object. The fact of the case is that, since