Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/28

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL STANDPOINT. 17 consciousness is the unity of subject and object, there is no purely subjective or purely objective. So here. It is pre- supposed that there are " two kinds " of consciousness, one individual, the other universal. And the fact will be found to be, I imagine, that consciousness is the unity of the individual and the universal ; that there is no purely individual or purely universal. So the disjunction made is meaningless. But however that may be, at all events it leaves the psychological basis, for it assumes that the nature of the individual is already known. This has been said that it may be borne in mind from the outset that Psychology must determine within consciousness the nature of the individual and the universal consciousness, thereby determining at once their place within experience, and explicating the nature of consciousness itself. And this, stated in plain terms, means simply that, since consciousness does show the origin of individual and universal conscious- ness within itself, consciousness is therefore both universal and individual. How this is, the present article, of course, does not undertake to say. Its more modest function is simply to point out that it is the business of psychology to show the nature of the individual and the universal and of the relation existing between them. These must not be presupposed, and then imported bodily to determine the nature of psychologic experience. There has now been rendered explicit what was implied concerning the psycholo- gical standpoint from the first, viz., that it is a universal standpoint. If the nature of all objects of philosophical in- quiry is to be determined from fixing their place within con- scious experience, then there is no criterion outside of or beyond or behind just consciousness itself. To adopt the psychological standpoint is to assume that consciousness it- self is the only possible absolute. And this is tacitly assumed all the while by subjective idealism. The most obvious ob- jection to subjective idealism is, of course, that it presupposes that, if " mind were to become extinct, the annihilation of matter, space, time would result". And the equally obvious reply of subjective idealism is : " My conception of the universe even though death may have overtaken all its inhabi- tants, would not be an independent reality, I should merely take on the object-consciousness of a supposed mind then present" (Bain, p. 682). In short, the reality of the external world, though I should imagine all finite minds destroyed, would be that I cannot imagine consciousness destroyed. As soon as I imagine an external world, I imagine a consciousness in relation to which it exists. One may put the objection 2