The change which I have more particularly in view is that which takes place in sensible intervals of time ; and the result on which I wish to lay stress is this, that no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before. Let us begin with Mr. Shadworth Hodgson's description :
"I go straight to the facts, without saying I go to perception, or sensation, or thought, or any special mode at all. What I find when I look at my consciousness at all is that what I cannot divest myself of, or not have in consciousness, if I have any consciousness at all, is a sequence of different feelings. I may shut my eyes and keep perfectly still, and try not to contribute anything of my own will ; but whether I think or do not think, whether I perceive external things or not, I always have a succession of different feelings. Anything else that I may have also, of a more special character, comes in as parts of this suc- cession. Not to have the succession of different feelings is not to be conscious at all. . . . The chain of consciousness is a sequence of differents."[1]
Such a description as this can awaken no possible pro- test from any one. We all recognize as different great classes of our conscious states. Now we are seeing, now hearing ; now reasoning, now willing ; now recollecting, now expecting ; now loving, now hating ; and in a hundred other ways we know our minds to be alternately engaged. But all these are complex states. The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity ; and in psychological science we have the celebrated 'theory of ideas' which, admitting the great difference among each other of what may be called concrete conditions of mind, seeks to show how this is all the resultant effect of variations in the com- bination of certain simple elements of consciousness that always remain the same. These mental atoms or molecules are what Locke called 'simple ideas.' Some of Locke's successors made out that the only simple ideas were the sensations strictly so called. Which ideas the simple ones may be does not, however, now concern us. It is enough that certain philosophers have thought they could see under the dissolving-view-appearance of the mind elemen- tary facts of any sort that remained unchanged amid the flow.
- ↑ The Philosophy of Reflection, I. 248, 290.
