forth the activity of that function. And, if the exercise of the function be in any way dependent on conditions, these can only lie in some characteristics of the perceptions or ideas judged about, and the process becomes a complex instead of a simple one.

Moreover, there is some ground for doubt regarding the description of the primitive judgment to which all others are on this view reduced. The existential judgment is not in itself so clear and unambiguous that we can without hesitation accept it as requiring no further explanation; for it is quite evident that the existence which enters into our various judgments is not always of the same kind. Existence, then, cannot be regarded as a simple unambiguous predicate. It demands a closer analysis to determine what is contained in the supposed assertion of existence. In all probability the ground for insisting on the primitive irreducible character of this asserted existence is the absolute distinction drawn between the contents of the judgment and the reference to objective fact which seems to stand alongside of them. For, if this distinction be made absoluteperhaps I ought to say, be misinterpreted—it is natural to conclude that any specification of the kind of existence must needs be in terms of some content or other which would therefore lie altogether outside of the assertion of existence.

It will be observed that this view to which we seem reduced is the fundamental conception at the root of all forms of Subjective Idealism. It is not necessary to adopt Subjective Idealism by accepting that foundation, for we may add to it, as is done in the theory here considered, the postulate that alongside of the contents there is given a simple irreducible assertion which carries us straightway to the objective. But, the more complete we make the distinction, the more startling and doubtful do we make the

postulate of this simple irreducible assertion of objective reality.

Besides, if we draw the distinction in this way, we are compelled to raise the further question, Whether we are justified in assuming that the analysis we can so readily make of our developed complex judgments-wherein, as we say, there are ideas connected plus some factor of belief or assertion-is an expression of the primitive components of the mental life within which judging and thinking manifest themselves.

We have as much reason for doubt with regard to this as with regard to the cognate distinction in language between the parts of speech and the sentence. In formed speech we make the analysis readily enough, and are all too prone to assume that in fact the sentence, which is the type. of connected speech, is built up out of those components into which we now resolve it. But this is not so. No language is constructed out of original elements precisely corresponding to the separate words into which we may now analyse it. If any result of philological inquiry can be trusted, we are justified in assuming that, in the primitive components of speech, the familiar distinctions, by means of which we break up the developed sentence into its parts, were not present; that the unit of speech resembled far more closely the sentence than the part of the sentence, though in truth it was identical with neither. In a similar fashion we may insist, on psychological grounds, that the sharp distinction we make between the terms of a judgment and the assertion of objective reality is a derivative fact, and does not represent the primitive condition of the simpler mental life.

There is a great deal of abstraction involved in this apparently simple discrimination. It may be quite true that the distinction between a sensation and an idea is irre

1

ducible, primordial, as Mill, for example, contends; and, to all appearance, Brentano's theory was a development from that observation. But, undoubtedly, the distinction does not consist in this, that with the same content there is present in the one and wanting in the other, a simple inexplicable utterance of the function of judgment—an assertion of objective existence. If we do make the abstraction required in order to contemplate isolated sensations and ideas as facts of mind (and such abstraction may really give a very imperfect picture of the actual mental process), we may fairly recognise differences of a quite ultimate or primordial kind without describing them in terms of a really complex act.

To all appearance, then, our discussion now thrusts us back to what may certainly be regarded as a tolerably simple and early stage of consciousness-the apprehension of the objective. It seems to me impossible to form any psychological theory of the judgment except by regarding its several forms as based on the simplest consciousness of the objective in our experience, and as expressing, in their gradual development, the increasing width and richness of the total representation of objective fact which we find in that experience. I assume some such gradation in the range of our

1 See J. S. Mill's edition of James Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, vol. i. pp. 412-3: "What, in short, is the difference to our minds between thinking of a reality, and representing to ourselves an imaginary picture. I confess that I can perceive no escape from the opinion that the distinction is ultimate and primordial. There is no more difficulty in holding it to be so, than in holding the difference between a sensation and an idea to be primordial. It seems almost another

aspect of the same difference." [P. 423: "I cannot help thinking, therefore, that there is in the remembrance of a real fact, as distinguished from that of a thought, an element which does not consist, as the author supposes, in a difference between the mere ideas which are present to the mind in the two cases. This element, howsoever we define it, constitutes Belief, and is the difference between Memory and Imagination. From whatever direction we approach, this difference seems to close our path."]

representation of reality, and I think it probable that we shall be able to make out a connexion between the more concrete forms of that representation and the more abstract -a connexion which will explain to us the ultimate relation, the tendency almost to flow into one another, of the two conceptions 'reality' and 'truth.'

I assume also what I think would readily be granted, that the whole development of this representation of reality is correlated with, and dependent on, the growth in the conscious subject of those experiences-sensations, ideas, and their combinations-wherein his mental life consists. It is to this side that the psychological analysis of thinking has to turn; and its first problem is to determine what combination of experiences in the inner life is required in order to give, in its primitive form, the distinction between subjective and objective. In the absence of such distinction no judgment can possibly have a place in consciousness; for the judgment, whatever else it may involve, has as its characteristic the reference to the objective. We have already seen. that such reference is not to be taken as a simple unchangeable part of the judgment. The 'objective' referred to is a variable quantity; and we cannot and ought not to suppose that what we vaguely call the 'reference' remains entirely unaffected by this alteration in what it concerns.

No thinking then, so far at least as that is expressed in the recognised products of thought, is possible except on the basis of the fundamental discrimination in consciousness "between the subjective and the objective. Now there can be no doubt that, so far as our human experience is concerned, the simplest form of that discrimination concerns solely the difference between sensuous perception and idea-a difference which is itself capable of resolution into a number of connected factors. Were we limited in our experiences to what are commonly called intellectual processes, it is doubtful

VOL. II.

S

whether this distinction could ever make its appearance. Only because every change in our consciousness is accompanied by a varying amount of sensuous feeling and of impulse which is very different in the two contrasted cases (that of actual stimulation of the organs of sense and that of revived idea), is it possible for a first crude imperfect distinction to establish itself in mind between subjective and objective.1

The objective order, in such primitive sensuous consciousness, does not extend beyond the occasions of actual senseperception. A certain unity of the subjective consciousness is undoubtedly implied in the merely natural conditions which render possible even the simplest form of this distinction: for, at all events, there must be a coexistence in one and the same state of a number of distinct modifications of consciousness. We may conjecture rather than confidently name the conditions on which the establishment of a higher form of that primitive unity of mind depends. Apparently it depends much on the two circumstances: (1) the range of discriminated sense-perceptions, (2) the possibility of accurate and complete revival of these in idea. A consciousness possessing but few elements of sense-perception, and these but vaguely discriminated, reviving few of its original impressions, and that in an imperfect form, can hardly arrive, I do. not say at a representation of continuity in time, but even at the basis for such a representation-the ability to hold together in one state of consciousness present perceptions and a number of revived ideas with their distinguishing circumstance. A unity of mind which involves a certain representation of continuous existence implies likewise, with

1 Although, strictly speaking, our conception of mind hardly extends beyond the form in which such distinction is involved. [The statement in the text here should be supple

mented by what is said elsewhere regarding the function of the spaceelement in the formation of the distinction between subjective and objective. See vol. i. pp. 238, 291 f.]