sible. Certainly, in the case of the human mind, it must be regarded as wholly beyond our compass. Not even the most daring of moral philosophers, I think, has ever ventured to do more than indicate in most abstract terms the general form of the final end.

If we apply this to the psychological problem we shall certainly be entitled to say that the mental life may be regarded as a development; for there assuredly, in more abundance than elsewhere, do we find the general features which are described in what we have called the Laws of Change in a developing subject. It may indeed be that any clearness of insight we possess into these general characters is based on our knowledge of mind rather than on our knowledge of the processes of life. Just as, in primitive experience, life was interpreted from the point of view of the conscious subject, and was taken to be identical with what that subject apprehended in himself, so, at a much later stage, the more elaborate idea of development may be applied by us to life and its processes only because we seem to discover there something analogous to what we are more directly and more copiously aware of in psychological observation. To apply the notion of development, therefore, to the mental life will not require us to assume that the notion of end or purpose has any objective validity. It will merely sum up for us the characteristic experience of a conscious and practical subject; and the notion of development will be employed without the assumption that we are in possession of the final idea, and consequently regard the inner life as developing only because we can trace in it approximations more or less marked to the final end.

And, finally, we shall by no means find it necessary to allow that the course of development is so predetermined that what are called relatively the external conditions play the part only of stimulating occasions calling forth into ex

plicitness what is implicit. The external and the internal conditions are equally necessary, and may therefore be called equally important. That a new product shows traces of being modified by what is past ought not to be interpreted as signifying that the new fact is merely explicit manifestation of what is implicit. Perhaps in no region is the notion of implicit existence really justifiable: it is just the Aristotelian potentiality re-expressed. It is least of all justifiable in the region of consciousness, where, so to speak, everything is just as it

appears.

The consideration of development in general has been directed to free that notion from entanglement with the thought of End or purpose, which has sometimes been identified with it, more often regarded as implied in it. No one would deny that, in point of fact, we do use the thought of end or purpose as a convenient key to explain the phenomena of development; but cautious thinkers, who have investigated more profoundly the idea of end in this application of it to the concrete, have always found themselves compelled to introduce a distinction which in fact transforms the notion the distinction technically expressed as that between an external end and an immanent end. Where end or purpose is proximately exhibited in the action of a conscious being, in the relation between an ideal representation of something to be effected and the realisation of that idea, the end as related to the action whereby it is carried out may be said to be external. Now no such relation of externality can be assumed in those cases to which the thought of purpose is applied and which lie outside the region of conscious action. Not only must we resign in respect to living organisms the thought of external adaptation, but, even in respect to the vital processes themselves, it becomes impossible to interpret them according to the scheme furnished by practical activity. There are no grounds

for assuming that the sequence of changes in such processes is preceded by a representation on the part of the subject himself of the changes to come about. There is no possibility of understanding how, even if such representation were assumed, it should operate as a determining factor.

Accordingly, if the notion of end be still retained in application to the vital processes, it must be represented, in some way hard to determine, as not distinct from the process. itself. The realisation and the end to be realised flow together. We can just name the total result as 'realised end' without introducing into our representation any thought of an antecedence of the end to its execution, or indeed of any difference between the two. But, when this modification is introduced, it appears to me that we have removed all that is specific to the category of end, and that, in taking the concrete fact, to the exclusion of the separation of its elements which is involved in the category of end, we have returned to the true point of view, and are summing up a characteristically distinct combination of empirical features.

If we apply to the mental life the thought of development, freed from its implication of an end or purpose which is there realised, we undoubtedly find within conscious experience itself abundant material for justifying the application to it of this general thought-development. Beyond doubt there is there a certain central unity which is modified through the various experiences which constitute the matter of its consciousness. The general character of the changes which take place in consciousness is certainly that of increasing definiteness of the central fact, the unity, through increasing variety of differences in it. Nor is it impossible to name definitely, though in general terms, the result which is reached through such development: it is the consciousness on the part of the individual subject of himself as in relation to the world of objects, of himself as an agent capable of carrying out in the

world of objects what is prefigured in his own representations of it.

Such consciousness, moreover, is undoubtedly exhibited to us in various stages of completeness. Even within the narrow range of our own personal experience we have the means of distinguishing more and less developed grades of it; and if, hypothetically, we extend the consideration of such development beyond the range of personal consciousness, we can find much, though indirect, material to supplement our representation of the developing unity and to substantiate the general representation we make of its nature.

In this life of consciousness the several distinct forms or modes are, moreover, dependent on one another in a regular order-in such fashion, indeed, that we are entitled to treat them as representing the successive stages of a determined development. It is not to be supposed that this general representation implies that each succeeding grade of consciousness abolishes what has preceded. The unity of the subject is sufficient to hold together (and, perhaps, without holding them together its development would be impossible) the elements that belong to several distinct stages of its history.

Moreover, the development is not to be regarded as, so to speak, the calling forth of new powers, new forms of operation. There is nothing in the most advanced, the most developed stage which is not generically the same as that which enters into the simplest form-a fact which, again, is probably intimately related to the foundation for the thought of development, that it is one and the same subject which is being modified.

Now this implies that what are called the higher operations of consciousness are not, in technical language, formally distinct from the lower, that the difference is one dependent on the material. And this consideration, again, enforces the

VOL. II.

N

general aspect of development, as being a consequence of the effect produced by what is retained of past experience on what is newly given. For example, we are doubtless right in regarding the stage of perceptive consciousness in which the given sense-presentations of the moment are symbolic of generalised thoughts concerning an orderly connected system of external things, as being higher, more developed, than that in which the given sense-content summons up by association, as it is said, the definite images of some particular previous experience. In the former case there is undoubtedly no representation of definite particular facts, just as a word by no means suggests definite objects of past experience. Yet the two are generically identical. It is fundamentally the same process that is at work in both; and the former, the higher, only becomes possible by an advance from the lower, by the supply of additional materials assimilated and presenting a somewhat novel appearance as a consequence of such assimilation.

In the same way we are justified in regarding consciously voluntary action as a higher form of practical activity than impulse, that is, action under the immediate pressure of idea and feeling. Yet the two are generically alike. The higher does not involve the introduction of a new factor: in the lower there is involved what renders possible, by increase of such acts, the advance to the relatively higher. There are given in it the conditions which render possible the recognition of a distinction between the inner motive-the idea and feeling as subjective, and the change, the activity, as an operation upon the objective. The highest form of voluntary determination is no more than a developed form of the simpler type, arising as a consequence of the enriched consciousness of self and the clearer discrimination between the orders of inner and outer experience.