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CHAPTER IV.

THE PRIMARY FACTORS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

I. General character of the content.-If we take, then, as our working conception of the business of psychology, the notion of the development of the inner life, we are naturally and inevitably confronted with the first of the main problems of psychological science: What is the irreducible minimum of material constituting consciousness? Our conscious experience contains a multiplicity which we find it hard to name, and about which, indeed, we are always in some confusion, owing to the vagueness of the general terms by which we name its parts. If, as we assume, these highly differentiated processes or states of our inner experience are rightly regarded as developments from what is simpler but identical in kind, it would appear as though the method of approaching a solution of our first problem were necessarily the analytical.

Now analysis on the whole assumes that that which we propose to resolve into its elements is made up by the juxtaposition, the putting together, of the elements we distinguish. Such an interpretation, if rigorously insisted on, would be found to lead to a view of mind which we have already considered the view which regards the composition of mind as but the putting together in certain general ways of elements definite from the first, and retaining throughout their definite nature. Such a conception is wholly

unworkable; it may be doubted whether it is without qualification applicable even in the region of mechanism, where it seems most appropriate. One might hazard the conjecture that it is altogether an offshoot of our abstract mode of representing space-relations; and even there, as past history has shown, the conception is not without its difficulties.

The problem defined above is substantially that which has always appeared in the treatment of mind as the classification or arrangement of the elementary forms of the psychical life. Naturally any attempt to describe these elementary forms is largely determined by the nature of the general conception we are applying to the mental life as a whole. If we proceed with the help of a notion familiar enough in the history of psychology that the contents of the inner life are brought before us by some process of inner perception-we shall hardly escape the implications of the term: we shall tend to represent the inner life after the model of the world of objects which we suppose ourselves to apprehend through outer perception. On the whole such a tendency results in giving a quite illusory independence to the facts of mind, and throws into the background the really important feature -the mode of connexion among the facts thus isolated.

On the other hand, if we regard the content of mind, as that of or in which we are immediately aware as immediate experience of our own, and apply to it the general conception of development, we shall tend rather to define the distinguishable parts of the inner life as connected processes, events which occur, and the occurrence of which together and in succession constitutes the inner life. We shall thus, at the same time, and in consistency with what has already been attained, avoid the introduction into the description of consciousness of a supposed Self distinct from the processes, and having these processes for objects of its contemplation.

The difficulty which has always been pressed as regards this view that it is impossible to represent the series of states of consciousness either as making up a self or as existing without a self-seems to me to arise altogether from the false objectification of what are called the 'states of mind.' If we represent them as objects, doubtless they seem to require a bond of connexion external to themselves. But, by so describing them, we ignore altogether their characteristic nature: we employ an external mark of their existence instead of being content to accept their inner nature, that which makes them what they are.

We may certainly assign a unity to the contents of consciousness without referring it to anything external to these contents themselves. Undoubtedly we have to admit as a general feature of what we are calling the processes of mind that, at any one moment of consciousness, the contents. defining it, giving it a special character, are manifold. A plurality of related contents constitutes the unit of the concrete life of consciousness. If, then, we desire to determine in general terms what are the differences which we must suppose to be involved in what is genetically the primary state of consciousness, we have to proceed by analysing the more direct and involved experience which we possess, and by singling out such features of the total content as seem irreducible.

It is hopeless to attempt to avoid all that cannot be said to fall fairly within the scope of a description from within. Were it possible, it would be logically more consistent to ignore altogether what concerns the dependence of the mental life on conditions lying outside itself. That is to say, were we to select as topic of analysis sentient consciousness, it would be logically consistent to ignore all that we may otherwise imagine we know respecting the way in which the contents of that consciousness are determined by external conditions.

Making the attempt for the moment, and taking as our field for analysis immediate experience-experience in which the fundamental distinction of self and not self, inner and outer, with all its consequences, is not involved-we may endeavour to name the distinguishable features which seem to be necessarily implied in a consciousness that is at once one and many, a single moment with varied content.

In the first place, then, there seems to be involved in the content qualitative distinctness, differences of quality. On general grounds we can go no further than the quite general term-qualitative differences. What kind of qualitative differences may be presented we can only discover from special experience. A total state of consciousness in which qualitative difference is presented-so much at least we may assert to be the primitive condition of mind. But in this description it is implied that in some form at least, however indeterminate, what we name by the abstract term 'relations' is also involved. Certainly a single moment of consciousness does not correspond to the representation we make of the inner life. It is in one respect at least a continuous process. Such discontinuity as it seems to present is always reckoned from the point of view of an outer observer, and, whether rightly or wrongly ascribed to the mental life, is perfectly compatible with the continuity of the psychical process from within. This continuity from within implies, and is only possible through, the retention and revival into subsequent moments of consciousness of the contents of previous states. Such perpetuation is indeed the fundamental condition of any transformation of the contents of mind or any development thereof.

Can we then name from special experience the qualitatively distinct contents which appear in consciousness? and are they in any way affected by the consideration that consciousness is not, so to speak, a stationary theatre within which they

are presented, but is itself in constant movement and change?

It is only by inference from what is in our mature experience that we can hypothetically name the various qualitatively distinct contents, and our names invariably bear traces of the more matured experience to which they primarily refer. Thus when we include sensations, as they are called, among such qualitatively distinct contents, and place feelings alongside of them as equally primitive, though perhaps not equally independent, we almost inevitably introduce into our description something of the general distinction between. objective and subjective which attaches to sensation and feeling in mature experience.

At the outset we are undoubtedly bound to include no more in our description than can be supposed to be present in the content as it is directly given. With just as much right, therefore, as we exclude from the content of a sensationelement all that may attach thereto by association, we should exclude from it all that concerns the more general connexion it may have with knowledge of the objective. Sensations and feelings cannot be primarily distinguished as relatively objective and subjective. Both have in common qualitative distinctness and variation of intensity. If, therefore, we are to enumerate the primitive contents, we must do so in the light of such qualitative differences as we can hypothetically determine.

For such a problem of special experience we have no other foundation to go upon than our matured knowledge of sensations, in accordance with which we proceed to enumerate a variety of types of content, making distinctions wherever it seems impossible to recognise specific elements of identity of character. It is, indeed, a question far from easy to answer, What constitutes the specific element of identity in each of these types of sense-experience—say,