294 The Unity of the Organism 



all observation confirms this supposition much of it strong- 

 ly. Inferential evidence could hardly be stronger than that 

 my particular emotional response to opera singing, for 

 example, is quite different from that of many other persons. 

 Obviously we are here skirting the edge of what modern 

 realism in formal philosophy calls pluralism, and deals with 

 in part as the question of whether percepts are strictly indi- 

 vidual and personal. No philosopher with whose views I 

 have become acquainted, has discussed this question so fully, 

 and in my opinion, so illuminatingly as Sellars. The follow- 

 ing sentences taken from his chapter, The Advance of the 

 Personal, show clearly, it seems to me, that the conclusions 

 he has reached, working from the purely philosophical side, 

 are essentially the same as those arrived at by me, advancing 

 from the biological side : "What may be called the sensory 

 content of our percepts is important,--! do not wish to 

 be understood to belittle it, but so are the meanings which 

 arise in conection with our bodily activities and motor ad- 

 justments to stimuli. Here again, we are face to face with 

 individual factors in perception which even the idealist must 

 recognise and somehow explain. Evidently, perception is not 

 a mere passive presentation, but a construction whose gene- 

 tic elements can be partially traced. Finally, let us call to 

 mind that percepts are continuous with feelings and with the 

 so-called organic sensations. . . . Once vaguely objective, 

 feeling is now considered subjective or personal." Many 

 other sentences and paragraphs of like purport could be 

 quoted from this author. I have selected this for the two- 

 fold reason that it indicates the measure of my agreement 

 with his view as to the personal character of percepts and 

 the rest of conscious life; and at the same time indicates 

 wherein I shall have to out-do him in the matter of validat- 

 ing the individual. A part of our task, to be reached a little 

 later, will be to show that although feeling and all the rest 

 of psychic life is indeed subjectively personal, it is also 



