208 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



facts of internal experience, to which Cardinal Mercier calls 

 attention. "English psychology," he observes, "had attempted 

 a kind of anatomy of consciousness. It made all consist in 

 passive sensations or impressions. These impressions came to- 

 gether, fused, dissociated under the guidance of certain laws, 

 principally those of similarity and dissimilarity. The whole 

 process was entirely passive without the intervention of any 

 active subject. It was psychology without a soul. Now that 

 things are being examined a little more closely, psychologists 

 find that there are a lot of conscious states that are without 

 the slightest doubt active on the part of the subject. There 

 are a number of mental states upon which the subject brings 

 his attention to bear, and attention (from ad-tendere) means 

 activity. Ordinarily we do not know the intensity of a sensa- 

 tion without comparing it with another preceding one. This 

 work of comparison, or, as the English call it, discrimination, 

 is necessarily activity. The Associationists had confounded 

 the fact of coexistence with the perception of similarity or 

 dissimilarity. Supposing even that the coexistence of two 

 mental states were entirely passive, it still remains true that 

 the notion of their similarity or dissimilarity requires an act 

 of perception. It is absolutely impossible to conceive psychical 

 life without an active subject which perceives itself as living, 

 notes the impressions it receives, compares its acts, associates 

 and dissociates them; in a word, there can be no psychology 

 without a perceiving subject which psychologists call esprit, 

 or with the English, 'mind.' " {Op. cit., pp. 52-54 — italics his.) 

 The conflict between phenomenalism and the clear testimony 

 of consciousness is summed up in the following words of T. 

 Fontaine: "If all things are phenomena, then we ourselves can 

 be nothing more than events unknown to one another; in 

 order, then, that such events may appear to us united, so 

 that we may be able to declare their succession within us, it 

 is necessary that something else besides them should exist; 

 and this something else, this link that binds them together, 

 this principle that is conscious of their succession, can be 



