ESSAY-REVIEWS 605 



intelligence. The view that the outer world has overwhelming 

 influence on the inner leads to fatalism. There must, there- 

 fore, be a revision of opinion concerning this autocratic outer 

 world . 



Dr. Merz's revision is drastic. He reverses the plain man's 

 view, disregards its " inevitability," and maintains that the 

 outer world is included in, and subsequent to, the inner world 

 of consciousness. We are not placed in a world external to 

 ourselves, but this world, apparently outside ourselves and 

 independent of us, is really part of us and dependent on our 

 consciousness for its existence. We are not items of a whole 

 — it is the world that is the item. The external world, in 

 short, is an excerpt from our consciousness. Dr. Merz traces the 

 excerpting process in the developing infant mind. At first 

 no outer world exists ; there is simply a passage of feeling and 

 impression through consciousness — a primordial continuity of 

 experience. The perceptual and the emotional are fused or 

 unseparated ; there is no aggregating or atomising into 

 separated and space-filling objects. There is no inner and 

 outer — no subject and object. Then " clusters " form in 

 the conscious flow and become objects. This mental habit 

 of " clustering " grows and results in the " Firmament of the 

 Soul." In this firmament the primary, unseparated conscious 

 flow, originally continuous and unexternalised, is knotted into 

 groups. These groups include persons in the first place and 

 material bodies in the second. This separation of the external 

 world in the conscious process is initiated by " intersubjective 

 communion." The moment of the birth of the distinction 

 between subject and object arises when the figure of a person 

 flashes on the background of the mind's consciousness. It is 

 then that " clusters " form in the conscious flow and become 

 objects. The remaining background constitutes the subjective 

 side. Dr. Merz evidently does not regard the objectified and 

 externalised conception as an answer to intimations from an 

 actual external world — he is no realist. Consciousness is prior ; 

 no outer world comes into existence till we are in being, and 

 not even then does it appear at once. We first perceive that 

 other personalities surround us and then, by an illegitimate 

 extension of this perceiving process, imagine ourselves in the 

 midst of a universe of things that is really only a separated 

 part of our own consciousness. 



