638 GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY 



genetic or comparative psychology, it is said, we must answer: 

 What is found as distinct from the finding, in other words, a self 

 or subject cognitively and conatively related to an objective situ- 

 ation in which it is interested. Such subject, we should say, was 

 conscious, but not self-conscious. In order to find myself feeling, 

 in order to know that I feel, I must feel. But I may feel without 

 knowing that I feel. In order to know that I am, I must be, but 

 I may be without having any knowledge of that fact. In short, the 

 advance to self-consciousness is said to presuppose mere conscious- 

 ness. Here, then, the irreducible minimum is the functional 

 relation of subject and object just mentioned, a duality in which 

 the subject knows, feels, and acts, and the object is known and 

 reacted to. But at this lower level of experience, at which the sub- 

 ject's functions are not immediately known, have we not a rela- 

 tion with only one term? And that is surely a contradiction. At 

 the higher level, where consciousness of self is present, where, 

 that is to say, the subject and its functions are known, we have, 

 indeed, two terms, but both are then objective, for self as known 

 is certainly objective. We have two terms now, but so far the es- 

 sential distinction of subject and object can no longer be maintained. 

 So far as both terms are known or objective, the distinction lapses, 

 it is allowed; but even in self-consciousness the "I knowing" 

 Kant's pure Ego is still distinct from "the Me known" Kant's 

 empirical or phenomenal Ego. Very good, but then, in that case, 

 it is rejoined, we are back at the original difficulty. You talk of 

 this duality of experience, but it is still, it seems, at bottom a dual- 

 ity with only one known term. At the best, your pure Ego or 

 subject is a metaphysical notion of a soul, or something that lies 

 hopelessly beyond any immediate verification. 



Now this disjunction, either in consciousness, i. e., "content 

 of consciousness," and then objective, phenomenal, presentational, 

 ultimately sensational; or out of consciousness, and then metem- 

 pirical, hypothetical, and unverifiable, this disjunction, I say, 

 constitutes a difficult problem, which at the present time demands 

 the most thoroughgoing discussion. But instead of thinking-out 

 the problem, psychologists seem nowadays content for the most 

 part to accept this disjunction. Some, whom we may call " object- 

 ive" psychologists, also known as "presentationists," confining 

 themselves, as they suppose, to what is empirically "given," -to 

 whom "given" and how received, they do not ask, regard the 

 facts of experience as a sort of atomic aggregate completely dom- 

 inated by certain quasi-mechanical laws. In conformity to these 

 laws, laws, that is, of fusion, complication, association, inhibi- 

 tion, and the like, the elements of the so-called "contents of 

 consciousness" differentiate and organize themselves; and what 



