640 GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY 



experience be the wider term, then knowledge must fall within 

 experience and experience extend beyond knowledge. Now we may 

 perhaps venture, without fear of metaphysical cavil, to maintain 

 that being is logically a more fundamental concept than knowing. 

 Thus, I am not left merely to infer my own being from my knowing, 

 in the fashion of Descartes's "Cogito, ergo sum." Nor would I even 

 say that the being supposed to be known, the object is in fact only 

 inferred, as Descartes was driven to suppose. Objective reality is 

 immediately "given "or immediately there, not inferred. But now 

 I am not going on to say that the subjective reality also is imme- 

 diately given, is immediately there, as Hamilton and others have 

 done. There is no such parallelism between the two: that would 

 not end our quest, but only throw us back. Es giebt, you say: yes, 

 but to whom given: cui bono? The dative relation is not a com- 

 mutable one. The subjective factor in experience, then, is not datum, 

 but recipiens : it is not "there," but '-here/' whereto "there" is 

 relative. 



And now this receptivity is no mere passivity. It is time to dis- 

 card the ancient but inappropriate metaphor of the stylus and tabula 

 rasa. The concept of pure passivity or inertia is a convenient ana- 

 lytical fiction in physics, but we find no such reality in concrete ex- 

 perience. Even receptivity is activity, and though it is often non- 

 voluntary, it is never indifferent. In other words, not mere recep- 

 tivity, but conative or selective activity, is the essence of subjective 

 reality; and to this, known or objective reality is the essential 

 counterpart. Experience is just the interaction of these two factors, 

 and this duality is a real relation, antecedent to, but never com- 

 pletely covered by, the reflective knowledge we come to attain 

 concerning it. It cannot be resolved either into mere subjective 

 immanence, nor into mere objective position. The identification of 

 its two terms equally with their separation altogether transcends 

 experience; their identification is sometimes said to lead to the 

 Absolute, and their separation, we may safely say, leads to the 

 absurd. A subject per se and an object per se are alike not so much 

 unknowable as actually unreal. A psychical substance, to which 

 experience is only incidental, is an abstract possibility of which 

 psychology can make no use; but for every experience an actual 

 subject to which it pertains is essential, so surely as experience 

 connotes presentation and feeling and impulse. If we are to be in 

 downright earnest with the notion of substance, we shall probably 

 find that Spinoza was right, and there is only one. But though 

 we stop short of regarding the subject of experience as a substance, 

 it is, I think, a mistake to speak of it as a phenomenon. If the 

 actual subject of experience is to be a phenomenon, it must be such 

 for some other experience; and one experience may, of course, 



