204 EXPERIENCE AND IDEALISM 



The third episode reverses in a curious man 

 ner (which confuses present discussion) the notion 

 of experience as a foreign, alien, coercive material. 

 It regards experience as a fortuitous association, 

 by merely psychic connections, of individualistic 

 states of consciousness. This is due to the Humian 

 development of Locke. The &quot;objects &quot; and &quot; op 

 erations,&quot; which to Locke were just given and 

 secured in observation, become shifting complexes 

 of subjective sensations and ideas, whose apparent 

 permanency is due to discoverable illusions. This, 

 of course, is the empiricism which made Kant so 

 uneasily toss in his dogmatic slumbers (a tossing 

 that he took for an awakening) ; and which, by re 

 action, called out the conception of thought as a 

 function operating both to elevate perceptual 

 data to scientific status, and also to confer ob 

 jective status, or knowable character, upon even 

 sensational data and their associative combina 

 tions. 1 Here emerges the third element in our 

 problem: The function of thought as furnishing 



1 There are, of course, anticipations of Hume in Locke. 

 But to regard Lockeian experience as equivalent to Humian 

 is to pervert history. Locke, as he was to himself and to 

 the century succeeding him, was not a sub j ectivist, but in the 

 main a common sense obj ectivist. It was this that gave him 

 his historic influence. But so completely has the Hume- 

 Kant controversy dominated recent thinking that it is con 

 stantly projected backward. Within a few weeks I have 

 seen three articles, all insisting that the meaning of the 



