240 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



with the second and equally important question as to the 

 essence or nature of the soul. He confined his investi- 

 gations in the beginning to the question how unity 

 of thought and knowledge was attained. In the sequel 

 of his researches which, for reasons which we need not 

 dwell on at present, he termed critical, he was inevitably 

 led to deal with such questions as the essence of the soul, 

 but the fact that he, to begin with, limited his investiga- 

 tions to the question how unity and order came to be 

 introduced into the casual and fleeting mass of single 

 sensations of which experience consists, gave to his whole 

 philosophy the appearance as if it dealt in a one-sided 

 manner with the intellectual life of the mind. In fact, 

 the connection of his practical with his theoretical philo- 

 sophy remained always a difficult point, although the 



arate and definite things and pro- 

 cesses, was still further aggravated 

 by the fact that psychical pheno- 

 mena do not become subjects of 

 discussion before they have been 

 externalised, so that they, to some 

 extent, become observable objects 

 for many minds ; whereas they origi- 

 nally are the possession and property 

 only of individual minds. This 

 process of externalisation is carried 

 out by us unconsciously in the ac- 

 quisition of language, which consists 

 of many words put 'together in 

 many ways, and very frequently 

 with very different meanings at- 

 tached to them. In this way the 

 natural " together," in time and 

 space, of mental states is broken up 

 into a multitude of different parts, 

 in the same way as the sciences of 

 dynamics, physics, and chemistry 

 start by showing how the complex 

 things, facts, and phenomena of 

 nature can be divided up into 

 separate more or less similar parts, 

 and to some extent put together 



again out of them. But this reverse 

 process of synthesis, by which we 

 again arrive at natural objects, 

 meets with very great difficulty if 

 we deal with things of the mind, 

 and this for obvious reasons on 

 which I need not dwell at 

 present. For the moment and in 

 the present connection it is only 

 useful to remark how, after taking 

 for granted that our conscious inner 

 experience is made up of a suc- 

 cession or assemblage of definite 

 elements called ideas, sensations, 

 perceptions, or by other terms, the 

 difficulty has arisen how to account 

 for the unity or synthesis which 

 seems to us so characteristic of the 

 inner life. Anticipating, we may 

 say that this difficulty which dis- 

 tinguishes internal from external 

 experience is fully recognised only 

 in recent psychological literature, 

 since Prof. James Ward put the 

 conception of a presentation-con- 

 tinuum prominently at the entrance 

 of psychological discussions. 



