772 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



36. 

 Study of 

 facts of 

 conscious- 

 ness. 



by his inner sense exists in numerous other instances 

 in the minds of his fellow -men, has long before forced 

 upon him the conviction that he is not dealing with 

 a purely individual and personal phenomenon, but with 

 one which, being common to so many, is practically 

 to be regarded as external and common to them all. 

 And yet there is no doubt that the field of his con- 

 sciousness was at one time in his life a purely subjective 

 experience, and that it developed out of this during 

 infancy, and acquired a dual aspect : first, the external 

 aspect, in which he, the thinker himself, shrinks into 

 a small area (his physical body or external self) ; and 

 secondly, the internal or introspective aspect to which 

 everything, including actual things and persons sur- 

 rounding us, are only experiences of individual con- 

 sciousness. 



Earlier thinkers who started upon the line indicated 

 by Locke did not trouble themselves to investigate, or 

 did so very imperfectly, how the individual mind or 

 consciousness develops out of the chaotic state inta 

 the daylight of clear sight and reason with its dis- 

 tinctions of subject and object, of consciousness and 

 self-consciousness, of the self and other selves. In 

 the nineteenth century, however, the facts of conscious- 

 ness and their psychical history formed a recurring sub- 

 ject of discussion, beginning with Fichte's ' Thatsachen des 

 Bewussteins ' and Schleiermacher's ' Psychologic,' down to 

 Ward's ' Psychology,' Bergson's ' Donnees Imm^diates de la 

 Conscience,' and Dilthey's ' Beschreibende Psychologic.' ^ 



^ In addition to the writings 

 mentioned in the text of this and 

 the foregoing chapter I refer my 



readers to the following : — 



Groom Robertson, " How we come 

 by our Knowledge "(1877), reprinted 



