MENTAL STATES AND PROCESSES. 115 



before said,* accompany our every thought ; but that sign 

 need not be now, nor need it ever have been, any form 

 of speech. 



activity is inevitable, apprehending that A is A is voluntary.' It is 

 true there is a great difference between these apprehensions, though 

 they both agree in being instances of apprehensions which are not 

 inferences, and as such I adduced them {Nature^ February 16, p. 

 364). Nevertheless in my judgment the difference between them 

 is not the difference which the Professor states. Both are alike 

 voluntary, regarded as deliberate reflex cognitions, and both are 

 alike inevitable, regarded as indeHberate, direct perceptions. The 

 labourer inevitably perceives that his spade is what it is, though the 

 nature of that perception remains unnoticed, just as he inevitably 

 perceives his own continuous being when he in no way adverts to 

 that fact. 



" I must further protest against the assertion that the idea ' there- 

 fore ' is ' present in the simplest acts of cognition ' — that every 

 perception of an object is an inference. This I regard as one of the 

 fundamental errors which underlie all the madness of idealism. 

 Akin thereto is the notion that a philosopher who desires to speak 

 with the very strictest accuracy ought, instead of using ' the big I,' 

 to say, 'a succession of states of consciousness.' To me it is 

 certain that even one state of consciousness (to say nothing of ' a 

 series ') is no more immediately intued by us than is the substantial 

 ego ; each being cognized only by a reflex act. What I intue is 

 my ' self-action,' in which intuition, both the * ego ' and the 

 ' states ' are implicitly contained, and so can be explicitly recognized 

 by reflection. I was myself long in bondage to these two errors, 

 from which it cost me severe mental labour to escape by working 

 my way through philosophical subjectivism. These questions I 

 cannot here go any further into, and I only mention them in con- 

 sequence of Prof. Max Miiller's remarks. I will, however, in turn, 

 refer him to my * Nature and Thought,' as well as to a larger work 

 which I trust may before long be published, and which, I venture 

 to hope, he will do me the honour to look at. 



" My object in calling attention to the fact that one word may 

 have several meanings, and several words one meaning, was to 

 show that there could not be 'identity' between thought and 

 language. This point the Professor seems practically to concede, 



* See above, p. 53. 



