20 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



suggests, by a more reflective act of consciousness. What 

 is subject at one moment is object at another. I see 

 Halley's comet, and so far the comet is my object. But 

 I also report the seeing, and here the conscious state qua 

 conscious has itself become the object of my thought. 

 But in attending to the process of seeing, must I not lose 

 hold of the object seen? And yet if I do so, is not the 

 process of seeing at once vitiated destroyed therefore 

 in the act of apprehending it? This is, it must be 

 admitted, a real difficulty in introspective psychology and 

 has even led some to deny the validity of introspective 

 methods altogether. It is not however necessary for our 

 purpose to probe all the difficulties that surround the 

 question. Our direct consciousness of mental process is 

 sufficiently clear to found a general conception of conscious 

 life and activity, to enable us to recognise the leading 

 species of this activity, and to infer its operation from 

 results in cases where it is not directly given. This will 

 be all that our account will be found to assume. 



(2) Mind and Consciousness. 



If this assumption is justified there is no initial difficulty 

 in conceiving the ' operations ' of consciousness or its vary- 

 ing relations to its object as the elements .out of which our 

 conceptions of Mind and Self are empirically constructed. 

 It is with the former conception that we are especially 

 concerned and we have to examine its logical foundation. 

 Consciousness, as appears from our previous account, is a 

 name for a state, an act or a condition, in short for some- 

 thing temporary. We seek for something more per- 

 manent to which we can refer it, for the same reasons 

 which make us impute colour, sound, length or weight to 

 material substances. Into these reasons we need not enter 

 here. It will suffice us for the moment that we give the 

 name of Mind to the permanent unity of which we con- 

 ceive any given act of consciousness to be the temporary 

 condition, act or state. But it may be asked why, granting 

 the desirability of something permanent as the vehicle of 

 consciousness, should we look beyond the body, a per- 

 manent object which we are already forced to construct by 



