158 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



may be taken as so much c fact,' is the asserted object 

 denuded of these references. 1 



Objects, then, are not 'given' in experience from with- 

 out in the simple manner at first supposed by common 

 sense. Hence, even if we assume perception to be an accu- 

 rate assertion of an outer object, we no longer conceive the 

 one as a photograph or impression of the other. We con- 

 ceive it as a construction or, if we prefer the term, a 

 reconstruction out of materials of stimulus and psycho- 

 physical process in which there is no likeness to the object 

 at all. This criticism of experience may be taken as the 

 starting-point for two very different lines of investigation. 

 On the one hand, it is the point of departure for the investi- 

 gation of the psycho-physical processes underlying experi- 

 ence. For, if experience is still the basis of knowledge, it 

 is, genetically considered, a mere effect of the specific 

 reaction of certain complex structures under given condi- 

 tions. Ultimate in the one sense, it is derivative and 

 relative in the other. On the other hand, the recognition 

 of the reference involved in the bare assertion of objects 

 of experience opens a door of escape from subjective 

 idealism. The problem of knowledge becomes that of 

 verifying these references, and the mode of verifying them 

 is by thorough-going interrelation with one another. This 

 interrelation is the work of the correlating or, as Kant 

 called it, synthetic activity of thought. This he showed 

 to be an original function, with its own appropriate modes 

 of operation, without which no organised body of experi- 

 ence could be formed. 2 When these modes become con- 



1 I * see ' a figure over there. Investigation convinces me that it was 

 an illusion. The so-called ' seeing ' is a false judgment, what convinces 

 me that it was false being at bottom inconsistency between it and other 

 judgments, i.e. the impossibility of correlating it with other objects. 

 Nevertheless, as a mere object of immediate consciousness, i.e. apart 

 from its reference to a point of space outside my body, the figure 

 was real. As such it was ' pure ' experience or the object of simple 

 apprehension. 



2 To adopt this general result of the Kantian criticism is not of course 

 to accept his description of the modes of operation in question or to dis- 

 tinguish between what is ' given * and what is not given on anything 

 resembling Kantian lines. 



