THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 173 



states so diflferent as tlie passive reception of a sound as a 

 whole, and the analysis of that whole into distinct ingre- 

 dients by voluntary atteTition, should be due to processes 

 at all similar. And the subjective difference does not con- 

 sist in that the first-named state is the second in an * un- 

 conscious ' forrj. It is an absolute psychic difference, even 

 greater than that between the states to which two difierent 

 surds will give rise. The same is true of the other sensa- 

 tions chosen as examples. The man who learns for the 

 first uime how the closure of his glottis feels, experiences in 

 this discovery an absolutely new psychic modification, the 

 like of which he never had before. He had another feeling 

 before, a feeling incessantly renewed, and of which the same 

 glottis was the organic starting ^ oint ; but that was not the 

 later feeling in an ' unconscious state ; it was a feeling sui 

 generis altogether, although it took cognizance of the same 

 bodily part, the glottis. We shall see, hereafter, that the 

 same reality can be cognized by an endless number of 

 psychic states, which may differ tofo co??o among themselves, 

 without ceasing on that account to refer to the reality in 

 question. Each of them is a conscious fact ; none of them 

 has any mode of being whatever except a certain way of 

 being felt at the moment of being present. It is simply 

 unintelligible and fantastical to say, because they point to 

 the same outer reality, that they must therefore be so many 

 editions of the same ' idea,' now in a conscious and now in 

 an * unconscious ' phase. There is only one ' phase' in 

 which an idea can be, and that is a fully conscious condi- 

 tion. If it is not in that condition, then it is not at all. 

 Something else is, in its place. The something else may be 

 a merely physical brain-process, or it may be another con- 

 scious idea. Either of these things may perform much the 

 same function as the first idea, refer to the same object, 

 and roughly stand in the same relations to the upshot of 

 our thought. But that is no reason why we should throw 

 away the logical principle of identity in psychology, and 

 say that, however it may fare in the outer world, the mind 

 at any rate is a place in which a thing can be all kinds of 

 other things without ceasing to be itself as well. 



Now take the other cases alleged, and the other distinct 



