THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 175 



tive function as dealing with the same objects. Identity oi 

 being, there is none ; and I believe that throughout the rest 

 of this volume the reader will reap the advantages of the 

 simpler way of formulating the facts which is here begun.* 



So we seem not only to have ascertained the unintelli- 

 gibility of the notion that a mental fact can be two things 

 at once, and that what seems like one feeling, of blueness 

 for example, or of hatred, may really and ' unconsciously ' 

 be ten thousand elementary feelings which do not resem- 

 ble blueness or hatred at all, but we find that we can 

 express all the observed facts in other ways. The mind- 



* The text was written before Professor Lipps's Grundtatsachen des See- 

 lenlebens (1883) came into my hands. In Chapter III of that booli the 

 notion of unconscious thought is subjected to the clearest and most search- 

 ing criticism which it has yet received, Some passages are so sira-^Jar to 

 what I have myself written that I must quote them in a note. After 

 proving that dimness and clearness, incompleteness and completeness do 

 not pertain to a state of mind as such — since every state of mind must be 

 exactly what it is, and nothing else — but only pertain to the way in which 

 states of mind stand for objects, which they more or less dimly, more 

 or less clearly, represent; Lipps takes the case of those sensations which 

 attention is said to make more clear. "I perceive an object," he saj-s, 

 " now in clear daylight, and again at night. Call the content of the day- 

 perception a, and that of the evening-perception a'. There will probably 

 be a considerable difference between a and a'. The colors of a will be 

 varied and intense, and will be sharply bounded bj' each other ; those of 

 a' will be less luminous, and less strongly contrasted, and will approach 

 a common gray or brown, and merge more into each other. Both percepts, 

 however, as such, are completely determinate and distinct from all others. 

 The colors of a' appear before my eye neither more nor less decidedly dark 

 and blurred than the colors of a appear bright and sharply bounded. But 

 now I know, or believe I know, that one and the same real Object A corre- 

 sponds to both a and a'. I am convinced, moreover, that a represents A 

 better than does a'. Instead, however, of giving to my conviction this, its 

 only correct, expression, and keeping the content of my consciousness and 

 the real object, the representation and what it means, distinct from each 

 other, I substitute the real object for the content of the consciousness, 

 and talk of the experience as if it consisted in one and the same object 

 (namely, the surreptitiously introduced real one), constituting twice over 

 the content of my consciousness, once in a clear and distinct, the other 

 time in an obscure and vague fashion. I talk now of a distincter and of a 

 less distinct consciousness of A, whereas I am only justified in talking of 

 two consciousnesses, a and a', equally distinct in se, but to which the sup- 

 posed external object A corresponds with different degrees of distinctness." 

 iP. 38-^9 ) 



