DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 499 



invoked to account for it, a word of further remark seems 

 desirable. 



My account, it will be noted, is merely a description of 

 the facts as they occur : feelings (or thoughts) each know- 

 ing something, but the later one knowing, if preceded by 

 a certain earlier one, a more comjolicated object than it 

 would have known had the earlier one not been there. I 

 offer no explanation of such a sequence of cognitions. The 

 explanation (I devoutly expect) will be found some day to 

 depend on cerebral conditions. Until it is forthcoming, we 

 can only treat the sequence as a special case of the general 

 law that every experience undergone by the brain leaves in 

 it a modification which is one fact(#in determining what 

 manner of exj)eriences the following ones shall be {cf. 

 pp. 232-236). To anyone who denies the possibility of such 

 a law I have nothing to say, until he brings his proofs. 



The sensationalists and the spiritualists meanwhile 

 (filled both of them with their notion that the mind must 

 in some fashion contain what it knows) begin by giving a 

 crooked account of the facts. Both admit that for m and 

 n to be known in any way whatever, little rounded and fin- 

 ished off duplicates of each must be contained in the mind 

 as separate entities. These pure ideas, so called, of m and 

 n respectively, succeed each other there. And since they 

 are distinct, say the sensationalists, they are eo ipso distin- 

 guished. " To have ideas different and ideas distinguished, 

 are synonymous expressions ; different and distinguished 

 meaning exactly the same thing," says James Mill.* "Dis-v 

 tinguished ! " say the spiritualists, "distinguished hy tuhat, 

 forsooth ? Truly the respective ideas of m and of n in the 

 mind are distinct. But for that very reason neither can 

 distinguish itself from the other, for to do that it would 

 have to be aware of the other, and thus for the time being 

 become the other, and that would be to get mixed up with 

 the other and to lose its own distinctness. Distinctness 

 of ideas and idea of distinctness, are not one thing, but 

 two. This last is a relation. Only a relating principle, op- 

 posed in nature to all facts of feeling, an Ego, Soul, or 



* Aualysis, J. S. Mill's ed., ii. 17. Cf. also pp. 13, 14. 



