32 PSYCHOLOGY. 



the same big extended sort of outward fact which I now 

 perceive. So far is it from being true that our first way of 

 feeling things is the feeling of them as subjective or men- 

 tal, that the exact opposite seems rather to be the truth. 

 Our earliest, most instinctive, least developed kind of con- 

 sciousness is the objective kind ; and only as reflection be- 

 comes developed do we become aware of an inner world at 

 all. Then indeed we enrich it more and more, even to the 

 point of becoming idealists, with the spoils of the outer 

 world which at first was the only world we knew. But 

 subjective consciousness, aware of itself as subjective, does 

 not at first exist. Even an attack of pain is surely felt at 

 first objectively as something in space which prompts to 

 motor reaction, and to the very end it is located, not in the 

 mind, but in some bodily part. 



" A sensation which should not awaken an impulse to move, nor 

 any tendency to produce an outward effect, would manifestly be use- 

 less to a living creature. On the principles of evolution such a sensa- 

 tion could never be developed. Therefore every sensation originally 

 refers to something external and independent of the sentient creature. 

 Rhizopods (according to Engeimann's observations) retract their pseudo- 

 podia whenever these touch foreign bodies, even if these foreign bodies 

 are the pseudopodia of other individuals of their own species, whilst 

 the mutual contact of their own pseudopodia is followed by no such 

 contraction. These low animals can therefore already feel an outer 

 world — even in the absence of innate ideas of causality, and probably 

 without any clear consciousness of space. In truth the conviction that 

 something exists outside of ourselves does not come from thought. It 

 comes from sensation; it rests on the same ground as our conviction of 

 our own existence. ... If we consider the behavior of new-born 

 animals, we never find them betraying that they are first of all con- 

 scious of their sensations as purely subjective excitements. We far 

 more readily incline to explain the astonishing certainty with which 

 they make use of their sensations (and which is an effect of adaptation 

 and inheritance) as the result of an inborn intuition of the outer world. 

 . . . Instaad of starting from an original pure subjectivity of sensa- 

 tion, and seeking how this could possibly have acquired an objective 

 signification, vv'smust, on the contrary, begin by the possession of objec- 

 tivity by the sensation and then show how for reflective consciousness 

 the latter becomes interpreted as an effect of the object, how in short 

 the original immediate objectivity becomes changed into a remote 



A. Riehl : Der Philosophischer Kriticismus, Bd. ii. Theil ii. p. 64. 



