REPLIES TO CRITICISMS. 407 



bodies are in states of vibration, and that the vibration may be made 

 visible. And it concludes that the objective activity is not what it 

 subjectively seems, but is proximately interpretable as a succession of 

 aerial waves. Thus Crude Realism is shown that while there unques- 

 tionably exists an objective activity corresponding to the sensation 

 known as sound, yet the facts are not explicable on the original sup- 

 position that this is like the sensation ; while they are explicable by 

 conceiving it as a rhythmical mechanical action. Eventually this re- 

 interpretation, joined with kindred reinterpretations of other sensa- 

 tions, comes to be itself further transfigured by analysis of its terms, 

 and reexpression of them in terms of molecular motion ; but, how- 

 ever abstract the interpretation ultimately reached, the objective 

 activity continues to be postulated : the primordial judgment of 

 Crude Realism remains unchanged, though it has to change the rest 

 of its judgments. 



In another part of his argument, however, Mr. Sidgwick implies 

 that I have no right to use those conceptions of objective existence 

 by which this compromise is effected. Quoting sundry passages to 

 show that, while I hold the criticisms of the Idealist to be impossible 

 without "tacitly or avowedly postulating an unknown something 

 beyond consciousness," I yet admit that " our states of consciousness 

 are the only things we can know," he goes on to argue that I am 

 radically inconsistent, because, in interpreting the phenomena of con- 

 sciousness, I continually postulate not an unknown something, but a 

 something of which I speak in ordinary terms, as though its ascribed 

 physical characters really exist as such, instead of being, as I admit 

 they are, synthetic states of my consciousness. His objection, if I 

 understand, it, is, that, for the purposes of Objective Psychology, I 

 apparently profess to know Matter and Motion in the ordinary real- 

 istic way; while, as a result of subjective analysis, I reach the con- 

 clusion that it is impossible to have that knowledge of objective 

 existence which Crude Realism supposes we have. Doubtless there 

 seems here to be what he calls " a fundamental incoherence." But I 

 think it exists, not between my two expositions, but between the two 

 consciousnesses of subjective and objective existence, which we can- 

 not suppress and yet cannot put into definite forms. The alleged 

 incoherence I take to be but another name for the inscrutability of the 

 relation between subjective feeling and its objective correlate which 

 is not feeling — an inscrutability which meets us at the bottom of all 

 our analyses. An exposition of this inscrutability I have elsewhere 

 summed up thus : 



" See, then, our predicament. We can think of Matter only in terms of Mind. 

 We can think of Mind only in terms of Matter. When we have pushed our 

 explorations of the first to the uttermost limit, we are referred to the second for a 

 final answer; and, when we have got the final answer of the second, we are re- 

 ferred back to the first for an interpretation of it. We find the value of x in terms 



