The Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell (best large ereader .txt) 📖

with what you would see

if you went to St. Paul’s, or what you would feel if you touched

its walls; it is further connected with what other people see and

feel, with services and the Dean and Chapter and Sir Christopher

Wren. These things are not mere thoughts of yours, but your

thought stands in a relation to them of which you are more or

less aware. The awareness of this relation is a further thought,

and constitutes your feeling that the original thought had an

“object.” But in pure imagination you can get very similar

thoughts without these accompanying beliefs; and in this case

your thoughts do not have objects or seem to have them. Thus in

such instances you have content without object. On the other

hand, in seeing or hearing it would be less misleading to say

that you have object without content, since what you see or hear

is actually part of the physical world, though not matter in the

sense of physics. Thus the whole question of the relation of

mental occurrences to objects grows very complicated, and cannot

be settled by regarding reference to objects as of the essence of

thoughts. All the above remarks are merely preliminary, and will

be expanded later.

 

Speaking in popular and unphilosophical terms, we may say that

the content of a thought is supposed to be something in your head

when you think the thought, while the object is usually something

in the outer world. It is held that knowledge of the outer world

is constituted by the relation to the object, while the fact that

knowledge is different from what it knows is due to the fact that

knowledge comes by way of contents. We can begin to state the

difference between realism and idealism in terms of this

opposition of contents and objects. Speaking quite roughly and

approximately, we may say that idealism tends to suppress the

object, while realism tends to suppress the content. Idealism,

accordingly, says that nothing can be known except thoughts, and

all the reality that we know is mental; while realism maintains

that we know objects directly, in sensation certainly, and

perhaps also in memory and thought. Idealism does not say that

nothing can be known beyond the present thought, but it maintains

that the context of vague belief, which we spoke of in connection

with the thought of St. Paul’s, only takes you to other thoughts,

never to anything radically different from thoughts. The

difficulty of this view is in regard to sensation, where it seems

as if we came into direct contact with the outer world. But the

Berkeleian way of meeting this difficulty is so familiar that I

need not enlarge upon it now. I shall return to it in a later

lecture, and will only observe, for the present, that there seem

to me no valid grounds for regarding what we see and hear as not

part of the physical world.

 

Realists, on the other hand, as a rule, suppress the content, and

maintain that a thought consists either of act and object alone,

or of object alone. I have been in the past a realist, and I

remain a realist as regards sensation, but not as regards memory

or thought. I will try to explain what seem to me to be the

reasons for and against various kinds of realism.

 

Modern idealism professes to be by no means confined to the

present thought or the present thinker in regard to its

knowledge; indeed, it contends that the world is so organic, so

dove-tailed, that from any one portion the whole can be inferred,

as the complete skeleton of an extinct animal can be inferred

from one bone. But the logic by which this supposed organic

nature of the world is nominally demonstrated appears to

realists, as it does to me, to be faulty. They argue that, if we

cannot know the physical world directly, we cannot really know

any thing outside our own minds: the rest of the world may be

merely our dream. This is a dreary view, and they there fore seek

ways of escaping from it. Accordingly they maintain that in

knowledge we are in direct contact with objects, which may be,

and usually are, outside our own minds. No doubt they are

prompted to this view, in the first place, by bias, namely, by

the desire to think that they can know of the existence of a

world outside themselves. But we have to consider, not what led

them to desire the view, but whether their arguments for it are

valid.

 

There are two different kinds of realism, according as we make a

thought consist of act and object, or of object alone. Their

difficulties are different, but neither seems tenable all

through. Take, for the sake of definiteness, the remembering of a

past event. The remembering occurs now, and is therefore

necessarily not identical with the past event. So long as we

retain the act, this need cause no difficulty. The act of

remembering occurs now, and has on this view a certain essential

relation to the past event which it remembers. There is no

LOGICAL objection to this theory, but there is the objection,

which we spoke of earlier, that the act seems mythical, and is

not to be found by observation. If, on the other hand, we try to

constitute memory without the act, we are driven to a content,

since we must have something that happens NOW, as opposed to the

event which happened in the past. Thus, when we reject the act,

which I think we must, we are driven to a theory of memory which

is more akin to idealism. These arguments, however, do not apply

to sensation. It is especially sensation, I think, which is

considered by those realists who retain only the object.* Their

views, which are chiefly held in America, are in large measure

derived from William James, and before going further it will be

well to consider the revolutionary doctrine which he advocated. I

believe this doctrine contains important new truth, and what I

shall have to say will be in a considerable measure inspired by

it.

 

* This is explicitly the case with Mach’s “Analysis of

Sensations,” a book of fundamental importance in the present

connection. (Translation of fifth German edition, Open Court Co.,

1914. First German edition, 1886.)

 

William James’s view was first set forth in an essay called “Does

‘consciousness’ exist?”* In this essay he explains how what used

to be the soul has gradually been refined down to the

“transcendental ego,” which, he says, “attenuates itself to a

thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a name for the fact that

the ‘content’ of experience IS KNOWN. It loses personal form and

activity—these passing over to the content—and becomes a bare

Bewusstheit or Bewusstsein uberhaupt, of which in its own right

absolutely nothing can be said. I believe (he continues) that

‘consciousness,’ when once it has evaporated to this estate of

pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It

is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among

first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a

mere echo, the faint rumour left behind by the disappearing

‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy”(p. 2).

 

* “Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods,”

vol. i, 1904. Reprinted in “Essays in Radical Empiricism”

(Longmans, Green & Co., 1912), pp. 1-38, to which references in

what follows refer.

 

He explains that this is no sudden change in his opinions. “For

twenty years past,” he says, “I have mistrusted ‘consciousness’

as an entity; for seven or eight years past I have suggested its

non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its

pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience. It seems to me

that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally

discarded”(p. 3).

 

His next concern is to explain away the air of paradox, for James

was never wilfully paradoxical. “Undeniably,” he says,

“‘thoughts’ do exist.” “I mean only to deny that the word stands

for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand

for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality

of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are

made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a

function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the

performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That

function is KNOWING”(pp. 3-4).

 

James’s view is that the raw material out of which the world is

built up is not of two sorts, one matter and the other mind, but

that it is arranged in different patterns by its interrelations,

and that some arrangements may be called mental, while others may

be called physical.

 

“My thesis is,” he says, “that if we start with the supposition

that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a

stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff

‘pure experience,’ then knowing can easily be explained as a

particular sort of relation towards one another into which

portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a

part of pure experience; one of its ‘terms’ becomes the subject

or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the

object known”(p. 4).

 

After mentioning the duality of subject and object, which is

supposed to constitute consciousness, he proceeds in italics:

“EXPERIENCE, I BELIEVE, HAS NO SUCH INNER DUPLICITY; AND THE

SEPARATION OF IT INTO CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTENT COMES, NOT BY WAY

OF SUBTRACTION, BUT BY WAY OF ADDITION”(p. 9).

 

He illustrates his meaning by the analogy of paint as it appears

in a paint-shop and as it appears in a picture: in the one case

it is just “saleable matter,” while in the other it “performs a

spiritual function. Just so, I maintain (he continues), does a

given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of

associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of

‘consciousness’; while in a different context the same undivided

bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an

objective ‘content.’ In a word, in one group it figures as a

thought, in another group as a thing”(pp. 9-10).

 

He does not believe in the supposed immediate certainty of

thought. “Let the case be what it may in others,” he says, “I am

as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of

thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only

a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to

consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The ‘I think’

which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the

‘I breathe’ which actually does accompany them”(pp. 36-37).

 

The same view of “consciousness” is set forth in the succeeding

essay, “A World of Pure Experience” (ib., pp. 39-91). The use of

the phrase “pure experience” in both essays points to a lingering

influence of idealism. “Experience,” like “consciousness,” must

be a product, not part of the primary stuff of the world. It must

be possible, if James is right in his main contentions, that

roughly the same stuff, differently arranged, would not give rise

to anything that could be called “experience.” This word has been

dropped by the American realists, among whom we may mention

specially Professor R. B. Perry of Harvard and Mr. Edwin B. Holt.

The interests of this school are in general philosophy and the

philosophy of the sciences, rather than in psychology; they have

derived a strong impulsion from James, but have more interest

than he had in logic and mathematics and the abstract part of

philosophy. They speak of “neutral” entities as the stuff out of

which both mind and