surely no imperative necessity that the philosophical significance of a term should be fixed by the significance it bears in popular parlance; if there were, it would fare badly with a large number of philosophical expressions. It has been lately argued, for example, that since 'blue' would be "rightly said " to be part of the content of a blue flower, therefore, when we speak of blue as the content of the sensation of blue, we cannot mean to assert that it has to the sensation in question any relation which it does not have to the blue flower, that what we do assert is that it has to the other element in the sensation of blue, namely, 'consciousness'-the same relation which it has to the other parts of a blue flower, the relation, that is to say, of a quality to a thing.* It is perhaps worth pointing out that even if appeal is to be made to popular usage, popular usage supplies no uniform sanction for the interpretation just referred to. † We speak, for instance, of the 'contents of a glass of water,' when we certainly do not mean that the water has to the glass the relation of a quality to a thing; we speak, again, of the 'contents of a book, when still less do we intend to imply a relation of thing and quality. I am far from wishing to suggest that in either of these cases we have anything like an adequate analogy, there can be no analogue to an absolutely unique relation, yet in the second example, at any rate, we have a much nearer approach to one than in the thoroughly false parallel of thing and quality.

According to the usual psychological doctrine, the individual's point of contact with existent reality as such is to be found on the one hand in the fact of sense-perception, and on the other

* G. E. Moore, "The Refutation of Idealism," Mind, N.S., xii, p. 447 sqq.

+ Strange to say, Mr. Moore uses, further on in the same article, an illustration which confirms this statement. The image in a looking glass, although it may be said to be a content of the looking g'ass, is certainly not related to the latter as a quality to a thing. I think the comparison of an image in the looking glass with an image in the mind utterly erroneous; but that is not the point with which I am here concerned.

hand in the fact of feeling. Through means of the former, it would be maintained, we become aware of the existence of external things; through means of the latter we become aware of the existence of the experiencing self or consciousness. With this doctrine, when duly guarded and qualified, there need be no quarrel: everything, however, depends upon the interpretation we give to it and upon the care with which we scrutinise the numerous assumptions it may be the means of concealing. If, for example, any result at all is to be derived from Kant's critical procedure, this certainly should be, that the initial fact in our experience is not that of mere passive reception, the only meaning that is popularly given either to sensation or to feeling, but is of the nature of a judgment, or, in other words, is already of the nature of a content known. In such primitive judgment there is doubtless involved as a constituent what our later mature reflexion may enable us to separate off or differentiate, - the bare affirmation, namely, of existence,-"something is." But the moment our interpretation of the doctrine in question has proceded so far, we have departed altogether from the familiar criterion to which appeal is so often made, the immediately given character of sensations or feelings as factual existences. We must regard such factual existences as furnishing at the most no more than the occasion on which there arises, the circumstance on which there ensues, the assertion of existence; just by distinguishing these two we have cut ourselves off from having recourse to the factual existences as though they were themselves elements in what is immediately known or experienced. We must accept this thought of existence, -for a thought from the beginning it may be said to be, in all its generality, as indicating at first what is neither internal nor external, as containing originally no reference, explicitly or implicitly, of presentations or representations either to a mind or to an object other than mind. That reference, which constitutes so characteristic a feature of our mature experience, is evidently a product of later growth, the consequence of a long process of mental development, it is not involved in the earlier stages of intelligence; it is not, therefore, to be conceived as a peculiarity characteristic of the nature of knowledge or experience as such. Primitive intelligence does not separate out, in the manner possible for intelligence of an advanced type, the abstract judgment of existence from its concrete surroundings; it does not distinguish the content apprehended from what is other than such content; it is only gradually that either the notion of self or of what is other than self begins to make its appearance. To trace the way in which there comes to be added to the phenomena of primitive or immediate experience this secondary or mediate factor of reference to self and to other than self is part of the business of the science of psychology. Here I would only remark that it is surely a vulgar prejudice to suppose that any element in knowledge is in the smallest degree less certain or reliable because it can be shewn to be derivative and not, so to speak, an intuitive datum present at the start.

The consistent working out of the fundamental distinction between psychical states as existent facts and the contents apprehended thereby enables us, then, it seems to me, to lay down two propositions of far-reaching consequence in respect to the cardinal principle of modern idealism. On the one hand, we reach the result that the inner nature or character of a psychical state, as an existent, is never itself a part of the content apprehended by means of it, and on the other hand, that, inasmuch as the apprehended content can never be severed from the act by which it is apprehended, the nature or character of so-called things, as existents, is never itself a part of the content which contains a reference to them. I turn now to a brief notice of some of the objections that may be urged against each of these propositions.

As regards the former, in the first place, we are referred to the experience of feeling, and here, it is contended, the esse of the psychical state is obviously identical with percipi, a pain exists only in being felt, the existence of pain consists in our being conscious of it. I reply, the contention, if intended as a reductio ad absurdum of the proposition we are considering, simply begs the whole question at issue. No one dreams of disputing the palpable truism that a pain is felt: the question is whether the felt pain is identical in nature with the psychical state in and through which it is felt. And I cannot see that those who apparently wish to maintain that it is, have advanced the slightest argument in support of their contention. Many psychological theories have been formulated of the psychical conditions giving rise to pleasure and pain. Mr.. Bradley, for example, has attempted to connect pleasure with the expansion or harmony of the self, pain with repression of the self or with the tension that arises in consequence of such repression. Now, I do not suppose that anyone would venture to assert that what is actually experienced in our feeling of pain is tension or strain, that tension or strain is the experience of which we are directly and immediately aware. But if,, admittedly, we are not directly aware of this assumed quality of the psychical states in and through which we experience pain, why should it be supposed that we are directly and immediately aware of the nature of that which is in a condition of strain or tension? Again, so far from landing us in the position maintained by Dr. Ward, which Mr. Bradley criticises, that pleasures and pains can never be objectified, it seems to me that in order to conceive of such objectification as in any sense possible, we must necessarily admit that in being aware of feeling we are aware of a content, however vague and illdefined that content may be. In the second place, it is objected that our proposition virtually amounts to a denial of the fact of self-consciousness, that, if the nature of the psychical states which constitute the self cannot be directly experienced,. the logical consequence would be to deny the possibility of an awareness of self altogether. But what, I would ask, are we to understand by an "awareness of self?" Is the "self," which

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is here referred to, merely a succession of psychical states, regarded in abstraction from the contents on account of which alone those states have any raison d'être in the realm of reality? Obviously not. But if by "self be meant, as apparently is meant, that relatively permanent background of feelings and thoughts and desires, which gradually comes to be differentiated from the experience of what we call "external things," I fail to see where the difficulty is supposed to lie. The former no less than the latter are admittedly, so far as we are aware of them, experienced contents, and the refusal to identify the contents in either case with the existent psychical states through which they are apprehended, does not, so far as I can discover, affect the question of the knowability of such contents in the slightest degree. It might as well be argued that we can have no experience of our own bodily organism, if the nature of the material of which it is composed is not directly apprehended by us. Surely, what we really mean by the "self" is never the merely psychical mechanism through which experience of any sort, whether of self or not self, is mediated. If to know "the self as knower, the self as experient" means to be directly aware of the nature of the processes through which it knows. or experiences, then certainly I admit such self-knowledge to be impossible; but inasmuch as it is nowhere to be found, the admission does not seem to be very damaging one. "Unknowable," in any ultimate sense, there is no reason for supposing such processes to be, any more than there is for supposing the nature of what we call physical processes to be unknowable, the point is, that, such knowledge of them as may conceivably be obtained will not in either case be direct, immediate, intuitive. Moreover, there is surely no means of reconciling* the Cartesian position that states or activities of mind are known directly, immediately, as such, and as the self, with

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* See Mr. Boyce Gibson's paper in the present volume, with which cf. his Philosophical Introduction to Ethics, p. 116 sqq.