tory one. From its point of view any and every possible experience can be consistently interpreted. But if so, why should one of the most universal of experiences, the experience, namely, that objects are always external to the body of the observer, or at least, as regards the parts of his own body, to the organ through which they are apprehended, inevitably lead the mind to draw self-contradictory conclusions? Why should such inconsistent conclusions be drawn from a consistent experience?
Dr. Stout in his article on introjection in Baldwin’s Philosophical Dictionary has quoted a passage in which Herbart has anticipated Avenarius’ argument. “A child sees a dog run whimpering from a stick which is raised to strike it. Immediately the child locates (hineindenkt) the pain of the blow in the dog; but as a future pain, for the dog is not yet struck. He also locates the stick in the dog, for the dog runs away from it; not, however, the real stick for it is outside the dog, but the stick without its reality, that is the image of the stick. . . . For an image is distinguished from the object represented by the fact that though not possessing its reality it yet resembles it in every other respect. In this way, then, the child is led to ascribe the representation (Vorstellung) of the stick to the dog and to distinguish it from its object. The child now possesses a representation of a representation, a very easy but indispensable step in the development of self-consciousness.”[1] This is exactly Avenarius’ argument, but the more concrete form of statement enforces the obvious objection that no child ever does argue in this way. A child would never dream of thus setting a mental copy of the stick inside the dog. The mind must become thoroughly sophisticated by reflexion on philosophical problems before it can be brought to admit, even as a possibility, that the world immediately experienced is a merely subjective copy. The child feels no difficulty in regarding objects as immediately apprehended by all observers. Just as various spectators may look out of different windows upon the same external landscape, so, the child holds, may animals and men look out through their eyes upon the actual real objects that constitute their common environment. The observers are different and so accordingly are their apprehensions or experiences, but the immediate contents of these experiences are the identical real objects. There is, of course, much difficulty as to how the child conceives the distinction between the objects and his experience of them, and as to
- ↑ Psychologie als Wissenschaft, § 133.
