ON THE NATURE OF THE NOTION OF EXTERNALITY. ence to order by regarding sensations as at least refer- ring to things and events which exist, or run their course, independently of consciousness. This conception constitutes the notion of externality. (The principle of externality, re- garded as an assertion of fact, is a psychological assertion : it does not express a primordial belief, but sets forth the general character of judgment.) As regards the " absence of routine," etc., this may be otherwise expressed by saying : " Sensations interrupt what- ever routine there may otherwise be in mental phenomena considered simply as such " ; if this is understood without prejudice to the further fact, that the succeeding psychical states (so far as they are not themselves sensations) are the outcome of the action between the sensation and the state of the mind at the moment of receiving the impres- sion. These two complementary facts may be presented under their physical aspect by saying, that the brain is not a self-contained cosmos which runs its own course in- dependently of all else ; but is, on the contrary, amenable to influences from the rest of the external world, the changes wrought in it being the outcome of these influences as well as of its own nature and previous history. It may here be pointed out that since perception, as distinguished from mere sensation, always involves the idea of a regular connexion of sensible attributes, and since this connexion cannot be reduced to laws of a purely subjective nature ; it follows that the development of sensation into perception already implies the act of externalisation. As regards the implication of the phrase " independently of consciousness " : it will, I think, be clear from the whole course of the preceding 1 argument, that we do not first think of the object of perception as something separate from consciousness and then think of it as continuing in- dependently thereof; but, on the contrary, we have to re- gard the percept as something more than a mere state of consciousness, as being a " state of consciousness " with the difference of marking as it were a point of contact with something not itself a psychical state, because we have to conceive the physical world, as a whole, as persisting in- dependently of consciousness a state of consciousness that persists apart from consciousness being a contradic- tion in terms. The idea, then, of persistence 2 apart from 1 See especially pp. 212-213. "The word "persistence " is here used in the sense in which Spencer uses it in his formula of the Persistence of Force i.e. to denote ex- istence prior, as well as subsequent, to the particular manifestation.
