Page:Mind and the Brain (1907).djvu/108

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reflection which constructs the notion of the subject, and it is this which afterwards introduces this construction into the states of consciousness; in this way the state of consciousness, by receiving this notion of subject, acquires a character of duality it did not previously possess. There are, in short, two separate acts of consciousness, and one is made the subject of the other. “Primitively,” says Rabier, “there is neither representative nor represented; there are sensations, representations, facts of consciousness, and that is all. Nothing is more exact, in my opinion, than this view of Condillac’s:—that primitively, the inanimate statue is entirely the sensation that it feels. To itself it is all odour and all savour; it is nothing more, and this sensation includes no duality for the consciousness. It is of an absolute simplicity.”

Two arguments may be advanced in favour of this opinion. The first is one of logic. We have divided all knowledge into two groups—objects of cognition, and acts of cognition. What is the subject of cognition? Does it form a new group? By no means; it forms part of the first group, of the object group; for it is something to be known.

Our second argument is one of fact. It consists in remembering that which in practice we understand by the subject of cognition; or rather, meta-