Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/62

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46
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. I.

entities" (facts, forces, etc.} "can sum themselves together." In another place (p. 161): "This argument of the spiritualists . . . holds good against any talk . . . which supposes a resultant consciousness to float off from the constituents per se, in the absence of a supernumerary principle of consciousness which they may affect." In yet another place (p. 331 f.): "This sort of bringing of things together into the object of a single judgment is of course essential to all thinking. . . . The thinking them is thinking them together, even if only with the result of judging that they do not belong together." This sort of "subjective synthesis" is declared "essential to knowledge as such"; and, if so, certainly to that peculiar form of knowledge which we have just seen described as memory, in the highest sense of the word. Nay: "The subjective synthesis is involved in thought's mere existence"; and only as we assume such synthesis can even a really disconnected world be known to be such.

In a note (p. 578) to the discussion of "association by similarity" we are told, "impartial redintegration connates neural processes," but "similarity is an objective relation perceived by the mind." Right in connection with the attempt to deal with this subject as a matter of "blank unmediated correspondences" between brain-processes and thoughts and feelings, an appeal is taken to some future day when "possibly" the science of nerve-physiology will clear the matter up; but here the significant confession is added: "Possibly neural laws will not suffice, and we shall need to invoke a dynamic reaction of the form of consciousness upon its content." I conceive this to be not only "possibly" so, for that indefinite future when the failure of cerebral psychology shall be made obvious to all, but also altogether and certainly so, for the immediate and necessitous present of psychological science. Indeed, it is in the study of these so-called "dynamic reactions of the form of consciousness upon its content" that a large part of scientific psychology must always consist.

If further proof were needed of the keen and comprehensive insight of Professor James into the inadequacy of his own avowed conception of psychology as a natural science, it might