Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/439

Manifestly not all. But in some cases the discrimination is easy to make, in some cases surpassingly hard. It is clear enough that the cognitive function will be ascribed to beliefs and not to imaginations — that is, to those mental states only which possess that psychological differentia which we have to some extent discussed above. But in cases not exclusively of thought, in cases where there is an admixture of emotion or sensation, the problem is more perplexing. In the matter of our moral judgments, we do not apparently seek in outward and objective actions a counterpart for the approval or disapproval with which the thought of them is suffused; yet to deny the external reality of right and wrong is to utter a revolutionary proposition. As regards another class of judgments, we do not apparently look in the object for the aesthetic relish or disrelish which is sometimes so poignant an accompaniment of our conception of it; yet not everybody is prepared to say that beauty and ugliness are in no sense independent outer facts. To the unending controversies over our sensory perception of the outer world which have so often returned to vex the philosophic mind — whether it is cognitive, how far it is cognitive, in what sense it is cognitive — it is only necessary to refer. To set down the analyses of these cases which I should offer, is forbidden by the compass of this article. I can only ask the reader to notice that they present no new difficulties — I should myself say that they lose some of the old — when they are approached with the present terms and presuppositions. And in particular I would point out once again that this argument, if well-founded, does not close the question of the independent existence of matter, or prejudice it on either side. If the mind contains a category or ultimate element of thought which enables it to think of existence not mental, then many of the realist's assertions may be correct; if not, his position as commonly stated is certainly wrong.

Dickinson Sergeant Miller.