Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/44

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30 F. H. BRADLEY : rather would happen, under certain conditions more or less unknown. They, in other words, are tendencies or individual laws. Certainly if phenomenalism professed to know the ultimate truth about these dispositions, and in the end really to understand them, it would end in failure and would also be quite false to itself. But, on the other hand, professing entire ignorance and the completest indifference as to their real nature, it uses these tendencies as facts, and in this it follows the example of every limited science. The disposi- tions are not phenomena, but they are legitimate fictions used to explain the happening of phenomena. I will try to put the same thing in a different way. In metaphysics I recognise in the end no distinction between the experienced and experience, and any attempt to draw such a distinction I consider to be in the end mistaken and futile. And hence there is naturally no readier way of proving my metaphysical views to be absurd than to assume dogmati- cally that this distinction holds good in metaphysics. But in psychology, since there we are not concerned with what is true in the end, I consider that this distinction is both justifiable and necessary. Beside that which at any one time is ex- perienced you have also the thing to which the experience belongs. And far from denying this, I have always taken it as a matter which is even obvious. 1 But for psychology this thing is nothing beyond the history and the group of ten- dencies which have just been mentioned. For more is not wanted, and therefore more is not admissible at least within psychology. (iii.) " But in the experienced," it may be said, " there is more than events, for there are ideas and judgments about objects, and these surely are not events." But we must, I answer, here distinguish. To say that ideas and judgments do not happen at a certain time, and that in this sense they fail to be occurrences, seems clearly contrary to fact. And again it would surely be once more contrary to fact to say that, when they happen (since they do happen), they are not also felt to happen in the soul and are not experienced as my states. But so far clearly they are events. The reality to which the ideal content is referred, that ideal content and its reference, everything in short is present in my feeling. 1 1 think that it is perhaps best to call this thing the soul, but I have no objection to the use of " subject " or even of " self " so long as it is clearly understood that you are not at once from these terms to draw certain conclusions, which I think quite false, about " object " or " not- self Another kind of mistake would be to refuse to recognise any psychical subject other than the body.