Can our consciousness be regarded as an aggregate of elementary facts, such as sensations or as atoms of pleasure and pain? If so, what aggregate of sensations forms a judgment, such as, “This man is my father?” Evidently here is indeed an aggregate of sensations represented, but also something more. What is this more? A product, it may be said, formed through association from innumerable past experiences. Granted for the moment; but the question is not as to the origin of this consciousness, but as to its analysis. This judgment, whereby a present sensation is regarded as in definite relation to real past experiences, as a symbol, not merely of actual sensations now remembered, not merely of future sensations not yet experienced, but of a reality wholly outside of the individual consciousness, this fact of acknowledging something not directly presented as nevertheless real — is this act possibly to be regarded as a mere aggregate of elementary mental states? Surely, at best, the act can be so regarded only in the sense in which a word is an aggregate of letters. For and in the one simple momentary consciousness, all these elements exist as an aggregate, but as an aggregate formed into one whole, as the matter of a single act. But in themselves, without the very act of unity in which they are one, these elements would be merely an aggregate, or, in Mr. Gurney’s apt words,[1] “a rope of sand.” Our mental life then, as a union of innumerable elements into the one Self of any moment, is more than an aggregate, and can never be explained as an aggregate of elementary atoms of sensation.
- ↑ Mind for April, 1881, article, “Monism.”
