conception was based on subjective idealism, the theory of introjection required to be formulated only in its connexion with idealism. No direct reference is made to animism,[1] or, save very briefly, to the attitude of ordinary consciousness. In Philosophie als Denken der Welt and in the Kritik Avenarius had, however, traced all the false conceptions of dualistic metaphysic to primitive animism; and the problem which still remained for solution, and which he set himself to solve in the Menschlicher Weltbegriff, was that of accounting for, and removing, the various dualisms (between inner and outer, soul and body, mind and matter, God and the world, etc.) into which the unity of pure experience had thus been resolved. This involved explanation of the transition from pure experience to animism and from animism to subjective idealism; and by interpreting his introjectionist argument, here propounded for the first time, now in a wider and now in a narrower sense he sought to make it yield an explanation of both these vitiating transformations of experience. With the elimination of all introjection both animism and subjectivism, and together with them every vestige of dualism, would, he claims, entirely vanish, leaving that pure experience out of which through introjection they originally emerged. To eliminate introjection is to overthrow both agnosticism and spiritualism, indeed every philosophy which asserts that there are realities which cannot be completely known or problems that cannot be completely solved by ideal completion of the existing sciences. The kind of completion which Avenarius would regard as satisfactory has already been indicated in the previous article.[2]
The introjectionist argument is stated in the Menschlicher Weltbegriff[3] in much the same manner as in the Bemerkungen, but is developed to a very different conclusion.[4] The conclusion now drawn is not that the world perceived is a mental copy of external reality but only that the perception of external objects is in the mind. Since the object which
- ↑ Except in a very significant note (Vierteljahrsschrift, vol. xviii., Bemerkungen, pp. 153-154) which seems to indicate consciousness of the unsatisfactory manner in which introjection and animism had been connected in the Menschlicher Weltbegriff (cf. § 56).
- ↑ Cf. previous article, pp. 25-26.
- ↑ § 38 ff.
- ↑ The two views do not seem to have been distinguished by previous writers. The statement of the theory given by Ward (Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii., p. 172) is somewhat indefinite. Taylor (Elements of Metaphysics, pp. 81, 299) is more explicit, but though apparently basing his statement on the Menschlicher Weltbegriff seems to have read into it the view of the Bemerkungen. Stout, on the other hand, bases his statement entirely on the latter.
