To that the reply is that neither primitive man nor the child does thus oppose inner and outer. Here again Avenarius is interpreting the words ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ in terms of the latter subjectivism of reflective consciousness. The distinction between inner and outer, between perception and object perceived, is not in itself illegitimate and false. Everything depends upon the particular manner in which it is viewed; and when Avenarius interprets the spatial metaphor and the localisation of perceptions within the body in a quite literal fashion he is guilty of ignoring the subtleties of a highly complex and very vaguely denned position. The language which he employs to express the distinction has been created in the course of philosophical inquiry and as such is thoroughly misleading. Primitive man and the child do not use so general a term as perception or experience. They say ‘I see the object’ or ‘I touch it,’ and thus always keep in view that complexity of relations by which soul and body, mind and object, are interconnected. And no better illustration of this fact could be obtained than the animistic conception of the soul as depicted by Tylor. As Tylor has shown, and as Avenarius himself admits, the soul is not pictured by primitive man as consisting of inner experiences, nor even as the subject or bearer of such experiences, but as a duplicate of the body, itself possessing sense-organs and therefore related to objects in the same manner as the physical organism. Animism is a form of naive realism, and indeed its extremest form, and just for that reason it always makes use of spatial metaphors, conceiving the inner body as related to the outer body as an individual is related to the house which he inhabits or the clothes which he wears.[1] It is not the dualising of experience, but the duplication of one of the objects experienced, that constitutes animism.
Avenarius’ assumption that experience has been at some point in the long past of the human race, and is at some stage in the life of each child, pure experience, and that this primitive experience has been vitiated in both cases by a supervening process of introjection, aided in the case of the child though not of course in the history of the race by current thought and language, has no sufficient ground either in anthropology or in child-psychology. We may get back to a stage at which the child does not distinguish self and not-self, inner and outer, but the differentiating process by which its confused experience is articulated through these distinctions does not seem to be vitiated at some particular stage in
- ↑ Cf. Menschlicher Weltbegriff, § 59.
