manner with the equally undoubted causal relations of that brain to the objects external to it.
Avenarius’ detailed analysis of the natural point of view, of the attitude, that is to say, of pure and complete experience, and of its relation to the scientific, I shall now proceed to state. As far as possible I shall avoid the technicalities of Avenarius’ special terminology.
I with all my thoughts and feelings find myself in the midst of a spatial environment.[1] This environment is composed of manifold elements which stand in relations of dependence to one another. Within it I also find my fellow-men. They interfere with the common environment, altering certain parts of it and maintaining others, and of all their actions they through words and gestures reveal the intention and reason. In everything they agree with myself. I accordingly believe that they are beings like myself, and that I am myself a being like them. The spatial world which thus includes both myself and others is for ordinary consciousness a something given, existing, familiar, known, lasting on in thought, constantly rediscovered as fact, and in all its repetitions remaining the same.
This natural consciousness is composed of two elements which from a logical point of view are of very different value, namely, of an experience and of an hypothesis. The experienced—das Vorgefundene—includes, as has just been said, the bodies of my fellow-men. The hypothesis lies in the interpretation which I give to the movements of my fellow-men, in the interpretation that they are expressive, that is, that they are dependent on feeling and will. This hypothetical element can be eliminated. I can, by an effort, think of my fellow-men as being merely automata, extraordinarily complex but without thought and feeling. Our reason for rejecting this attitude is not its unnaturalness or its unfruitfulness. Apart altogether from the difficulties of consistently developing such a view, there is a valid reason for regarding it as false. For, if the elimination of the hypothesis is suggested by its formal logical character as hypothesis (in distinction from experience), its retention is enforced by its actual agreement with experience. In the sole case in which through personal experience I am acquainted in all its relations with the movements of that mechanism which is named ‘man,’ I find it in definite relations to thoughts, feelings, volitions, etc. The denial of the hypothesis therefore involves a theory, equally hypothetical, which in its content is further
- ↑ Der Menschliche Weltbegriff, § 6 ff.
