sensations or perceptions are only actual, i.e., only exist, in the moment of actual perception. Minds and the experiences of these minds are, with Mill as with Berkeley, the only two modes of existences (if, indeed, Mill would distinguish between the mind and its 'states of consciousness'); the essence of sensations is percipi. Consequently possible sensations are not to be conceived as constituting a separate genus or mode of existence; a sensation unfelt, a perception unperceived, is a contradiction in terms. The possibilities of sensation have, therefore, a merely imaginative or fictitious permanence, for, so long as they are not realized, they simply do not exist at all, – they are nothing. That is, be it understood, what consistency imperatively dictates. They cannot be more than this, unless we leave the ground of immanency altogether, and pass to the real thing of which sensation is the evidence. It is certain, however, that to Mill the permanent possibilities mean a great deal more than the 'naked possibilities'[1] which consistency allows him. Mill's possibilities have functions assigned them which only real existences can discharge. Modifications take place, Mill tells us, in our possibilities of sensation, and these modifications "are mostly quite independent of our consciousness and of our presence or absence. Whether we are asleep or awake, the fire goes out, and puts an end to that particular possibility of warmth and light. Whether we are present or absent, the corn ripens and brings a new possibility of food. Hence we speedily learn to think of Nature as made up solely of these groups of possibilities, and the active force in Nature as manifested in the modification of some of these by others." Now, we may fairly ask how a change can take place in a possibility at a time when it is admittedly only a possibility, that is to say, at a time when it does not exist. "A change in nothing," as Mr. Stout puts it, "is no change at all." Equally baseless is the notion of one of these possibilities causally modifying another at a time when, ex hypothesi, both are non-existent. The truth is that, under cover of the
- ↑ The phrase is Mr. Stout's, in an acute criticism of Mill's doctrine (Mind, XV, 23-25), to which I am indebted in this paragraph.
