experienced. The reality of everything beyond my own existence is thus of necessity beyond experience, for the experiences of each being are simply its own states, its own life. By the use of this term, therefore, in connection with knowledge, the trans-subjective reference is cut off in advance before the formal discussion begins.
This is so neatly illustrated in our home-grown philosophy that I make no apology for using Professor Bain's position to drive my argument home. Professor Bain shall be answered out of the mouth of Mr. Spencer. As is well known, Professor Bain lays great stress, and rightly so, on the contrast between passive and active sensation as a source of our belief in an external world. "Movement," he says, "gives a new character to our whole percipient existence." "The sense of resistance is the deepest foundation of our notion of externality."[1] In this Mr. Spencer is quite at one with him. But Mr. Spencer accepts this experience as the sufficient evidence of 'an existence beyond consciousness' – of 'something which resists.' Professor Bain is more subtle. The sense of effort and of effort resisted is no doubt contrasted with 'purely passive sensation,' but the contrast is still within consciousness. Our experiences of resistance are, after all, just so many 'feels,' so many subjective changes. "The exertion of our own muscular power is the fact constituting the property called resistance. Of matter as independent of our feeling of resistance, we 'can have no conception; the rising up of this feeling within us amounts to everything that we mean by resisting matter." Those 'feels,' then, are the material world. "We are not at liberty to say without incurring contradiction that our feeling of expended energy is one thing, and a resisting material world another and a different thing; that other and different thing is by us wholly unthinkable."[2] Or as he puts it more generally – "knowledge means a state of mind; the notion of material things is a mental fact. We are incapable even of discussing the existence of an independent material world; the very act is a contradiction."[3]
