properly explain, if he can, how the 'complex presentation' called nerve and brain has arisen in his own consciousness; but how can he deal with nerve and brain as 'objective facts'? Do not nerve and brain, as 'objective facts,' belong to that 'trans-subjective' world, which, for aught the psychologist as psychologist knows, may be a pure fiction? I submit that for Mr. Seth's psychologist, who has shut himself up in his own individual consciousness, there is no nerve and brain, any more than there is a solar system or other individual conscious subjects. He is alone in the universe, and must remain alone until the epistemologist lets him out, if indeed that happy deliverance should ever take place. I fear that Mr. Seth must have had the fear of the physiological psychologist before his eyes when he destroyed the symmetry of his theory by admitting prematurely the existence of "objective facts of nerve and brain." I am aware that the physiological psychologist, like Michel Angelo, has about him a certain terribilità hard to withstand: still, one must pluck up courage, and resist the adversary. A clear-cut theory must not be sacrificed from mere lack of courage.
Let us suppose, then, that nothing has been said about the "objective facts of nerve and brain." Psychology, as we can now affirm clearly and boldly, deals only with the successive states of the individual subject, and neither affirms nor denies the reality of anything beyond those states. But, though the psychologist may preserve, and should preserve, absolute neutrality in regard to the existence of a 'trans-subjective world,' the problem must be faced by somebody, and the epistemologist is the man to do it. Are these mental states of mine, asks Mr. Seth's epistemologist, the signs or symbols of a reality lying beyond my consciousness? Are there "realities which have a different fashion of existence from the fleeting and evanescent mode of psychical states – beings or things which are in some sense permanent and independent?" With what right do we pass beyond our subjective states? What is the ground of our belief in an independent world? In a word, what is the relation of knowledge to reality?
