which is here called Neutral Monism. Neutral monism is the theory that the things commonly regarded as mental and the things commonly regarded as physical do not differ in respect of any intrinsic property possessed by the one set and not by the other, but only in respect of arrangement and context. Ideas are not mental duplicates of the physical order; they are identical with it, but considered in its mental context. The word consciousness does not stand for an entity but rather for a function; it connotes a kind of external relation and does not denote a special stuff or way of being. There is only one primal stuff or material in the world, and we call this pure experience. Thus knowing can be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. Knowing is an external relation between two bits of experience, consisting in the fact that one of them leads to the other by means of certain intermediaries. An experience may know itself in certain circumstances. The knower and the known are either (1) the selfsame piece of experience taken twice over in different contexts; or they are (2) two pieces of actual experience belonging to the same subject, with definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between them; or (3) the known is a possible experience either of that subject or another, to which the said conjunctive transitional would lead, if sufficiently prolonged.
Against this theory the author urges four chief objections (a fifth will appear in the next article). He shows that the theory is a protest against the view that external objects are known through the medium of subjective "ideas" or "images"; not directly, but in the sense at least that whatever I experience, must be part of my mind. His objections are: 1. That between for instance a color seen and the same not seen, there seems to be a difference not consisting in relations to other colors, or to other objects of experience, or to the nervous system, but in some way more immediate, more intuitively known. This would make a mind of only one experience a logical impossibility. Furthermore, this philosophy can not define the respect in which the whole of my experience is different from the things that lie outside of my experience. 2. The theory assimilates belief and judgment to sensation and presentation which when applied to error makes it "belief in the unreal," or admission of the existence of unreal things, which is a contradiction. 3. The thought of what is not in time, or a belief in a non-temporal fact, is an event in time with a definite date, which seems impossible unless it contains some constituent over and above the timeless thing thought of or believed. 4. It refuses to regard immediate experience as knowledge. It speaks of knowledge as consisting in the presence of other things capable of leading to the thing which these other things are said to know. It is knowledge of things rather than of truths, and the knowledge of things is really a knowledge of propositions in which the object is not even a constituent.
Henry Bentson.
