the complete series could exist concretely. Apart from this, however, we cannot look upon sense-experience as a compact series, for its continuity really consists in its unity. The totum objectivum of perceptual experience is one and indivisible, for it is presented to one subject. Hence if we analyze the former into a number of separate entities, we imply that the latter is also a series of separate existences. Again the appeal must be to concrete experience. The subject is one, persisting through change. This much we realize, though the notion of separate instantaneous existences may not be a logically impossible one. Moreover, it should be noted that the object of experience is in part determined by the activity of the subject. Again it is difficult to see how this could be so if there were sense-data existing independently as separate entities, and merely passively perceived in appropriate conditions. It would probably be replied that all that can be said is that certain motor sensations are followed by changes in the other sense-data, the motor sensations themselves being part of the data. But this assertion ignores the fact that the ground of the motor sensations is the activity of the subject.
The source of the whole difficulty, then, lies in the distinction between perceptual experience and its symbolic representation. Individual experience is unique, particular, and incommunicable. In describing it symbolically, therefore, our description cannot be entirely adequate, for it is conceptual, and the conceptual must always contain some element of the general. Hence the essential privacy of concrete individual experience cannot be comprehended in a descriptive formula. Moreover, in reflecting on experience and its implications, we are bound to attack it piece-meal, and to analyze it by abstraction, on account of our intellectual limitations. This inevitably entails a certain artificial immobilizing and dissection of experience, which we effect by means of concepts. Experience is dynamic and continuous, but concepts are static and discrete, even though they be concepts of things which are themselves dynamic.
The above point is illustrated particularly clearly by what Mr. Russell calls the logical answer[1] to the objections raised
- ↑ Op. cit., Lect. V. p. 150.
