never tired of insisting that the mental life is characterized, from first to last, by unity and connection, that it is never quite 'chaotic' or entirely 'raw,' never a 'mere manifold' of 'simple ideas,' but always a continuous 'stream of thought.' The distinction between the earlier and the later stages of knowledge is not, it is insisted, a distinction between absence and presence of connection, but between actual connection and insight into the connection."[1] The lesson from this fact, Professor Seth continues, is the lesson of realism. The subject does not determine the object, but is determined by it; and Kant's Copernican change of standpoint is no change after all. Now, I am convinced that this radical change of front in Professor Seth's epistemology, is due to the fact that he has been betrayed by these 'representatives of the new psychology' into their own confusion between the mental life as existing continuously, and the unity of Thought. If by the expressions, "the mental life," "stream of thought," in the above passages, the author intends to denote the psychical process, I would reply that, as existing, it is indeed continuous, but yet is entirely raw, unrelated, and without significance for knowledge. But if these expressions are taken to denote 'the facts of our knowledge,' 'the unity of our experience,' the answer is that this truth is much older than 'the new psychology,' and is the very fact from which Kant and the Transcendentalists set out. I am here, however, neither defending Kant's way of stating his problem nor his solution of it. Indeed, the language of the Kritik is largely responsible for the view that I am combating—since it gives the impression that it is the sensations as actual existences which are held together and related by the activity of thought, and that the result of this concrete synthesis is Knowledge. No one is more fully aware than Professor Seth that a combination of particulars will never give us knowledge; but he seems for the moment to have supposed that the continuous nature of the psychological process constitutes it already a universal, and that its relations can at once be 'read off' or 'recognized.' But whether the mental phenomena with which psychology deals are discrete or continuous, they must always remain for Knowledge unrelated particulars.
J. E. Creighton.
- ↑ Philosophical Review, Vol. II, p. 550.
