Norman Kemp Smith

“ With the elimination of all introjection both animism and subjectivism, and together with them every vestige of dualism, would, he claims, entirely vanish, leaving that pure experience out of which through introjection they originally emerged. To eliminate introjection is to overthrow both agnosticism and spiritualism, indeed every philosophy which asserts that there are realities which cannot be completely known or problems that cannot be completely solved by ideal completion of the existing sciences. ”

“ The empirical fact that our apprehension of the object varies together with the brain-state has led to the quite illegitimate assumption, for which there is no evidence, that it likewise is an effect caused by the object. We transform the merely logical functional relation, according to which our world as a whole and in all its parts varies together with changes in this particular part of itself, into a causal relation between our world conceived as an effect and the brain as its external cause. We duplicate the one given reality into an external world and its internal representation. ”

“ Animism is not the source of the distinction between soul and body but only the first and crudest attempt to comprehend and define their interrelations. To say, as Tylor and Avenarius both do, that the real grounds for the conception of the soul lie in primitive thinking, and that all later attempts to develop it fail to strengthen the grounds upon which it was adopted by the savage mind, is a grotesque misrepresentation of the history of human thought. ”

“ The subject-matter of inquiry remains, however, objective throughout: all we have to do with is, on the one hand, the causal relation of objects to one another and to the nervous system, and on the other the functional relation of states of the nervous system to the complete experience which includes this whole spatial environment with all its causal relations within itself. Throughout we are dealing with reality, and with a reality in which there appears no dualism, and therefore no insoluble problems. ”

“ As we have already observed, two points of view are possible without desertion of pure experience. From the absolute point of view, each individual describes reality just as he finds it. But since this, as in the above instance, often leads to contradictory assertions, we are frequently forced to reinterpret it in the fuller light of the relative point of view. ”

“ In overcoming the opposition of subject and object he very seriously misrepresents it. When, on the one hand, he identifies the opposition of subject and object with the distinction between character and content, by using these new and quite general terms, and by describing character and content as inseparable aspects of every experience, he escapes the duty of analysing the varied and complex forms in which they are related in special cases. ”

“ It leads us not only to what has not been experienced but to what can never by any possibility be experienced by beings like ourselves. But here again the ambiguities of the term experience come to Avenarius’ rescue. He argues that thought is as genuine a form of experience as sense-perception, and so in the end falls back on the timeworn argument of subjective idealism, that thought and reality are inseparable, because reality can only be conceived in thought, and thought involves the presence of the thinker. ”

“ But if the self has no conception of inner experience or of perception as something distinguishable from the objects apprehended, it could not invent the distinction by any amount of reflexion upon the spatial externality of objects to the bodies of others. Also, it is not clear why the spatial externality of objects to our own body should not in itself, without this roundabout argument through other selves, suffice to direct our attention to so fundamental a distinction as that between objects and the perception of them. ”

“ Throughout the Kritik, and indeed in all cases in which he is not directly engaged in defending his monistic view of experience, he practically equates the self with the brain. As the brain is an agent that reacts upon its environment and yet at the same time is an object existing in space, it very conveniently combines his two conflicting views of the self—as subject or character when it is felt as active and as self or content when it is experienced as object. ”

“ For when he allows as legitimate the demand that experience be ideally completed in thought, he makes an admission which he cannot successfully combine with his assertion that nothing exists save in relation to the self. The ideal completion of given reality which results from the analysis of material bodies into elements which no human senses can apprehend, or from following the earth back to a time when no human being existed upon it, is, strictly, not a completion of experience but only of what is experienced. ”

“ The language which he employs to express the distinction has been created in the course of philosophical inquiry and as such is thoroughly misleading. Primitive man and the child do not use so general a term as perception or experience. They say ‘I see the object’ or ‘I touch it,’ and thus always keep in view that complexity of relations by which soul and body, mind and object, are interconnected. And no better illustration of this fact could be obtained than the animistic conception of the soul as depicted by Tylor. ”

“ By identifying subjectivity with character he is enabled to treat subjectivity as an aspect that colours, quite indifferently, any and every objective content, and therefore as yielding nothing that can constitute the self as a self-centred reacting agent. ”

“ We may get back to a stage at which the child does not distinguish self and not-self, inner and outer, but the differentiating process by which its confused experience is articulated through these distinctions does not seem to be vitiated at some particular stage in its development, but rather constantly to advance towards a more and more definite, more and more exact, appreciation both of the opposition between self and not-self and of their interrelations. ”

“ Avenarius will have nothing to do with the solution offered by subjective idealism—that our experience as purely subjective may vary simultaneously with those brain-states which real external objects have produced. That solution rests on a dualism which Avenarius denounces as ungrounded and absolutely false. Our experienced world is reality, and its functional relation to its own component, the brain, must therefore be reconcilable in some other manner with the equally undoubted causal relations of that brain to the objects external to it. ”

“ He shares Avenarius’ belief in a primitive state of pure and true experience. Though the starting-point of human experience is the ‘unaufgeschlossenes Ei des Glaubens,’ in which the whole truth of the Universe is contained in germ, “it was so unstable that it yielded to every idle suggestion, so uncertain of itself that it fell victim to every deceptive appearance, so little capable of grasping the parts simultaneously with the whole, that every attempt to enter more fully into the parts caused it to lose the meaning of the whole. ”

“ Though the absolute standpoint states nothing which is not true, and though in experience we apprehend objects as independent of the self, we never experience them save in relation to the self. The absolute standpoint is therefore reached only by abstraction from complete experience. Further, Avenarius refuses to recognise any such thing as the perception of an object. The only reality that can exist is experience, and experience has the two inseparable aspects, inner and outer, psychical and physical, perception and object perceived, thought and object thought about. ”

“ From this point of view Avenarius seeks to interpret the progress of philosophy as an inevitable development of animism through more and more subtilised forms of spiritualism back to naturalism. Philosophy, as it develops the conception of spirit, passes by completion of the dualism between it and all the objects of possible experience into agnosticism, and agnosticism, by elimination of the spiritualistic opposition of appearance and reality which it has unconsciously retained, returns to the naturalism of pure experience. ”

“ The world thus experienced is apprehended as having a past that survives itself in thought and a future that anticipates itself in knowledge, and similarly as having spatial limits that may be transcended in imagination and thought. ”

“ Just as various spectators may look out of different windows upon the same external landscape, so, the child holds, may animals and men look out through their eyes upon the actual real objects that constitute their common environment. ”

“ The most, then, we can ever do is simply to describe what we actually find as constituting reality. [18] From the absolute standpoint we describe the object just as it is presented, and from the relative point of view, while considering it as a term in a relation whose other term is the self, we must also still describe it just as it exists for us. ”

“ The true originating cause of subjective idealism seems to me to be physiological. Subjective idealism was not definitely formulated until the physiology of the nervous system had been developed by Descartes and his contemporaries; [6] and the fundamental reason which inclined them to subjective idealism may perhaps be stated in the following simple manner. So long as the eyes can be regarded as windows through which the mind can look out, every observer may directly apprehend the real external objects. ”

“ None the less Avenarius maintains as the fundamental principle of his Kritik that the only hope of a scientific treatment of mental experience lies in the development of physiology on the lines which he has sketched. Only through a scientific understanding of the brain in its relation to environment can we acquire knowledge of the ultimate nature of experience as a whole. This part of his philosophy appears to have been formed previous to the views developed in the Menschliche Weltbegriff, and to be uncritically based on the scientific teaching prevalent in his day. ”

“ At no stage is the development describable as a transition from a consistent and true experience to an impossible or illegitimate dualism. If at certain stages duality, such as that of soul and body in the animistic theories, is unduly emphasised, it can be said with equal truth that in the preceding stages the duality was unduly ignored. A duality that leads through animism to the idealism of Plato can only be reckoned an illegitimate development of thought by those who, like Avenarius, advocate a purely naturalistic interpretation of spiritual experience. ”

“ When it is asserted that an object produces a perception in us, it is assumed that it acts on the sense-organs and brain, and also upon that inner something, soul or consciousness, which introjection adds. What now is meant by ‘acting on’? It covers the conception of physical causation. There is a continuous causal relation between the object and the resulting process in the brain. By acting on the brain it causes that process. This causal relation will not, however, carry us from the brain-state to consciousness. ”

“ As Tylor has shown, and as Avenarius himself admits, the soul is not pictured by primitive man as consisting of inner experiences, nor even as the subject or bearer of such experiences, but as a duplicate of the body, itself possessing sense-organs and therefore related to objects in the same manner as the physical organism. ”

“ The only possible questions are questions which can be solved by a possible extension of experience. Insoluble problems only arise when the true and natural and primitive attitude is departed from, and such departure is in all cases due to that illegitimate process to which Avenarius has given the name, introjection. ”

“ I should further contend that the subjectivist position is not a falsification of the attitude of naive realism but a necessary step on the way to its correction. Subjective idealism may not itself be true, but the facts upon which it is based suffice to prove that naïve realism is certainly false. In the end Avenarius’ own theory breaks down because of its irreconcilability with these physiological facts. As I have tried to prove in the previous article, he only escapes them by inconsistently accepting the extreme subjectivism involved in the parallelist position. ”

“ By this limiting addition the contradictions involved in the absolute standpoint are removed. So long as the errors of introjection are avoided, this relativism is perfectly unambiguous, and it is also the only possible or consistent attitude. But when misled by a dualistic distinction between the absolute and the relative, between appearance and reality, we ask: What is the object in and for itself?—we raise an unreal, because self-contradictory, problem. ”

“ The mind must become thoroughly sophisticated by reflexion on philosophical problems before it can be brought to admit, even as a possibility, that the world immediately experienced is a merely subjective copy. ”

“ Being convinced of the closed nature of the physical world, as obedient in all its changes to the principle of the conservation of energy, he asserts as ascertained fact, that consciousness can neither intervene to modify a brain-process nor emerge from it as its effect. ”

“ As the voice of each individual comes from within him, and as each individual locates certain feelings in organs which are as a rule inside the body, the perceptions are regarded as forming an inner world. ”