George Stuart Fullerton

“ Does it not seem to follow that a man may as truly be said to see the formal element as the material, and that two men who see the same tree may with justice be said to see the same shape or arrangement of parts? In other words, may we not apply the sixth sense of the word same to the formal element in consciousness if this element is a thing capable of treatment at all? And if this formal element in a tree seen by two men is a part of the self, why may we not say that two men see a part of the same self, even though we make self mere form? ”

“ It is enough for my purpose to point out that when we say a man remembers an object we do not mean merely to indicate the presence in his imagination of a resembling picture, but to include a certain relation between this picture and an original percept.
It is not easy to describe what is present in an act of memory. When I am thinking of another man as calling to mind something from his past experience, I bring before my own mind two pictures, one representing his original percept, and one his present memory-image. ”

“ For the having the idea of anything in our mind no more proves the existence of that thing, than the picture of a man evidences his being in the world, or the visions of a dream make thereby a true history. ”

“ And if consciousness testifies that it knows immediately what Dr. McCosh has maintained to be mediately known, he must hold that its revelation is false and delusive. It certainly seems to me that my consciousness reveals the ink-stand before me as it does not reveal the part of my body with which the mind has "come together," since it does not even reveal whether this part be a point or a surface. If my knowledge of the ink-stand must rest upon my knowledge of this, and can have no greater certainty, my faith in the ink-stand must go. A tower cannot be more firm than its foundation. ”

“ I answer that a straight line has no angularity at all, and yet two straight lines may obviously make an angle; that one man is not in the least a crowd, but that one hundred men may be; that no single tree is a forest, but that many trees together do make a forest; that a uniform expanse of color is in no sense a variegated surface, but that several such together do make a variegated surface. It may be that extension is simply the name we give to several simple sense-elements of a particular kind taken together. ”

“ Though Philosophy condemns successively each attempted conception of the Absolute—though it proves to us that the Absolute is not this, nor that, nor that—though in obedience to it we negative, one after another, each idea as it arises; yet, as we cannot expel the entire contents of consciousness, there ever remains behind an element which passes into new shapes. The continual negation of each particular form and limit, simply results in the more or less complete abstraction of all forms and limits ”

“ If one thinks he has reason to believe each percept represents not merely the series of percepts, but something different, which he infers and is pleased to call the "real" thing, he may be inclined to believe that in saying he sees the same object on two occasions he is referring to this something. It must be clear to him, however that all his evidence for the sameness of this something lies in the experience I have described, and it is to this that he must point in proof that it is the same. The percepts themselves are certainly not the same in any other sense than the one given. ”

“ If by the self we do not understand a part or the whole of consciousness taken simply, but the one or the other of these regarded from some peculiar point of view, does it affect the question of the kinds of sameness we may attribute to it? It may be asserted, for example, that when we are thinking of the world of things immediately perceived as conditioned by its relation to a particular organism (also immediately perceived) —as duplicated by a pressure on the eyes, as annihilated by a blow on the head—we make these things mental, and properly include them under the head of self ”

“ Things that differ cannot be conceived as differing except in qualities, and here there is question not of qualities but of noumena. If one is to retain any appearance of consistency, he [36] must not maintain that the word same is applicable in any given sense to certain noumena and not to others. If he does so, he openly abandons his noumena to a phenomenal fate. And, as a matter of fact, I think it is plain that those believers in noumena, who distinguish them from one another, yet think of them in just the one way. ”

“ One does not in the least explain the similarity, or sameness in the fourth sense, of a number of "real" objects, by assuming a universal in a quite different world—one which could not possibly exist in the world of the objects. This solution of the problem is Platonic. The element which twenty real objects have in common must be a "real" element, or it cannot be a constituent part of each object. If it is not a constituent part of each object, it is absurd to speak of the objects as having it in common. If they have nothing in common, it is absurd to say that they are alike. ”

“ If it be proved to us that every notion of a real existence which we can frame is utterly inconsistent with itself—that matter, however conceived by us, cannot be matter as it actually is, our conception, though transfigured, is not destroyed: there remains the sense of reality, dissociated as far as possible from those special forms under which it was before represented in thought. ”

“ The conclusion that one cannot be the same with itself is based upon the supposition that sameness is a quality superadded to the other qualities of a thing; but in its first sense the word does not even serve to indicate a relation; it is merely used to point out the absence of duality. Both "a one" and "the one" may be the same with themselves perfectly well, and in saying so we do not in thought endow them with any quality not already possessed. This last error serves also as a basis to the second paradoxical position, that one cannot be like or unlike itself or other. ”

“ The object which I certainly see in relation to the body which I certainly see is what Locke would call an idea. The man's body is an idea. The idea which I assume the man to have is to me, if I remain within the sphere of the observable, an idea of the (idea) object I see. If I am to get any "real" object at all it is not by reference to observation or experience. If I am to get it by inference, some ground must be furnished for inference. Again Locke has confounded the observable with the "real." It is only on this ground that the appeal to the sense organ has any force. ”

“ In each concept there is an element which persists. It is alike impossible for this element to be absent from consciousness, and for it to be present in consciousness alone: either alternative involves unconsciousness—the one from the want of the substance; the other from the want of the form. But the persistence of this element under successive conditions, necessitates a sense of it as distinguished from the conditions, and independent of them. The sense of a something that is conditioned in every thought, cannot be got rid of, because the something cannot be got rid of. ”

“ The percept of the object which I connect in thought with the other man's body need not be wholly similar to my percept of the object. The man who has discovered that he is color-blind, does not suppose that men not similarly afflicted see just what he does in looking at a cherry tree full of ripe fruit. ”

“ The second sense of the word self would make it a complex of "real" qualities beyond, and represented by, the self as it appears in consciousness. Now, I do not think that the fact that one would attribute to the self, so considered, one class of qualities, and to the not-self another class, would, when the two "real" objects are considered in themselves, prevent one's ascribing to the former all the kinds of sameness which one may ascribe to the latter, or would justify the assumption of a new kind of sameness proper only to the former. ”

“ When we come to the question of the sameness of the Self or Ego we are, if possible, on more debatable ground than heretofore. The whole subject of our knowledge of the Self lies as yet, in the opinion of many, very much in the dark. ”

“ The Nominalistic doctrine that only individuals have real existence, and that the universal, whatever it may be, is to be sought in the mind, distinguishes between the spheres of being and denies to one what it allows to another. Of the extreme nominalistic position, that the only true universal is the word, which may be applied indifferently to several distinct objects, I shall not here speak. ”

“ So long as there is any difference left, we still have "identity in diversity"—similarity in the ordinary sense of the term, which implies a recognition of two things as two. When, however, the last difference disappears, all sense of duality must disappear with it, for any division or distinction within what remains is inadmissible. Things which are distinguished are distinguished through some difference. A sense of duality implies a discrimination between two, and where it is impossible to discriminate duality vanishes. ”

“ Should a man say that he can think of himself as unable to distinguish two things which are nevertheless two, the case, would not be materially different. The man cannot, of course, think of the two things as indistinguishable, but he may think of two things and connect with this thought the thought of himself as having an experience in which there is no consciousness of duality. ”

“ I perceive a particular object, and in a certain relation to it I perceive the body of another man. From a past experience of my own body in relation to objects and from reasoning by analogy, I have come to connect such a relation of another body to the object with the thought of another consciousness of the object as connected with that body. ”

“ One horse is one object, and so is one part of a horse. It may be said, however, that "a one" may also be used to signify a single occurrence of oneness, as distinguished from another occurrence of oneness. That any element of consciousness may be distinguished from any similar element merely by spatial or temporal differences I have argued in the first part of my monograph. Why may not then "a one" mean the oneness of this one horse, or the oneness of this part of the horse? And if it may, can "a one" of this kind have parts any more than "the one?" ”

“ The certainty that on the one hand such a Power exists, while on the other hand its nature transcends intuition and is beyond imagination, is the certainty towards which intelligence has from the first been progressing. ”

“ If, for instance, we refuse to allow to our notion of a thing "any qualitative or quantitative expression whatever," we cannot think of the thing as having reality or existence, or any mark by which it is to be distinguished from nothing at all. In this case the idea is no longer representative, for it has nothing to represent. If, on the other hand, we do not wholly destroy the noumenon, but still allow it a diluted existence of an indefinite kind, in so far as it has this, and can be represented in mind at all, it resembles the idea, and just so far may the idea stand as its representative. ”

“ If another man's body is not exactly like mine, I am not justified by argument from similarity in reading into it an exactly similar experience. It is not the similarity of the two percepts that I am thinking of chiefly when I speak of them as percepts of the same object. I am thinking of the relation in which I suppose them to stand to each other. I think of the possible existence of the one under given circumstances as conditioning the possible existence of the other. ”

“ Sensations differing in time are two, and may differ without violating any law. In marking the fact that when we say two men perceive the same thing we do not mean that the immediate object of knowledge is in the two cases strictly one, but merely that these two objects are related in a peculiar way, Aristotle draws the line between sameness in sense first and in sense sixth. ”

“ We do it in this case simply because the organism furnishes us with a convenient unit, and one much more important as a unit than as an aggregate. We can make similar units when we please, and consider their sameness without thinking of their parts. We speak of the same nation as existing through many generations, and of the same corporation as surviving many deaths. Whether the object we are considering be naturally indivisible, or composite and assumed a unit for convenience, when we speak of it as the same at two different times we are referring to the one experience. ”

“ For, though we hold indeed the objects of sense to be nothing else but ideas which cannot exist unperceived; yet we may not hence conclude they have no existence except only while they are perceived by us, since there may be some other spirit that perceives them though we do not. Wherever bodies are said to have no existence without the mind, I would not be understood to mean this or that particular mind, but all minds whatsoever. ”

“ The fact is that this "external" world, as we think it, implies the notions of before and after, in this place and that, all the distinctions and differences which make it to us a world of distinct objects. Of course it follows that things in the "external" world are thought as distinct from each other, but this does not affect my statement that distinction is impossible without difference. ”

“ Consciousness does not testify to the two classes. The common man thinks that he knows directly the things that he sees and feels, and the distinction between these things and his ideas of the things, or his sensations gathered from the things, arises only upon reflection and after a comparison of his experiences with those of other men. He sees the ink-stand in front of another man's body. He discovers that the other man sees the ink-stand—that is, has an experience like his own. ”

“ If I try to discover or to invent some new experience which I may call the true nature of the group, I am simply adding to it in thought another experience which takes its place among those the group already contains. ”

“ When a common, unreflective man, whose mind has not been, in the words of Bishop Berkeley, "debauched by learning," looks at a tree and thinks about it, he believes he sees a real tree, at a certain real distance from his body, and of a given real height and figure. It does not occur to him to make any distinction between the tree immediately perceived, and an inferred second tree, not immediately perceived, but represented by the former. ”

“ This they can do, of course, only in so far as the two sets of qualities and relations are similar. It is easy enough to see that this notion of similarity is present when we think of an idea or complex of ideas as representing a "real" thing beyond consciousness, and giving information concerning it. When, however, we sublimate our "real" thing into a noumenon and strip it of the determinations which, taken together, make up our idea of a thing, we destroy, if we are consistent and thorough-going, all notion of similarity between the two; but in doing this we destroy our noumenon altogether. ”

“ What is experienced on the second occasion is another stick, and its true nature is also just what it seems to be. If, however, by "the stick" I do not mean only the experience of one moment, but a series of experiences differing more or less from one another, then I am under no necessity to select one of them as the true nature of the stick, for its true nature is nothing more nor less than the whole group of experiences. ”

“ At the same time that by the laws of thought we are rigorously prevented from forming a conception of absolute existence; we are by the laws of thought equally prevented from ridding ourselves of the consciousness of absolute existence: this consciousness being, as we here see, the obverse of our self-consciousness. ”