I do not believe a psychologist would go as far as to admit that a
definite correlation of elements as specific and ordered as that of
Mr. Russell's statement is a primitive psychological datum. Many would
doubtless hold that patches of colored extensity, sounds, kinaesthetic
qualities, etc., are psychologically much more primitive than, say, a
table, to say nothing of a group of objects in space or a series of
events in time; they would say, accordingly, that there is a real
problem as to how we infer or construct the latter on the basis of the
former. At the same time I do not believe that they would deny that
their own knowledge of the existence and nature of the ultimate and
irreducible qualities of sense is the product of a long, careful, and
elaborate analysis to which the sciences of physiology, anatomy, and
controlled processes of experimental observation have contributed. The
ordinary method of reconciling these two seemingly inconsistent
positions is to assume that the original sensible data of experience,
as they occurred in infancy, have been overlaid by all kinds of
associations and inferential constructions so that it is now a work of
intellectual art to recover them in their innocent purity.
Now I might urge that as matter of fact the reconstruction of the
experience of infancy is itself an inference from present experience
of an objective world, and hence cannot be employed to make a problem
out of the knowledge of the existence of that world. But such a retort
involves just the dialectic excursus which I am here anxious to avoid.
I am on matter-of-fact ground when I point out that the assumption
that even infancy begins with such highly discriminated particulars as
those enumerated is not only highly dubious but has been challenged by
eminent psychologists. According to Mr. James, for example, the
original datum is large but confused, and specific sensible qualities
represent the result of discriminations. In this case, the elementary
data, instead of being primitive empirical data, are the last terms,
the limits, of the discriminations we have been able to make. That
knowledge grows from a confusedly experienced external world to a
world experienced as ordered and specified would then be the teaching
of psychological science, but at no point would the mind be confronted
with the problem of inferring a world. Into the arguments in behalf of
such a psychology of original experience I shall not go, beyond
pointing out the extreme improbability (in view of what is known about
instincts and about the nervous system) that the starting-point is a
quality corresponding to the functioning of a single sense organ, much
less of a single neuronic unit of a sense organ. If one adds, as a
hypothesis, that even the most rudimentary conscious experience
contains within itself the element of suggestion or expectation, it
will be granted that the object of conscious experience even with an
infant is homogeneous with the world of the adult.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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