The Physical Basis of Mind: Being the Second Series of Problems of Life and Mind.Lewes, George Henry
Philosophy
The Physical Basis of Mind: Being the Second Series of Problems of Life and Mind.
Lewes, George Henry
Mind and body; Psychophysiology
artifice that the objective can be divorced from the subjective. Matter
_is_ for us the Felt; its Qualities are differences of Feeling.
6. Not that this result is to be interpreted as freeing our Theoretic
Conception from its objective side, and landing us in Idealism,
which suppresses the real universe. The denial of all reality apart
from our minds, is a twofold mistake: it confounds the conception of
general relations with particular relations, declaring that because
the External in its relation to the sentient organism can only be
what it is felt to be, therefore it can have no _other_ relations to
other individual reals. This is the first mistake. The second is the
disregard of the constant presence of the objective real in every fact
of Feeling: the Not-Self is emphatically present in every consciousness
of Self.
The legitimate conclusion is neither that of Dualism nor of Idealism,
but what I have named Reasoned Realism (_Problems_, Vol. I. p. 201),
which reconciles Common Sense with Speculative Logic, by showing that
although the _truth_ of things (their _Wahrheit_) is just what we
perceive in them (our _Wahrnehmung_), yet their _reality_ is this, and
much more than this. _Things_ are what they are felt to be; and what
they are thought to be, when thoughts are symbols of the perceptions.
Idealism declares that they are _nothing but_ this. It is against this
_nothing but_ that Common Sense protests; and the protest is justified
by Reasoned Realism, which, taking a comprehensive survey of the facts,
thus answers the idealist: “Your synthesis is imperfect, since it
does not include _all_ the data--notably it excludes the fact of an
objective or Not-Self element in every feeling. You may, conceivably,
regard the whole universe as nothing but a series of changes in your
consciousness; but you cannot hope to convince me that I myself am
simply a change in yourself, or that my body is only a fleeting image
in your mind. Hence although I conclude that the Not-Self is to you, as
to me, undivorceable from Self, inalienable from Feeling, in so far as
it is felt, yet there must nevertheless be for both of us an existence
not wholly coextensive with our own. _My_ world may be my picture of
it; _your_ world may be your picture of it; but there is something
common to both which is more than either--an existent which has
different relations to each. _You_ are not _me_, nor is the pictured
Cosmos _me_, although I picture it. Looking at you and it, I see a vast
whole of which you are a small part; and such a part I conclude myself
to be. It is at once a picture and the pictured; at once subjective and
objective. To me all your modes of existence are objective aspects,
which, drawing from my own experience, I believe to have corresponding
subjective aspects; so that your emotions, which to me are purely
physical facts, are to you purely mental facts. And psychological
analysis assures me that all _physical facts are mental facts expressed
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