The Principles of Psychology

13 Introd. to Hume, §§ 146, 188. It is hard to tell just what this apostolic human being but strenuously feeble writer means by relation. Sometimes it seems to stand for system of related fact. The ubiquity of the ‘psychologist’s fallacy’ (see p. 196) in his pages, his incessant leaning on the confusion between the thing known, the thought that knows it, and the farther things known about that thing and about that thought by later and additional thoughts, make it impossible to clear up his meaning. Compare, however, utterances in the text such others as these: “The waking of Self-consciousness from the sleep of sense is an absolute new beginning, and nothing can come within the ‘crystal sphere’ of intelligence except as it is determined by intelligence. What sense is to sense is nothing for thought. What sense is to thought, it is as determined by thought. There can, therefore, be no ‘reality’ in sensation to which the world of thought can be referred.” (Edward Caird’s Philosophy of Kant, 1st ed. pp. 393-4.) “When,” says Green again, “feeling a pain or pleasure of heat to be connected with the action of approaching the fire, am I not receiving a relation of which one constituent, at any rate, is a simple sensation? The true answer is No.” “Perception, in its simplest form . . . — perception as the first sight or touch of an object in which is seen or touched is recognized — neither is nor contains sensation. ( Contemp. Rev., xxxi. pp. 746, 750.) “Mere sensation is in truth a phrase that represents no reality.” “Mere feeling, then, as a matter unformed by thought, has no place in the world of facts, in the cosmos of possible experience.” (Proglegomena to Ethics, §§ 46, 50.) — I have expressed myself a little more fully on this subject in mind, x. 27 ff.