to a place among first principles.  Those who
still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the
faint rumor left behind by the disappearing
'soul' upon the air of philosophy.  During the
past year, I have read a number of articles
whose authors seemed just on the point of abandoning
the notion of consciousness,(1) and substituting
for it that of an absolute experience
not due to two factors.  But they were not

---

   1 Articles by Bawden, King, Alexander, and others.  Dr. Perry is
frankly over the border
---

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quite radical enough, not quite daring enough
in their negations.  For twenty years past I
have mistrusted 'consciousness' as an entity;
for seven or eight years past I have suggested
its non-existence to my students, and tried to
give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities
of experience.  It seems to me that the hour
is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded.

     To deny plumply that 'consciousness' exists
seems so absurd on the face of it -- for undeniably
'thoughts' do exist -- that I fear some
readers will follow me no farther.  Let me then
immediately explain that I mean only to deny
that the word stands for an entity, but to insist
most emphatically that it does stand for a
function.  There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff
or quality of being, contrasted with that of
which material objects are made, out of which
our thoughts of them are made; but there is a
function in experience which thoughts perform,
and for the performance of which this

4
quality of being is invoked.  That function is
_knowing_.  'Consciousness' is supposed necessary
to explain the fact that things not only
are, but get reported, are known.  Whoever
blots out the notion of consciousness from his
list of first principles must still provide in some
way for that function's being carried on.

                              I

     My thesis is that if we start with the supposition
that there is only one primal stuff or
material in the world, a stuff of which everything
is composed, and if we call that stuff
'pure experience,' the knowing can easily be
explained as a particular sort of relation
towards one another into which portions of
pure experience may enter.  The relation itself
is a part of pure experience; one if its 'terms'
becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge,
the knower,(1) the other becomes the object
known.  This will need much explanation
before it can be understood.  The best way to

---

   1 In my _Psychology_ I have tried to show that we need no knower
other than the 'passing thought.'  [_Principles of Psychology, vol. I,
pp. 338 ff.]
---

5
get it understood is to contrast it with the alternative
view; and for that we may take the
recentest alternative, that in which the evaporation
of the definite soul-substance has proceeded
as far as it can go without being yet
complete.  If neo-Kantism has expelled earlier
forms of dualism, we shall have expelled all
forms if we are able to expel neo-kantism in its
turn.

     For the thinkers I call neo-Kantian, the word
consciousness to-day does no more than signalize
the fact that experience is indefeasibly dualistic
in structure.  It means that not subject,
not object, but object-plus-subject is the minimum
that can actually be.  The subject-object
distinction meanwhile is entirely different from
that between mind and matter, from that between
body and soul.  Souls were detachable,
had separate destinies; things could happen to
them.  To consciousness as such nothing can
happen, for, timeless itself, it is only a witness
of happenings in time, in which it plays no
part.  It is, in a word, but the logical correlative
of 'content' in an Experience of which the

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