peculiarity is that _fact_comes_to_light_ in it, that
_awareness_of_content_ takes place.  Consciousness
as such is entirely impersonal -- 'self' and its
activities belong to the content.  To say that I
am self-conscious, or conscious of putting forth
volition, means only that certain contents, for
which 'self' and 'effort of will' are the names,
are not without witness as they occur.

     Thus, for these belated drinkers at the Kantian
spring, we should have to admit consciousness
as an 'epistemological' necessity, even if
we had no direct evidence of its being there.

     But in addition to this, we are supposed by
almost every one to have an immediate consciousness
of consciousness itself.  When the
world of outer fact ceases to be materially present,
and we merely recall it in memory, or
fancy it, the consciousness is believed to stand
out and to be felt as a kind of impalpable inner
flowing, which, once known in this sort of experience,
may equally be detected in presentations
of the outer world.  "The moment we try
to fix out attention upon consciousness and to
see _what_, distinctly, it is," says a recent writer,

7
"it seems to vanish.  It seems as if we had before
us a mere emptiness.  When we try to introspect
the sensation of blue, all we can see is
the blue; the other element is as if it were diaphanous.
Yet it _can_ be distinguished, if we
look attentively enough, and know that there
is something to look for."(1)  "Consciousness"
(Bewusstheit), says another philosopher, "is
inexplicable and hardly describable, yet all conscious
experiences have this in common that
what we call their content has a peculiar reference
to a centre for which 'self' is the name,
in virtue of which reference alone the content
is subjectively given, or appears....  While
in this way consciousness, or reference to a
self, is the only thing which distinguishes a conscious
content from any sort of being that
might be there with no one conscious of it, yet
this only ground of the distinction defies all
closer explanations.  The existence of consciousness,
although it is the fundamental fact of
psychology, can indeed be laid down as certain,
can be brought out by analysis, but can

---

   1 G.E. Moore:  _Mind_, vol. XII, N.S., [1903], p.450.
---

8
neither be defined nor deduced from anything
but itself."(1)

     'Can be brought out by analysis,' this
author says.  This supposes that the consciousness
is one element, moment, factor -- call it
what you like -- of an experience of essentially
dualistic inner constitution, from which, if you
abstract the content, the consciousness will remain
revealed to its own eye.  Experience, at
this rate, would be much like a paint of which
the world pictures were made.  Paint has a dual
constitution, involving, as it does, a menstruum (2)
(oil, size or what not) and a mass of
content in the form of pigment suspended
therein.  We can get the pure menstruum by
letting the pigment settle, and the pure pigment
by pouring off the size or oil.  We operate
here by physical subtraction; and the usual
view is, that by mental subtraction we can
separate the two factors of experience in an

---

   1 Paul Natorp: _Einleitung_in_die_Psychologie_, 1888, pp. 14, 112.

   2 "Figuratively speaking, consciousness may be said to be the one
universal solvent, or menstruum, in which the different concrete kinds
of psychic acts and facts are contained, whether in concealed or in
obvious form."  G.T.Ladd:  _Psychology,_Descriptive_and_Explanatory_,
1894, p.30.
---

9
analogous way -- not isolating them entirely,
but distinguishing them enough to know that
they are two.

                              II

     Now my contention is exactly the reverse of
this.  _Experience,_I_believe,_has_no_such_inner_duplicity;_