Note 30 — Chapter III · THE SUB-DIVISIONS OF METAPHYSICS

The fallacy of the assumption that our environment is directly given in experience as merely physical is best brought out by Avenarius in his masterly little work Der Menschliche Weltbegriff, which should be familiar to all students of Philosophy who are able to read German. The purely English reader will find many fruitful suggestions in Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, pt. iv., “Refutation of Dualism.” Much confusion is caused in philosophical discussion by the unscholarly use of the epistemological term “object” (which properly signifies “object of cognition”) instead of the more familiar “thing” to denote the constituent elements of our environment as it is actually experienced in practical life. In strictness the elements of the environment are “objects” only for an imaginary consciousness which is thought of as merely cognisant of presented fact, a point which Prof. Münsterberg has emphasised. For practical life the essential character of the environment is not merely that it is “presented,” but that it interacts with our own purposive activity; it thus consists not of “objects,” but of “things.”

In including the minds of our fellows among the things which constitute our environment, we must not commit the mistake of supposing “minds” as factors in immediate experience to be “incorporeal realities,” or “complexes of states of consciousness.” The distinction between mind and body, and the concept of mind as “within the body,” or again as a “function” of the body, are psychological hypotheses which only arise in the course of subsequent reflective analysis of experience. Of the worth of these hypotheses we shall have to speak later. At present it is enough to note that for direct experience a “mind” means simply a thing with individual purpose. What for my direct experience distinguishes my fellow-man from a stock or stone, is not the presence within him of an incorporeal “soul” or “consciousness,” but the fact that I must take account of his individual purposes and adapt myself to them if I wish to achieve my own. Here again the reader of German will do well to consult Prof. Münsterberg (GrundzügeGrundzüge der Psychologie, vol. i. chaps. 1-3). See also a paper on “Mind and Nature” by the present writer in International Journal of Ethics for October 1902.