SOURCE: "The Philosophy of Samuel Alexander (I.)," in Mind: A Quarterly Review, Vol. XLIX, No. 193, January, 1940, pp. 1-18.

[In the following essay, Stout presents the first part of an extended analysis of Alexander's philosophical system, focusing on his concepts of mind, mental processes, and sensory perception.]

According to Mr. Laird "no English writer has produced so grand a system of speculative metaphysics in so grand a manner since Hobbes in 1696 completed his metaphysical journey with the publication of De Corpore". I entirely agree. But this was not the kind of praise which pleased Alexander himself. When the plan of his philosophy first dawned upon him in all its brilliance, he hoped and was strongly tempted to believe that it was destined to be the "philosophy of the future". What he really longed for was confirmation of this estimate of the objective value of his work. Mere praise of its greatness or grandeur left him cold and finally bored him by its incessant repetition. Now I cannot myself admit that Alexander's system will be, or, at any rate, ought to be the philosophy of the future. There seem to me to be flaws in it fatal to any such claim. None the less, I feel strongly that the most promising path to this philosophy of the future is to be found in a critical reconstruction of Alexander's work, with the aim of correcting its defects while retaining its systematic character. He has asked the right questions and answered them in such a way that even where he is wrong his errors are most instructive. In discovering how he has gone astray we are guided to a more satisfactory positive solution of the problems with which he deals. What is perhaps even more important, he has everywhere shown the essential connexion and interdependence of these problems and has thus bequeathed to his successors a most helpful and inspiring model of systematic thinking—of Architectonic.

It follows from the systematic character of his philosophy that if he goes astray in dealing with one fundamental question he is bound to go correspondingly astray in dealing with others. On the other hand, so far as we succeed in correcting one such error, we may hope to correct others on the same principle, and thus reconstruct the whole system in a more satisfactory form. It is in this way that each important philosopher learns from the work of his predecessors and progresses beyond it. The progress is of a peculiar kind determined by the peculiar nature of the philosophical problem. None the less it is quite real.

I cannot here attempt to reconstruct Alexander's philosophy. I must be content to recommend this reconstruction as a promising venture for younger men. I can here only indicate briefly some special points on which he seems to me to be mistaken.

Mind and the Cognitive Relation.

I begin with his treatment of the nature of mind as distinguished from and related to its objects. I do so because, as he tells us himself, it was in dealing with theory of knowledge that he was led on to ontological questions; also because this way of approach is most congenial to myself.

"Any experience whatever", according to Alexander, "may be analysed into two distinct elements and their relation to one another. The two elements which are the terms of the relation are, on the one hand the act of mind or the awareness and on the other the object of which it is aware; the relation between them is that they are together or compresent in the world which is thus far experienced."¹ Every part of this statement calls for close scrutiny. Let us begin with the cognitive relation and then consider the nature of the mental act or process.² It is to be noted at the outset, that the relation, as Alexander conceives it, is existential. In other words, the terms which enter into it have each an existence separate from that of the other. Further, the relation does not merely relate the nature of one term to that of the other, as is the case with mere resemblance or contrast. It is a real connexion relating the separate existence of each to the separate existence of the other.³ We may now pass to the most startling point of Alexander's doctrine. He insists that the cognitive relation is in no way unique. Provided that one of the terms is a mental process or "act", any existential relation may be a cognitive relation. What is unique is not the nature of the relation but the nature of one of its terms—the mental process. He expresses this view in the most drastic way by asserting that all that is needed to constitute the cognitive relation is togetherness or compresence. Everything, according to him, is compresent with everything else inasmuch as they are all parts of one spatial-temporal universe. Why then are we not omniscient, seeing that a mental process is compresent with everything else? I can find no satisfactory answer to this question in Alexander. He holds that, in fact, however limited our knowledge of details may be, we are always cognisant, however dimly, of a whole embracing these details and extending indefinitely beyond them. "No experience .. . is isolated or has boundaries which shut it off rigidly from the rest of the world. . . . Every experience has its fringes, shoots out its corona into some larger whole which encircles it. . . . Every object we know is a fragment of an infinite whole."⁴1 agree essentially with this statement. But it does not solve the difficulty I have raised. If it is sufficient to constitute the cognitive relation, that a mental process should be part of the same world with what it knows, it ought to know everything in detail. Finite minds ought to be omniscient and they certainly are not so. We may state the objection in another way. On Alexander's view, which I accept myself, compresence within one universe is not a special kind of relation; it is the most general condition of all relations, however diverse they may be in their specific nature. It covers indifferently such diverse relations as spatial contiguity, temporal succession, resemblance, greater and less, reason and consequence, etc. We give no account of the distinctive character of any of these by merely saying that they are cases of compresence. Now Alexander holds that in this respect the cognitive relation is exceptional. According to him it is not a specific kind of relation distinct in its own nature from all others. What is distinctive of it is only the nature of one of its terms. One of its terms must be a mental process. This condition being fulfilled, any existential relation is, at least potentially, a cognitive relation. So far as detailed knowledge is concerned, the potentiality becomes actual only under certain special conditions, e.g. the action of an external object on the organs of sense.

Why is it necessary to the relation that one of its terms shall be a mental process? I can find no possible answer to this question except that the reason lies in the peculiar nature of the relation. It is owing to the unique nature of the relation of cognition and cognitum that only minds can enter into it as cognitive. I believe Alexander would have recognised this if his mind had not been warped by his ontology. His ontology requires that all relations, at any rate all existential relations, shall be purely spatialtemporal. But cognition as here defined by him is an existential relation between particular processes in a finite mind and other things which are not mental. Hence, if he is to be consistent, he is bound to hold that the relation of knowing and being known is also spatial-temporal and nothing more. I submit that this is simply untrue. It is flatly inconsistent with the nature of the cognitive relation as we find it or, as Alexander would say, experience it.⁵ Even if we admit that it always depends on spatial-temporal relations so as to be impossible without them, yet in its own nature it is neither spatial nor temporal. Even if we accept Alexander's very dubious contention that an individual mind is a spatial-temporal complex, this does not remove the difficulty. What has to be shown is that it is nothing more. But the fact of cognition shows that it is something more.

Let us now consider the nature of the mental act or process. Alexander frequently speaks as if the mental process were itself cognition. It is an awareness of an object existentially distinct from itself. But such language is loose and inconsistent with his own fundamental position. What he really holds is that the mental act is cognitive only inasmuch as it enters into the cognitive relation. Within this relation it has a distinct nature and existence of its own. But its being in this relation is no more a mental act or process than being known is a physical act or process. Alexander does not make this clear until he is well advanced in the second volume of Space, Time and Deity, at ch. v, pp. 118-119. The relevant section is headed "Mind made up of Conations". Conation is to be taken as including such processes as "desire or endeavour or willing". But it is also used to cover mental excitements which are commonly regarded as passive, e.g. "passive acts of sense". In this wide application of the term every mental process is, according to Alexander, "a conation and is nothing else, except for the possible addition of feeling". "Cognition is not a separate kind of action from conation. It is not even a separate element in a mental act which can be distinguished from a conative element in the act. Cognition is nothing but the conation itself in so far as it is compresent with and refers to an object."⁶ "In so far as the conative act refers to its object, it is a cognition. The cognitive element therefore, of a mental act, is, to use a paradoxical expression, not anything distinctive of the act as a process taking place in the mental substance itself. It signifies rather that the mental act refers to a cognitum."7

The mental act then is not in itself a cognitive process. It is so only in the sense that it enters directly into the cognitive relation on its cognitive side. But if it enters directly into the cognitive relation on its cognitive side, this only means, not that it is a knowing, but that it is that which knows. It is not cognition, but a cognitive subject. This is a startling paradox which Alexander simply ignores. It is true no doubt that we cannot desire anything or attend to it or be otherwise interested in it or occupied about it unless we are cognisant of it, however imperfectly. But for that very reason the conation itself cannot itself be the subject which is cognisant of the object. On the contrary, the conation, in order to exist as such, presupposes that the cognition is already present as part of the whole situation.

It seems obvious that Alexander's position here is quite untenable. But what alternative view can we substitute for it? Here if anywhere the conception of a transcendental self or pure ego seems called for. We seem to need a something definable only as "that which knows" or perhaps as "that which knows, feels and wills". But I agree with Alexander in rejecting this way out of the difficulty. We both substitute for the supposed "pure ego" the conception of the mind as a complex whole having a distinctive character and a distinctive form of unity marking it off from every other kind of complex whole, though in many ways its unity is analogous to that of a living organism. This complex whole is what the word 'I' stands for when I say that I know this or that, will or desire this or that, feel this or that. What is meant is that the knowing, willing and feeling enter into the constitution of the complex whole which is my individual mind or self and have no independent existence apart from it. This, be it noted, is not an exceptional use of language. When I say that my pen is in contact with the paper before me I mean that it has a point which is directly touching the paper. When I say that I digest food, I mean that my body, which I take to be part of myself, digests food. Further, it does so directly only through a part of itself—the digestive apparatus. The digestive apparatus is contained within its complex unity and functions only because it is so.

Now within an individual mind cognition is not found and, as I hold, cannot exist apart from some form of interest—of what Alexander calls conation. But if we are to examine the relation of cognition and cognitum for itself we must abstract from the conditions of its existence within the complex unity of the individual mind. Considering it in this abstract way, what do we find? I can find only the distinction and relation of what is cognised to the fact that it is cognised, of what is known to its knownness. From the purely abstract point of view I cannot find any distinction or relation between being known and knowing. I am not, in saying this, asserting a paradox. It is familiar common sense that there is no knowing apart from as 'I' which knows—a mind to which the knowing belongs. But I have deliberately left the knowing mind out of count, and it is for that reason that I can discover no knowing on the part of the mind, but only a being known on the side of the object. The proposition I know this or that' means that I have cognisance of this or that. In other words, it means that this is known within the complex unity of the individual mind. Its knownness belongs to the individual mind as part of its own being. From this a consequence follows which may be unpalatable to some modern realists. Inasmuch as knownness is only abstractly distinguishable from what is known and can have no separate being, it follows that objects, so far as they are known, must also in their own way enter into the constitution of the individual mind as a complex whole. Of course the condition "so far as they are known" is essentially important. I am not suggesting that objects are mental in any other respect. But so far as the mind has cognisance of them they are its own objects. So regarded, they are what are called ideas—what Ward calls presentations. As ideas or presentations they have characters and relations to each other of which they are otherwise incapable. Consider, for instance, association of ideas. Karlsbad is associated in my mind with my having had my hair cut there. This means that the thought of Karlsbad calls up in my mind the thought of the hair cutting. But the thought of Karlsbad and of the hair cutting and of the relation between them just is Karlsbad and the hair cutting and the relation between them so far as I have cognisance of them. If they do not actually exist, yet, in so far as I have cognisance of them, they are at least objective possibilities dependent upon certain general conditions which cannot in the long run be merely possible.⁸

May we call knownness abstractly considered a state of the object known? Such language may seem appropriate inasmuch as the object may come to be known or cease to be known, at least to finite individuals, without ceasing to be the same object, as water may boil or freeze without ceasing to be water. But the suggested analogy breaks down in a most essential respect. When water boils or is frozen, its previous character is altered. But when what was previously unknown becomes known there is, in principle, no such alteration. The knownness is simply superinduced, leaving the other characteristics of the object, as it previously existed, unchanged. If this were not so, what is known could never be the same objectively as what was previously unknown. What we seek to know would never be the same as what we come to know. The questions we ask would never be answered.

Presupposing that we are cognisant of objects, it becomes possible to be interested in them—to be pleased or displeased with them, to seek to alter them or maintain them unaltered, to gain fuller knowledge of them. Such relations of the mind to its objects are essentially different from that which is involved in mere cognition abstractly considered. The terms which enter into it are existentially distinct. When the feeling of anger is part of the complex unity which I call myself I say that I feel angry. But the felt anger is existentially distinct from its object, from what I feel angry about. The same holds for all other ways of being interested. But the two terms of the relation being existentially distinct, there may be and there constantly is interaction between them. The object pleases or displeases me, and in being pleased or displeased with it I endeavour to act on it so as to maintain and enhance the pleasure or remove the pain. The mind as owning the feeling and conation is a subject interacting with its object. Though the objects are its objects only because it has cognisance of them, yet when we consider cognition in abstraction from feeling and conation, this antithesis of subject and object as existentially distinct and interacting with each other does not emerge. From this abstract point of view, we can say that the cognised objects, so far as cognised, are in the mind as a complex unity. But we cannot appropriately speak of them as for or before the mind, or as presented to the mind as if the mind confronted them and had dealings with them. It is quite otherwise when we consider the mind as owning feelings and conations. From this point of view the mind is a subject, and the mental life essentially consists in a transaction constantly going on between it and its objects. What we may call cognitive process essentially depends on this transaction. By cognitive process I mean, not a process in which cognition consists, for there is no such thing. I mean the passage from cognition to cognition, and especially from relatively vague and incomplete cognition to relatively distinct and complete cognition. This process could not go on without being sustained by conation and feeling.⁹

Sense-perception and the Status of Sensa.

Alexander draws a very sharp and sweeping distinction between the way in which each of us experiences his own mental processes—or, as I should prefer to say, his own subjective processes—and the way in which he experiences other things. The two kinds of experience are, according to him, mutually exclusive. As he holds, we only "enjoy" our own subjective processes and do not "contemplate" them; we contemplate other things and do not enjoy them. Now my main difficulty with his doctrine on this point is that I find something essentially akin to, if not identical with, what he calls enjoyment involved in what he calls contemplation and, on the other hand, something essentially akin to contemplation in what he calls enjoyment. My point is that he has confused a distinction between two elements involved in all knowledge through experience with a supposed distinction between two separate and mutually exclusive ways of experiencing. Postponing the treatment of "enjoyment", I shall first examine "contemplation", in order to show that his analysis of it is in this respect inadequate and incorrect. The question at issue is most sharply defined when we attempt to analyse the nature and conditions of perceptual illusion. To this topic Alexander devotes two chapters of Space, Time and Deity (Vol. II, chs. 7 and 8). Though I cannot accept his conclusions, I am full of admiration for the comprehensive and systematic way in which he states the relevant questions. His general doctrine, as I understand it, is that in all sense-perception what we perceive as existing actually does exist. Illusion is due to selection from, or distortion of, what actually exists as physical fact. In order to show that this is so Alexander distinguishes and examines in turn three kinds of appearances, which he calls real appearances, mere appearances, and illusory appearances.

The same thing appears differently to different persons or to the same person at different times according to their variable position relatively to it in space. Such differences, due only to the varying relative positions of the percipient, are said to be differences in the real appearance of things. What is distinctively characteristic of them is that they involve selection but not distortion. The difference between the object as it really is and as it is perceived is constituted by the partial nature of the perception. Only part of the object appears: but the part that does appear, appears as it really is. Alexander's attempt to justify this view in detail seems to me to break down completely. We need here examine only one typical example—the seeming increase or shrinkage in the size of things seen, according as they are nearer or more remote from the eye. A plate as measured by artificial instruments such as a tape or a yard measure, or by superposition of part of the percipient's body, e.g. the hand,¹⁰ is, let us say, ten inches or three handbreadths in diameter. The size which is capable in principle of being measured in this way by physical units may be called physical or objective size. What we call "the size of the plate" is physical size, and it has no other. When we contrast its objective or physical size with its apparent size the contrast is not between two kinds of size really belonging to the plate. What is meant is that the plate seems to be objectively either of the size it really is or larger or smaller than it really is. When I say that anything seems to some one, correctly or incorrectly, to be so and so, what is meant is either that the subject believes it to be so, or that conditions exist which tend to make him believe this and would lead him to believe it if he did not otherwise know better.

In this sense of "seems" the size of the plate seems to diminish as the distance between it and the percipient increases, though it really remains of the same size at all distances. As it recedes from him or he from it beyond a certain limit of distance," it seems to be or seems as if it were smaller and smaller until it looks like a mere speck and finally vanishes. At one stage of the process it may seem not more than half an inch in diameter instead of ten inches. Apart from any such estimate in units of measurement, it seems as if it were very much smaller than it seemed to begin with, and very much smaller than another plate of equal size seen close at hand. Let us now consider Alexander's explanation of such facts. "The same plate," he tells us, "when near and far excites different extents of retinal tract and is seen in different sizes."¹² But how does the variable extent of the retinal excitement operate? It is in the answer to this question that the peculiarity of his view emerges. "The distance of the eye from the plate acts selectively. . . . The size which we see is a portion of the real geometrical size of the plate."¹³ We must first make clear what Alexander means by seeing when we speak of "the size we see". The seeing is "immediate and sensory"; in other words, what is said to be seen is taken to be identical with the visual sensum as actually experienced, not merely thought or judged or believed or seeming to exist. It is the actual sensum which, according to Alexander, is identical with part of the size. The sensum is therefore a physical or objective size and in this respect does not differ at all from the "real geometrical size of the plate". The only difference is that it is part and not the whole of this real geometrical size. But what can be meant by the statement that it is part of the whole physical size of the plate which is thus actually experienced as a sensum? The meaning cannot be that as the plate seems to shrink with its increasing distance parts of it continue to be revealed in their real size while others vanish. All the parts together seem to shrink, so that what is true of the whole is true of each part. Further, if some were selected and others omitted, there would arise gaps between them of which there is no trace. We must suppose therefore that the gaps between them are in some way filled so as to constitute the single uninterrupted visual sensum as we actually experience it.¹⁴ But if we reject the view that parts are thus selected and others rejected, what can be meant by saying that what is sensed is only part of the real size? So far as I can discover, in using such language we are only asserting in a clumsy way that the extent of the sensum is smaller than the real geometrical size of the thing seen. Let me add that I do not know how even this statement can be verified. For the size of the sensum as such is not capable of physical measurement.

Let us, however, grant that the size of the sensum is in some way a partial extract from the objective size of the thing. How far does this help him in accounting for the seeming diminution of the plate with increasing distance, and its seeming enlargement with decreasing distance? How in particular does he explain the fact that what seems to the percipient to grow smaller or larger is the whole size of the plate, not only a selection from it, and that if he knows from other sources that the plate as a whole continues to be the same size, he regards its seeming variations as unreal and for practical purposes disregards them? Indeed, for a certain near range of distance the plate does not even seem to vary in size, in spite of variations in the size of the visual sensum. Here the first question which emerges is how the percipient is cognisant at all of the whole size of the plate. For on Alexander's view only an extract from it is ever sensibly experienced.

But if it is not sensibly experienced and yet the percipient is cognisant of it, we must say that he only thinks of it. The thought together with the sensum enters into what Alexander, in agreement with ordinary language, would call the experience of seeing the plate. But experience in this sense should be distinguished from what I call actual or immediate experience, inasmuch as it includes besides this the thought of what is not actually experienced. We have next to inquire how the thought arises. Alexander, who recognises that it must be present, denies that it belongs to purely visual perception. "It is only in reference to space as touched and thought of in terms of touch that the plate itself seems to shrink as it moves further off. Considered in themselves as purely visual objects . . . the one patch of colour merely looks smaller than the other. If we know otherwise than by sight that they are appearances of the same thing, we say that the thing shrinks to sight as it recedes. But if we do not know this, there is no thought of shrinkage." Alexander does not, as I understand him, hold that touch perception reveals things in their size whereas sight fails so to reveal them. His position is more subtle. He holds that there are certain experiences of combined sight and touch which leave no doubt that the thing seen is the same as the thing touched, having the same place and the same extent, though the seeming size may vary for sight.¹⁵ This size which is the same for what is seen and what is touched can only be the real or whole size of the object. "We have only to hold the plate in our hands and move it away .. . in order to assure ourselves that the touch and colour of the plate are in the same place. The touch remains of the same felt extent: the colour varies but the seen contour of the plate coincides in place with the felt contour." Alexander's analysis is defective. The felt contour is confined to the parts of the plate which the hands touch, and those parts are not seen because the hands screen them from the eye. The other side of the hands is seen in seeing the plate but, as he supposes, they and it seem to shrink together as the distance is increased. But this assumption is wrong. For ordinary vision the seen object does not seem to shrink within this range of distance. I hold indeed as a verifiable matter of fact that the visual sensum does actually shrink with the varying extent of the retinal image. But this creates another difficulty for Alexander. His explanation of the seeming shrinkage as due merely to the diminution of the sensum breaks down. The seeming shrinkage is not merely due to what he regards as the smaller selection from the whole size, which according to him constitutes the sensum. None the less I agree with Alexander that experiences of this kind do give assurance that what is seen and what is touched are of the same size. The hand is an instrument for measuring the part of the plate on which it is superposed. It would do equally well if it were insensitive. Tactual perception is important mainly as evidence of contact. But sight can supply equally good evidence. I see my hand on the plate as I see a match on the table before me. In like manner the distance between the two hands, as determined by the angle made by the two arms, measures the distance from one side of the plate to the other, much as it might be measured with a pair of compasses. Motor sensations supply evidence of what this angle is. But within this near range of vision equally good evidence is supplied by sight. It is by sight alone that another person understands us when, in the absence of the plate, we indicate its size by holding our hands a certain distance apart. What measurement of this sort effects is to determine, however roughly, the physical or, as Alexander would say, the whole, size in terms of physical units supposed to remain at least sufficiently constant to be of some practical use. But we cannot thus attempt to determine what is the physical size, unless we start with the thought of it and the belief in its existence. As for the relation of the thought to the belief, we may safely adopt the Spinozistic position that belief in anything is inseparable from the thought of it unless the conditions preclude the belief. We may then confine ourselves to the question how the thought of it first arises. Is it primarily due to visual or to tactual perception or to both? To these I would add as a fourth alternative that it may be due not to touch alone but to touch in union with effort against resistance.¹⁶ No one is likely to maintain that the thought belongs originally to visual and only derivatively to tactual perception. But the persistence of what I may call the Berkeleyan prejudice may lead some to regard it as belonging in the first instance to touch and only derivatively to sight. I can find no justification for this view. When we have set aside measurement by superposition and also effort against resistance, the case for touch rests only on the supposed constancy of tactual sensa. But they are not constant. They differ, e.g., for the tip of the forefinger and the centre of the palm. If we hold with Alexander that in vision only part of the size of the thing seen is sensibly experienced we are bound to hold that in tactual perception only part of the size of the thing touched is sensibly experienced. Mere touch differs from sight in no way which can warrant us in asserting that it does, and that sight does not, primarily include the thought of "real geometrical size" as distinguished from the size of the sensum or from the seeming size of the object.

A more plausible case can be made out for touch in union with voluntary motor effort against resistance.¹⁷ To touch there belongs an extensive sensum and the consequent apprehension of the thing touched as extended. In the experience of motor effort the extended thing as such is apprehended as if it were making a counter effort as a whole and in all its discernible parts. This resistance or counter effort is not part either of the tactual or of the motor sensum. It is thought of, not actually experienced. Hence the extension of the thing as resisting need not coincide with its extension as perceived under variable conditions by touch or sight. The real extension is the extension which offers resistance. Now I am ready to accept this analysis of the experience of effort against resistance as yielding the thought of and the belief in objective as contrasted with seeming extension. I would only add that since effort and resistance are reciprocal we are aware in this experience of the objective extension of our own bodies as included in the embodied self as well as of the thing which resists our efforts. The principle is that what acts and is acted on is so far real. But is this principle applicable only to motor effort against resistance? I submit that this is only one case, though a specially important one, of the interaction between subject and object which pervades our experience. Everywhere we find the antithesis of what we actively initiate and what is objectively determined for us and not by us. We need here only consider vision apart from touch and motor effort. It depends normally on our initiative whether we shall approach or recede from the thing seen, or remain still, or turn our backs on it. But however we proceed, it never depends wholly on our initiative what the size, shape, etc., of the thing shall seem to be or whether we shall see it at all. Suppose that we recede from it, keeping it in view; it seems to decrease in size in a way which is regular and uniform, provided that other relevant conditions remain unchanged. On this assumption we can command at will the series of seeming sizes. But we cannot thus determine what size it shall seem to be either initially or at any given distance. Further, the seeming diminutions in size as we retire from the thing seen do not always take place in the same uniform way. As we are receding from it, it may be receding from us, and it may itself increase or diminish. Such conditions, which are independent of our initiative, make a difference to the seeming size. In general we proceed on the sound principle that seeming change and difference which depend merely on our initiative are not objective. On the other hand, seeming change and difference which occur independently of our initiative may not be objective; for there are other sources of illusion. But in the absence of reasons to the contrary it presumably is so. It has at any rate passed an essential preliminary test.

I conclude that Alexander has no good reason for supposing that objective reference in visual perception is borrowed either from touch or from the union of sight and touch, even if we take touch to include motor effort. It is plain also that he is wrong in denying that "real appearances" as such are free from illusion. If a plate far off seems to be objectively smaller than one near at hand which is objectively of the same size, the seeming is contrary to fact and therefore illusory. If the illusion is not corrected by knowledge gained from other sources, it involves false belief. I myself remember that in my early childhood when looking down from a cliff on a group of men below, I took them to be tiny dwarfs. I was astonished but not incredulous. I accepted the fact with "natural piety".

It makes no difference to the question at issue whether or not we accept Alexander's hypothesis that the size sensibly experienced is a selection from the whole objective size. For what I call seeming, whether illusory or not, is an affair of at least potential belief, not merely of immediate sensible experience. The sensum which is actually experienced cannot, as such, be illusory. The most radical defect in Alexander's epistemology is his failure to recognise the ambiguity of the term "experience". He habitually uses it in the very common and convenient sense in which it is synonymous with knowledge through or by experience. Understanding the term in this way, I agree with Alexander that all knowing is experiencing. But experience in this sense must in principle be sharply distinguished from what I call actual or immediate experience, whether this takes the form of sensation or the "enjoyment" of subjective processes. The latter is only one ingredient in knowledge through experience. It is the ingredient which justifies us in saying that it is through experience we know. The other ingredient is thought, and apart from this there would be no cognition. Even what we are actually experiencing is not cognised except in so far as it is thought of, and it is always thought of in connexion with what is not being actually experienced.

I have previously urged that it is difficult to attach any clear meaning to Alexander's view of the size of the sensum as a partial selection from the objective size unless we regard it as merely stating the unverifiable proposition that the sensible size is always smaller than the objective. But in spite of such difficulties many might be tempted to cling to it if it really gets rid, as Alexander supposes, of all representative theories of sense-perception. But we have just seen that it does nothing of the kind. Representationism¹⁸ could be entirely avoided only if it were shown that the seeming objective size is identical with the whole objective size: and this on Alexander's view is far from being true.

For "mere appearances", such as the face we seem to see in a mirror or the straight oar that seems to be bent in water, the principle of selection confessedly breaks down. Alexander substitutes another which I cannot reconcile with obvious facts. In such cases Alexander's theory is that "we do not sense the thing of which we apprehend the mere appearance taken by itself but in connexion with some other thing which modifies it. What we sense or otherwise apprehend is not the thing by itself, but a new thing of which the thing forms a part; and there is no reason to suppose that . . . the compound thing does not really possess what we sense."¹⁹ "It may be impossible to perceive a thing alone, and the foreign thing may distort the object and make it not a real appearance but a mere appearance."²⁰

Here Alexander is asserting two distinct and, as I think, incompatible propositions. (1) The thing seen, or what the percipient takes to be the thing seen, is really distorted by the intervention of a "foreign object". (2) What seems to be a character of the thing seen is objectively a character of a "compound object" of which this is only a part. Let us take first the theory of distortion. Wherein is the distortion supposed to consist? Alexander cannot mean, or at least ought not to mean, merely that the thing seems different from what it objectively is. For this is precisely what has to be explained; it is not the explanation. Nor can he mean merely that the sensum is distorted: for such distortion is relevant only in so far as it makes a difference to the seeming nature or place of the thing seen. These alternatives being excluded, there remains only one other, that the thing seen is objectively altered by the foreign object. Many passages in Alexander prima facie seem to imply this view. In particular it would account for his denial that "mere appearances" are illusory. But the theory is in violent conflict with admitted facts. The partially immersed oar is not really bent by the water or by the refraction of the light. The optical explanation is based on the assumption that it continues to be as straight as it was before it was dipped in the water. The refraction accounts for the bent sensum. But though the sensum is really bent the oar is not. Alexander analyses only one example at length, that of reflexion in a mirror supposed to be flawless. According to him we see the real thing exactly as it is, only it is displaced. Here I can only make the rude and crude comment that the real thing, e.g. a reflected face, is not displaced. It remains in front of the mirror and does not pass behind it: if it did, we should not see it at all, as the mirror would hide it. Nor is the visual sensum thus displaced: the only place the sensum can have is within the actually experienced field of visual sensation; it cannot move out of the field so as to get behind the mirror. It may be suggested that we immediately experience the reflected light: but the reflected light is not behind the surface that reflects it. The only tenable meaning I can attach to the statement that the face reflected is itself displaced, is that there seems to be a face where there really is no face, and that this illusory seeming is due to a real face's being reflected in the mirror. What we see is the reflexion and not the real face directly or indirectly. There is an experience, strangely neglected by Alexander, which seems decisive of this question. The spectator may see simultaneously the real face and the reflexion of it. There then seem to be two separate faces, each in its own separate place. One of them really exists where it seems to exist. The other does not exist at all, but only a reflexion of the first. But there really are two separate sensa, each actually experienced, in separate places within the actually experienced field of visual sensation. To convince any one who may doubt this let us discard the arbitrary assumption that the mirror is flawless. We have then another case of "mere appearance". But if the mirror is not flawless the sensum due to reflexion may differ grotesquely in shape from the sensum experienced in seeing the real face. But if they are really unlike they cannot be identical. I can make nothing of Alexander's other view that the seeming character or place of the object seen really belongs to a compound object of which it is part. The seeming place of the reflexion behind the mirror is not really the place of the compound object constituted by the mirror, the reflected face and the light passing between them. This compound object is not behind the mirror. On the whole, Alexander has signally failed to show that his mere appearances are not illusory.

We turn now to what Alexander himself admits to be illusory appearances. To account for these he again has recourse to "selection". But the selection is not, as in real appearances, from the perceived object; on the contrary, anything may be selected which is compresent with the percipient in the universe of which he is part. What determines the selection of this rather than that is not any objective condition but an appropriate mental process; and this is identified by Alexander with the neural process which is ordinarily said to be correlated with it. Alexander gives as an example the grey piece of paper which is seen as green by contrast on a red ground. "The paper itself is not green. But there is green in the world. The appropriate response of the mind to green is the kind of sensory act which the mind is at the moment performing, and accordingly it sees green." What is thus seen is not a "universal green" but an "individual sensum".²¹ This highly ingenious theory is open to criticism in many ways. The green sensum is actually experienced as placed within a surrounding field of red. On the evidence of immediate experience it is as certain that it is in this place as that it is green. But the red which surrounds it is not supposed to be illusory or even a mere appearance. It is taken to be a real appearance. This means, according to Alexander, that the red actually experienced really belongs to the paper. It follows that the green which is really included within the red must also really be the objective colour of the paper.²² But it is admitted that the paper which seems objectively green is in fact objectively grey. The conclusion seems unavoidable that the whole sensum is existentially distinct from any physical object. It is, however, real, though not physically real. Whether and in what sense it can properly be called mental is another question. Another obvious difficulty for Alexander is that he must assume that what is sensibly experienced in illusory appearances really pre-exists somewhere or other in the world. But this cannot be true of all that is sensibly present in dreams, delirium, etc. The only reply that Alexander can make is that such sensa are complex and that the elements which comprise them really pre-exist. But what we sensibly experience is actual, hot merely potential. How are the constituent elements brought together so as to actualise the potentiality? On Alexander's view this must be the work of mind or of neural process. It follows that the mind or neural process must actually produce and not merely select such complex sensa. Further, as they are supposed by Alexander to be objective, the mind or neural process must produce them as objective facts—which is absurd. The outcome of this whole discussion is that, sensa being existentially distinct from whatever is physically objective, Alexander's doctrine of selection is quite untenable.

Am I then committed to a representative theory of senseperception? I admit that I am. So is Alexander. He is bound to regard what is selected from the object as representing the whole object. But though I accept a representative theory of sense-perception I reject any representative theory of knowledge in general. The representative function of sensa, like all knowledge by way of representation, must be founded on an apprehension of some relation between what represents and what is represented; and this must in the long run be apprehended directly and not by way of representation. I have indicated my own positive view on this question in my book on Mind and Matter.

¹Space, Time and Deity, Vol. I, p. 11. (Hereafter referred to as S. T. and D.)

² Alexander usually treats act and process as synonymous. At any rate the act is for him always a process.

³ I gather that Alexander would hold that all relations are existential in this sense. But if so, I think that he is wrong.

⁴S. T. and D., Vol. I, p. 23.

⁵ I shall have occasion later to notice an ambiguity of the term experience which leads to confusion in Alexander's use of it.

⁶ Italics mine.

⁷ Italics mine.

⁸ I do not wish to repeat here what I have said elsewhere about the nature and conditions of error and fiction.

⁹ There is another reason why we naturally regard the mind as confronting the objects which are said to be present to it. The mind is commonly considered as embodied and its objects are taken to be external to the body as known through organic and motor sensation. So far as this is the case the confrontation is literal and not merely metaphorical.

¹⁰ The use of the body or part of it as an instrument of measurement is different in principle from the perception of size through touch sensation, which is very vague and very variable for different parts of the skin, as is clearly shown by experiments expressly devised to test tactual sensibility. Alexander is confused on this point. He says, for instance, that it is only when "thought of in terms of touch that the plate itself seems to shrink as it moves further off. I should say "thought of in terms of physical measurement"—or more accurately "thought of in terms of magnitude which is capable of physical measurement".

¹¹I shall have occasion to refer to this reservation later.

¹²S. T. and D., Vol. II, pp. 193-194.

¹³Ibid., p. 193.

¹⁴ Otherwise there would be only a broken sketch or indication of the real shape, not a different shape which is what we perceive.

¹⁵I may add for touch also according as this takes place through different parts of the cutaneous surface.

¹⁶ Alexander seems to offer yet another alternative in his account of intuition as a "way of apprehending" distinct from sense-perception. I shall deal with this topic later on. Meanwhile I am assuming that size, shape, etc., are perceived by the senses in essentially the same way as colour or heat.

¹⁷ Alexander nowhere discusses this experience.

¹⁸ Note that I am speaking of representative theories of sense-perception, not of knowledge in general. I shall return to this distinction later.

¹⁹S. T. and D., Vol. II, p. 191. Italics mine.

²⁰Ibid., p. 185. Italics mine.

²¹S. T. and D., Vol. II, p. 214.

²² Or a selection from it: this makes no difference to my argument.