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just so in the case of the 'undifferentiated' objects
of 'will' in Neo-Fichtean types of philosophy, 1 which
are all so far neither physical nor mental, that one
inquires why the 'will' is essential to them. Clearly
Avenarius approached the matter with a somewhat
social bias, having himself and other 'subjects' in mind,
and in so doing he conceded, at least verbally, a point
that he ought never to have granted. For surely a
purely naïve realist does not say, "I am experiencing all
these things"; but he says: "All these things are."
And for my own part I am willing to believe in the most
unequivocal way that they simply are. For one has
instantly to admit that one's own experience is a highly
complicated aggregate of objects whose 'nature' is
not so far known or even questioned: and hence, as we
have seen, an experience is not a simple entity but a
complex of entities that are at least simpler than itself,
and for this reason it is definable in terms of them, but
not they in terms of it. They cannot be defined in terms
of experience; and such a definition attempted is
actually equivalent to the assertion that the components
of experience consist of an experience-stuff,--and this
is false. Experience consists of them, in combinations,
and if they have a substance, experience too consists
of that same substance. If we would truly 'exclude
the introjection' we must do so at the outset, and there
dismiss our deeply rooted psychological prejudices.
Certainly it has been the vice of all latter-day philosophy,
by which I mean idealism, in one way or another to try
to define the simpler entities of being in terms of their
more complex aggregates, wills or minds or experiences.

____________________
1 As in Münsterberg: "Grundzüge der Psychologie", Leipzig,
1900, p. 46 ff.

-78-

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Publication Information: Book Title: The Concept of Consciousness. Contributors: Edwin B. Holt - author. Publisher: Macmillan. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1914. Page Number: 78.
    
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