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