ME. F. H. BEADLEY'S ANALYSIS OF MIND. 567
Herbart, who may be said to have suppressed the old tripartite classification into cognitions, emotions, volitions, only made the more prominent the distinction between the vorstdlende Seele and its Vorstellungen. Our English Associationists again, with whom Mr. Bradley is anxious to make his peace, have allowed full weight to the old classification, though they have refrained from emphasising the implication of a subject which it contains. Mr. Bradley alone would sweep away both entirely, believing that what might be called Presentationism will suffice ; and for him, it is to be noted, a presentation is supposed to imply no relation to a subject but is " that which is simply and comes as it is ". This position is so little in keeping with Mr. Bradley 's general theory of method that one is almost tempted to regard it as a wilful tour deforce. Thus in one place he says: "The absolute truth in the light of metaphysics, because it will not work, must not be let in ". On the other hand, to those who brand a useful assumption as falsehood he replies : "If a fiction, it deals with the facts. Let psychology mind its own business." * Why should not this language be used of the conscious subject, which, whether fact or fiction itself, certainly works and enables psychology to know its own business? Nothing would have seemed more natural for Mr. Bradley, with his views of working defini- tions and useful hypotheses, than to say : ' The conception of a subject, soul or self, that is aware of what is presented, receives what is given, and either seeks or avoids, according as it feels pleased or pained this universal postulate of common-sense may be a fiction, but it deals with the facts : debar me from its use, and I must talk of psychical processes as I might of fermen- tation or electrolysis. Whether individual minds are modes of one Infinite Mind ; whether their individuality is one of form and has varying real constituents ; whether the mind that I am for myself is matter for everybody beside ; whether the energy of the physicist is but another aspect of what the psychologist calls will, and the law of least resistance another side of pleasure and pain whether propositions like these or their opposites are true in the light of absolute metaphysics, is entirely outside empirical psycho- logy. The assumption of a conscious subject as a working con- ception can be kept clear of such questions just as the conceptions of substance or cause can be kept clear of analogous speculative difficulties. "If we do not define by the organism," i.e., help ourselves out with scraps of physiology, " we must use the word soul or mind;" and if we are to avoid "rags of metaphysics," such as talking of " what is simply and comes as it is," we must define the soul as " a totality of immediate experience". And it must be plain to all but "barbarians" that such a continuous 1 Soberly put, this is very much my own position. I have developed it at more length in an article entitled " A General Analysis of Mind," in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy for 1882, pp. 368-370.