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III. The Psychologist's Treatment of Knowledge
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The conclusion derived from the two preceding sections has been that within the whole which is experience and is reality, there is a distinction of real and ideal (within which is included the distinction of real and unreal): a distinction which turns out to be appearance and not real, inasmuch as the real is largely ideal, and the ideal is also real; a distinction, however, which in a sense supports reality.
The distinction between real and ideal in psychology takes several forms. On the one hand, it may be said, is external reality, and on the other mental content, which is ideal in so far as it intends that reality and has reality of its own as well; and which, under the aspect of that reality of its own, can be studied by the psychologist. Or we may deny the possibility of a valid distinction between content and external reality, and distinguish only between object and act or conation. Or we may deny activity to consciousness altogether, and assemble existents in one complex or another. Or we may say that reality consists of elements of sensation, the rest being ideal construction. Or there is the view of Mr. Bradley, for whom everything is
The questions involved are these: in an act of apprehension is there a part which is strictly mental and a part which is strictly external? and even if the distinction can be made, can it be made sharply enough to give us a class of objects which can form a separate science, psychology? and the ultimate question is: is there a problem of the possibility of knowledge as well as that of the morphology and structure of knowledge?
There are two terms of psychology, which imply unexamined assumptions, and one of which at least has undergone the fire of recent realism: “mental content,” and “psychical process.” The first is an assumption still of the majority of psychologists. The presentation of an external object may or may not “agree” with that object, but in the cases where we assume a complete agreement or identity, the presentation is like a point at which the circumferences of two circles are in contact: the one point may be taken twice over in two diverging contexts. Thus Miss Wodehouse declares that content has one context, while object has another. a stone die is hard and...