"The contrast is not, then, as the Platonists would have it, between certain subjective facts called images and sensations, and others called acts of relating intelligence; the former being blind perishing things, knowing not even their own existence as such, whilst the latter combine the poles in the mysterious synthesis of their cognitive sweep.The contrast is really between two aspects , in which all mental facts without exception may be taken; their structural aspect, as being subjective, and their functional aspect, as being cognitions.In the former aspect, the highest as well as the lowest is a feeling, a peculiarly tinged segment of the stream.This tingeing is its sensitive body, the wie ihm zu Muthe ist , the way it feels whilst passing.In the latter aspect, the lowest mental fact as well as the highest may grasp some bit of truth as its content, even though that truth were as relationless a matter as a bare unlocalized and undated quality of pain.From the cognitive point of view, all mental facts are intellections.From the subjective point of view all are feelings.
Once admit that the passing and evanescent are as real parts of the stream as the distinct and comparatively abiding; once allow that fringes and halos, inarticulate perceptions, whereof the objects are as yet unnamed, mere nascencies of cognition, premonitions, awarenesses of direction, are thoughts sui generis , as much as articulate imaginings and propositions are; once restore, I say, the vague to its psychological rights, and the matter presents no further difficulty.
"And then we see that the current opposition of Feeling to Knowledge is quite a false issue.If every feeling is at the same time a bit of knowledge, we ought no longer to talk of mental states differing by having more or less of the cognitive quality; they only differ in knowing more or less, in having much fact or little fact for their object.The feeling of a broad scheme of relations is a feeling that knows much; the feeling of a simple quality is a feeling that knows little.But the knowing itself, whether of much or of little, has the same essence, and is as good knowing in the one case as in the other.Concept and image, thus discriminated through their objects, are consubstantial in their inward nature, as modes of feeling.
The one, as particular, will no longer be held to be a relatively base sort of entity, to be taken as a matter of course, whilst the other, as universal, is celebrated as a sort of standing miracle, to be adored but not explained.Both concept and image, quâ subjective, are singular and particular.Both are moments of the stream, which come and in an instant are no more.The word universality has no meaning as applied to their psychic body or structure, which is always finite.It only has a meaning when applied to their use, import, or reference to the kind of object they may reveal.The representation, as such, of the universal object is as particular as that of an object about which we know so little that the interjection 'Ha!' is all it can evoke from us in the way of speech.
Both should be weighed in the same scales, and have the same measure meted out to them, whether of worship or of contempt." (Mind, IX.pp.18-19.)
Hodgson, Time and Space, p.404.
Compare the admirable passage in Hodgson's Time and Space, p.310.
Philosophy of Reflection, I.273-308.
