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How Two Minds Can Know One Thing
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Meanwhile, a pure experience can be postulated with any amount whatever of span or field. If it exert the retrospective and appropriative function on any other piece of experience, the latter thereby enters into its own conscious stream. And in this operation time intervals make no essential difference. After sleeping, my retrospection is as perfect as it is between two successive waking moments of my time. Accordingly if, millions of years later, a similarly retrospective experience should anyhow come to birth, my present thought would form a genuine portion of its long-span conscious life. ‘Form a portion,’ I say, but not in the sense that the two things could be entitatively or substantively one–they cannot, for they are numerically discrete facts–but only in the sense that the functions of my present thought, its knowledge, its purpose, its content and ‘consciousness,’ in short, being inherited, would be continued practically unchanged. Speculations like Fechner’s, of an Earth-soul, of wider spans of consciousness enveloping narrower ones throughout the cosmos, are, therefore, philosophically quite in order, provided they distinguish the functional from the entitative point of view, and do not treat the minor consciousness under discussion as a kind of standing material of which the wider ones consist.[74]
FOOTNOTES:
[68] [Reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. II, No. 7, March 30, 1905.]
[69] “A World of Pure Experience,” above, pp. 39-91.
[70] [For an explanation of this expression, see above, p. 32.]
[71] I call them ‘passing thoughts’ in the book–the passage in point goes from pages 330 to 342 of vol. I.
[72] Shadworth Hodgson has laid great stress on the fact that the minimum of consciousness demands two subfeelings, of which the second retrospects the first. (Cf. the section ‘Analysis of Minima’ in his Philosophy of Reflection, vol. I, p. 248; also the chapter entitled ‘The Moment of Experience’ in his Metaphysic of Experience, vol. I, p. 34.) ‘We live forward, but we understand backward’ is a phrase of Kierkegaard’s which Hoeffding quotes. [H. Hoeffding: “A Philosophical Confession,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. II, 1905, p. 86.]
[73] [Cf. below, pp. 197, 202.]
[74] [Cf. A Pluralistic Universe, Lect. IV, ‘Concerning Fechner,’ and Lect. V, ‘The Compounding of Consciousness.’]