which is to represent. Upon this assumption rest the theory of representative perception and the correspondence-theory, or copy-theory, of truth.

Among the possible representative metaphors the picture is the nearly universal choice. It is hardly too much to say that for common sense and for science alike the idea is just a picture-qualified, however, as a "mental picture" or a "mental image". Upon this metaphorical basis is built most of the traditional psychology, especially that which makes a special claim to be "empirical", to communicate the facts of mind just as they are. This view, which makes of human life a gallery of pictures exhibited in succession, has been stigmatized by Bergson as the "cinematograph-psychology"; a comparison so apt in detail that we might almost conceive the cinema to have been invented for the purpose of objectifying the traditional view of mind. The synthesis of a succession of instantaneous pictures into an experience of motion illustrates precisely, when the process is reversed, the method by which for two centuries past psychologists have "analysed" all of the life of the soul into coexistences and successions of atomic "mental states". As an explanatory metaphor, however, even the simple picture has a unique advantage. For it seems to us that pictures represent their object necessarily and inevitably. Their representative function is not a matter of convention as in the case of a poker-chip or baggage-check. At the same time there may be a picture to which no reality corresponds; it will then be a "mere picture". Accordingly, by furnishing the soul with pictures we seem to explain, not only how our ideas always seem to be significant (as they might not seem if they were thought of as poker-chips), but how we may have significant ideas which are yet only

"mere ideas". "Mere ideas", of course, are "mere pictures".

• What I will say, then, is that in our human experience there are, and can be, no mere ideas, mere pictures, or mere symbols: The purpose of the picture-psychology is to offer a "scientific" theory of mind which will dispense with the person, that is, with the activity of "apperception", or of imagination. But apart from the activity of imagination a symbol is not a symbol, a picture is not a picture; and it "represents" nothing. As a brute fact a picture of course knows nothing; it is the person looking at it who knows. The plausibility of the picture-psychology, with its apparatus of "mental images" suggesting one another, all rests upon the idea that pictures are somehow natural conveyors of knowledge. Yet a little reflection must show that the idea is the fruit of sheer innocence; of an innocence comparable only with that of an unlettered person who wonders at the stupidity of a man, though he be born French or German, who derives no intelligence from plain English; or of the innocence (of one of us perhaps) who, surveying a page of Chinese, doubts gravely whether true intelligence could ever be expressed in anything of that kind. I think many persons must have noted that a very young child-say, a child between one and two years old, and thus quite old enough to distinguish many of the objects about him-derives nothing from a picture. Show him a picture of his mother, and he smiles wonderingly in reply. The late Carl Lumholtz tells us that the Australian blacks saw nothing in a photograph of himself. And what, then, of ourselves? I think we are all inclined to wonder how the cave-man, or the child of four or five, could suppose his crude sketches of animals to be rep

resentative of reality. And in looking at a Japanese print I can only wonder what idea or scheme of representation the artist had in mind. It does not easily occur to me that, unconscious of any scheme of representation, he might regard this as only the natural way of presenting the object. And yet why should he not? In brief, a picture or an image is one kind of symbol-one kind of language— among others. It has no more meaning per se, and no more self-evident cognitive power, than the Morse code. For it is only imagination that knows.

And this means that so far as imagination is awake and active we no longer merely "have a picture"; we face reality. This is true even when in the physical sense we are facing a picture. I hold, for example, in my hand a photograph of Westminster Abbey upon which my eyes are resting. From a physical point of view the facts are simple. But now when I reproduce the photograph in a mental picture (so to speak) and say that I have also a picture of the Abbey in my mind, the whole situation is dissolved. For so far as the picture I am assumed to have fulfils its functions as a picture I no longer "have" anything. I see Westminster Abbey. Or better, I am in the presence of the Abbey; and thus far the Abbey is not represented but presented. On the other hand so far as the picture is in evidence-so far as I only "have a picture" of the Abbey-I have not even a picture. To say, in other words, that I am not in the presence of the Abbey but only in the presence of the picture is to reduce that picture to the meaningless thing it would be if I could view it with what the draftsman calls "the innocence of the eye", and see it, no longer as a picture, in perspective, but only as a certain distribution of light and shade.

There are certain ingenious stereoscopic pictures which illustrate the point nicely. Viewing them with the naked eye all that I can make out as a uninitiated observer is a rather complicated tangle of straight lines, all now in one plane-not a picture of anything. I shall be told, however, that this tangle is a picture in perspective of a rather simple arrangement of lines, or threads, in three dimensions. And when I survey the card through the stereoscope (but only then if imagination gives the cue) suddenly the perspective meaning of the picture is revealed. I use the word "revealed" because this word alone is just to the dramatic contrast between the two experiences. But now in this second experience it is quite false to say that I "have a picture". A picture, let us remember, is all in one plane. But what I now see is in three dimensions and in several planes, nearer or more remote with reference to myself. In brief, I am in the midst of an objective situation.

The printed page is another illustration. I am reading Doughty's "Arabia Deserta" in the quiet of the midnight hour before going to bed. If I chance to grow dull and sleepy, then what I find before me is just a printed page. But while imagination remains awake I am in the Arabian desert even though I am also in my easy chair.

And therefore my thesis: there are no mere ideas. All experience of mind is insight; and thus, as experience, an apprehension of a reality other than myself. The possibility so often suggested in modern philosophy that our whole world may be nothing but "mere idea" and all consciousness illusion, is meaningless for mental experience. It presupposes that mental life is life in a picture gallery. This view of mind, as I have pointed out, is the fruit, not

of experience of mind, but of observation of mind, rather of observation of behavior, of other persons. It is thus not more nearly related to the experienced realities of mind than the observation of toothache is related to having a toothache, or the observation of love to being in love. The question as I am thinking of it is not how it looks to have a mind but (if you please) how it feels-what it is to be conscious. For one who is conscious there are no subjective "mental states" waiting to be attached, on the one hand to a knowing person, on the other hand to a thing known. In any degree whatever in which you are conscious you are aware, however vaguely, of a distinction and a relation between yourself a knowing person and a known which is other than yourself. Any one who thinks is just so far a person confronted with reality.

This means that consciousness, or spirit, is not in any sense a "state" as digestion is a state; or if a state, consciousness is a state of knowing something other than myself. Nor is consciousness an "effect", the effect of an external object stamping itself upon a tabula rasa; or if an effect, it is an effect which, as a consciousness of effect, somehow knows not only itself but the system of things constituting its cause. Nor is consciousness a "reaction" (to speak with the vulgar). If a reaction, consciousness is at any rate a reaction which knows why and to what it reacts. As against these banalities of popular psychology, I turn rather to Walter Pater's characterization of the mind as essentially "vision". Yet this too may be misleading. It may be that vision, as the best developed of our senses, is highly significant for the nature and meaning of all. But mere vision seems to me too cool, too dry, too possibly superficial and disconnected from all of the