The conditions and objects of sentience, which are not sentience, are also real.
It is preferable to give a more Platonic meaning to the word and to let “reality” designate not what is merely felt diffusely but what is true about those feelings. Then dramatic fancy, psychology of the sympathetic sort, would not be able to reach reality at all. On the other hand scientific psychology, together with all other sciences, would have reality for its object; for it would disclose what really was true about sentient moments, without stopping particularly to sink abstractedly into their inner quality or private semblance. It would approach and describe the immediate as a sentient factor in a natural situation, and show us to what extent that situation was represented in that feeling. This representation, by which the dignity and interest of pure sentience would be measured, might be either pictorial or virtual; that is, a conscious moment might represent the environing world either scientifically, by understanding its structure, or practically, by instinctive readiness to meet it.
Mind knowable and important in so far as it represents other things.
What, for instance, is the reality of Napoleon? Is it what a telepathic poet, a complete Browning, might reconstruct? Is it Napoleon’s life-long soliloquy? Or to get at the reality should we have to add, as scientific psychology would, the conditions under which he lived, and their relation to his casual feelings? Obviously if Napoleon’s thoughts had had no reference to the world we should not be able to recover them; or if by chance such thoughts fell some day to our share, we should attribute them to our own mental luxuriance, without suspecting that they had ever visited another genius. Our knowledge of his life, even where it is imaginative, depends upon scientific knowledge for its projection; and his fame and immortality depend on the degree to which his thoughts, being rooted in the structure of the world and pertinent to it, can be rationally reproduced in others and attributed to him. Napoleon’s consciousness might perhaps be more justly identified with the truth or reality of him than could that of most people, because he seems to have been unusually cognisant of his environment and master of the forces at work in it and in himself. He understood his causes and function, and knew that he had arisen, like all the rest of history, and that he stood for the transmissible force and authority of greater things. Such a consciousness can be known in proportion as we, too, possess knowledge, and is worth the pains; something which could not be said of the absolute sentience of Dick or Harry, which has only material being, brute existence, without relevance to anything nor understanding of itself.
The circumstances, open to science, which surround consciousness are thus real attributes of a man by which he is truly known and distinguished. Appearances are the qualities of reality, else realities would be without place, time, character, or interrelation. In knowing that Napoleon was a Corsican, a short man with a fine countenance, we know appearances only; but these appearances are true of the reality. And if the presumable inner appearances, Napoleon’s long soliloquy, were separated from the others, those inner appearances would not belong to Napoleon nor have any home in the knowable world. That which physics, with its concomitant psychology, might discover in a man is the sum of what is true about him, seeing that a man is a concretion in existence, the fragment of a world, and not a definition. Appearances define the constituent elements of his reality, which could not be better known than through their means.
FOOTNOTES:
[E] Aristotle called the soul the first entelechy of such a body. This first entelechy is what we should call life, since it is possessed by a man asleep. The French I know but do not use is in its first entelechy; the French I am actually speaking is in its second. Consciousness is therefore the second or actualised entelechy of its body.
CHAPTER VI
THE NATURE OF INTENT