Subject and Object

The doctrine of the independent knowledge of subject or mind, as above set forth, is confirmed by some of the chief forms and defenses of the opposite doctrine. Many who most earnestly contend that mind and matter, or subject and object, are and can be known only in contrast with one another, make, in fact, both subject and object internal or subjective, regard them both as in the mind, or as modes, aspects, pulses, or parts of the same reality - mind. There are somewhat different modes of drawing the line between subject and object within mind. Professor Bain, for instance, assigns especially our muscular or active experiences to object, and our passive experiences, as the tactual sensations, to subject. First, he remarks of the distinction of subject and object as being a distinction of things wholly within mind: "The totality of our mental life is made up of two kinds of consciousness - the Object consciousness and the Subject consciousness. The first is our external world, our non-ego; the second is our ego, or mind proper. It is quite true that the object consciousness which we call Externality, is still a mode of self in the most comprehensive sense, but not in the usual restricted sense of 'self and 'mind, ' which are names for the subject, to the exclusion of the object." Here, plainly, the external world and mind are both made purely subjective, but modes of what is commonly and properly called mind. The position becomes yet more plain by the express manner in which Professor Bain denies the existence of matter, and implicitly everything else external to and independent of the mind. "Knowledge," he says, "means a state of mind; the notion of material things is a mental fact. We are incapable even of discussing the existence of an independent material world; the very act is a contradiction." "Of matter as independent of our feeling of resistance, we can have no conception; the rising up of this feeling within us amounts to everything that we mean by resisting matter. We are not at liberty to say, without incurring contradiction, that our feeling of expended energy is one thing, and a resisting material world another and a different thing; that other and different thing is by us wholly unthinkable." -"The Principles of Knowledge, with Remarks on the Nature of Reality," Vol. 1