Yet not as stubbornly as in the case of
physical qualities, for beauty and ugliness,
love and hatred, pleasant and painful can, in
certain complex experiences, coexist.
If one were to make an evolutionary construction
of how a lot of originally chaotic pure
experience became gradually differentiated
into an orderly inner and outer world, the
whole theory would turn upon one's success in
explaining how or why the quality of an experience,
once active, could become less so, and,
from being an energetic attribute in some
cases, elsewhere lapse into the status of an
36
inert or merely internal 'nature.' This would
be the 'evolution' of the psychical from the
bosom of the physical, in which the esthetic,
moral and otherwise emotional experiences
would represent a halfway stage.
VIII
But a last cry of _non_possumus_ will probably
go up from many readers. "All very pretty as
a piece of ingenuity," they will say, "but our
consciousness itself intuitively contradicts you.
We, for our part, _know_ that we are conscious.
We _feel_ our thought, flowing as a life within us,
in absolute contrast with the objects which it
so unremittingly escorts.
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