RADICAL EMPIRICISM 255 cases, whether we had been witnesses of the events in question, we should normally reply that we had; but this does not mean that when we recalled them our act of recollection included any reference to ourselves. If we were conscious of having been present at the scene, it was in a purely dispositional sense. And even this is not absolutely necessary. There are abnormal cases in which it is clear from the evidence of their behaviour that people remember events which they actually deny having witnessed. It may besaid that such memories should be classified as unconscious, and therefore as falling outside the scope of James's account, but this would appear somewhat arbitrary in the cases where the subject is conscious of the past event and only not conscious of having witnessed it. What makes it tempting to maintain that we always remember events as experienced by ourselves is that saying ‘I remember’ does carry the implication that the occur- rences in question entered into one’s own experience. But, if I am right, it does not enter into the conditions of remembering an event that one should claim to remember it, even if the claim is made only to oneself. I have tried to show that it is not necessary, and it is obviously not sufficient. It is not at all easy to say what is sufficient. I have argued that James requires too much, but it is also true that he does not require enough. In saying, as he does, that ‘the object of memory is only an object imagined in the past to which the emotion of belief adheres’, he forgets that it is quite possible to believe truly that a certain event occurred, to locate it correctly in one’s own past experience, to imagine it vividly, but still not to remember it. The most obvious way in which this could happen would be for one to have been told about the event by someone whom one regarded as a reliable authority. This is a well-known difficulty, but I am still not sure how it can be overcome. It has been sug- gested that we need only add the further condition that one’s belief in the occurrence of the event be causally dependent upon one’s previous experience of it. But the trouble is that this may also be true in a case where one’s belief in an event which one has forgotten is caused by someone else’s testimony; for instance, 1 Ibid., p. 652.256 WILLIAM JAMES one’s informant may originally have heard the story from one- self. To exclude the effect of testimony altogether will not do, because it often has the effect of bringing memories back. It is, therefore, necessary to enter more precisely into the details of the causal connection, to stipulate, for example, that the belief must be the direct outcome of the activation of a brain-trace which was implanted by one’s experience of the original event. But now it seems very implausible to read such a specific causal thegry into the definition of memory. It is anyhow conceivable that the theory of brain-traces should be false, without our therefore haying to conclude that nothing is remembered. Moreover, even| if we adopted such a causal condition, we should still have to a¢count for the change that takes place when we suddenly remember something which we had previously believed upon testimony. It can hardly be supposed that it consists in our becoming aware of the activation of a brain-trace. To speak of a ‘feeling’ of memory, which is sui generis, is not very satisfactory, but I confess that I do not know what else there is to say. With this brief account and criticism of his analysis of memory, I come to the end of my survey of the materials out of which James tries to construct the world as we know it and of the very first steps that his construction takes. The next stage in our examination of his radical empiricism will be to see how out of the stuff of ‘pure experience’, which is all that he believes there really is, he tries to extract the conscious subject and to explain how the subject differentiates between himself, his feelings and his concepts, and the things which are external to him. We shall begin with James’s analysis of self-consciousness. B. THE KNOWER AND THE KNOWN 1. The Concept of the Self In an essay entitled ‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?’, which appeared in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods in 1904 and is reprinted as the first of the Essays in RadicalRADICAL EMPIRICISM 257 Empiricism, James comes to the conclusion that it does not. This conclusion is, however, less startling than it might appear. James does not mean to deny that people have thoughts and feelings; neither does he take the behaviourist view that these thoughts and feelings are reducible to the physical states and dispositions of those who own them, though, as we shall see, there is a sense in which he does hold that mental and physical ‘objects’ are identical. What he does deny is that the word ‘consciousness’ stands for an entity, while insisting ‘most emphatically that it does stand for a function’.t The function for which he takes it to stand is that of knowing. It will help to elucidate James’s position if we contrast his analysis of this function with that which is likely to be given by philoso- phers who tie themselves more closely to the outlook of common- sense. Their view would be that in the analysis of a cognitive situation there are three, or perhaps even four elements to be distinguished; first, the knowing subject, secondly, his act of consciousness, and thirdly, the object of this act: a fourth element would be added by those who think it necessary to distinguish between the object of the act, or state, of consciousness and its content. James, for his part, is very much more economical. For him there is only a piece of experience, in which there is no distinction between object and content. The knowing subject and his act of consciousness are both eliminated, at Icast as entities. Together with the cognitive process, in the analysis of which they were supposed to figure, they are transformed into relations between experiences. James’s reasons for denying that either the self or its alleged acts of consciousness exist as entities are partly empirical and partly reasons of economy. On the subject of acts of conscious- ness he quotes G. E. Moore, who had based his Refutation of Idealism? upon the assumption that the distinction between acts of consciousness and their objects is not only one that we are logically bound to make but also one that we can introspectively detect. “The moment we try to fix our attention upon conscious- s fical . 3s ee bn Radia eee Moore's Philosophical Studies, A.O.P,