ch SEEMS obviously in common among the different
ways of being conscious, and that is, that they are all directed to
OBJECTS. We are conscious "of" something. The consciousness, it seems,
is one thing, and that of which we are conscious is another thing.
Unless we are to acquiesce in the view that we can never be conscious
of anything outside our own minds, we must say that the object of
consciousness need not be mental, though the consciousness must be. (I
am speaking within the circle of conventional doctrines, not expressing
my own beliefs.) This direction towards an object is commonly regarded
as typical of every form of cognition, and sometimes of mental life
altogether. We may distinguish two different tendencies in traditional
psychology. There are those who take mental phenomena naively, just as
they would physical phenomena. This school of psychologists tends not to
emphasize the object. On the other hand, there are those whose primary
interest is in the apparent fact that we have KNOWLEDGE, that there is a
world surrounding us of which we are aware. These men are interested in
the mind because of its relation to the world, because knowledge, if
it is a fact, is a very mysterious one. Their interest in psychology
is naturally centred in the relation of consciousness to its object, a
problem which, properly, belongs rather to theory of knowledge. We may
take as one of the best and most typical representatives of this school
the Austrian psychologist Brentano, whose "Psychology from the Empirical
Standpoint,"* though published in 1874, is still influential and was the
starting-point of a great deal of interesting work. He says (p. 115):

* "Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte," vol. i, 1874.
(The second volume was never published.)

"Every psychical phenomenon is characterized by what the scholastics of
the Middle Ages called the intentional (also the mental) inexistence of
an object, and what we, although with not quite unambiguous expressions,
would call relation to a content, direction towards an object (which is
not here to be understood as a reality), or immanent objectivity. Each
contains something in itself as an object, though not each in the same
way. In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is
acknowledged or rejected, in love something is loved, in hatred hated,
in desire desired, and so on.

"This intentional inexistence is exclusively peculiar to psychical
phenome