asure inspired by it.

* This is explicitly the case with Mach's "Analysis of
Sensations," a book of fundamental importance in the present
connection. (Translation of fifth German edition, Open Court
Co., 1914. First German edition, 1886.)

William James's view was first set forth in an essay called "Does
'consciousness' exist?"* In this essay he explains how what used to be
the soul has gradually been refined down to the "transcendental ego,"
which, he says, "attenuates itself to a thoroughly ghostly condition,
being only a name for the fact that the 'content' of experience IS
KNOWN. It loses personal form and activity--these passing over to the
content--and becomes a bare Bewusstheit or Bewusstsein uberhaupt, of
which in its own right absolutely nothing can be said. I believe (he
continues) that 'consciousness,' when once it has evaporated to this
estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether.
It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first
principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo,
the faint rumour left behind by the disappearing 'soul' upon the air of
philosophy"(p. 2).

* "Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific
Methods," vol. i, 1904. Reprinted in "Essays in Radical
Empiricism" (Longmans, Green & Co., 1912), pp. 1-38, to
which references in what follows refer.

He explains that this is no sudden change in his opinions. "For twenty
years past," he says, "I have mistrusted 'consciousness' as an entity;
for seven or eight years past I have suggested its non-existence to my
students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities
of experience. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly
and universally discarded"(p. 3).

His next concern is to explain away the air of paradox, for James
was never wilfully paradoxical. "Undeniably," he says, "'thoughts' do
exist." "I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to
insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I
mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of
which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are
made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform,
and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That
function is KNOWING"(pp. 3-4).

James's view is that the raw material out of which the w