ence centers in, or gathers about, or proceeds from a center or
subject which is outside the course of natural existence, and set over
against it:--it being of no importance, for present purposes, whether
this antithetical subject is termed soul, or spirit, or mind, or ego, or
consciousness, or just knower or knowing subject.

There are plausible grounds for thinking that the currency of the idea
in question lies in the form which men's religious preoccupations took
for many centuries. These were deliberately and systematically
other-worldly. They centered about a Fall which was not an event in
nature, but an aboriginal catastrophe that corrupted Nature; about a
redemption made possible by supernatural means; about a life in another
world--essentially, not merely spatially, Other. The supreme drama of
destiny took place in a soul or spirit which, under the circumstances,
could not be conceived other than as non-natural--extra-natural, if not,
strictly speaking, supernatural. When Descartes and others broke away
from medieval interests, they retained as commonplaces its intellectual
apparatus: Such as, knowledge is exercised by a power that is
extra-natural and set over against the world to be known. Even if they
had wished to make a complete break, they had nothing to put as knower
in the place of the soul. It may be doubted whether there was any
available empirical substitute until science worked out the fact that
physical changes are functional correlations of energies, and that man
is continuous with other forms of life, and until social life had
developed an intellectually free and responsible individual as its
agent.

But my main point is not dependent upon any particular theory as to the
historic origin of the notion about the bearer of experience. The point
is there on its own account. The essential thing is that the bearer was
conceived as outside of the world; so that experience consisted in the
bearer's being affected through a type of operations not found anywhere
in the world, while knowledge consists in surveying the world, looking
at it, getting the view of a spectator.

The theological problem of attaining knowledge of God as ultimate
reality was transformed in effect into the philosophical problem of the
possibility of attaining knowledge of reality. For how is one to get
beyond the limits of the subject and subjective occurrences? Familiarity
breeds credulity oftener than contempt. How can a problem b