data—we need not here trouble ourselves with the controversy between realists and symbolists. Even on Spencer's view the world as symbolized is the real world for science.

Now one way of expressing the fact that the cognitive relation is always present where knowledge is concerned is to proclaim 'the truth that our states of consciousness are the only things we can know'.[64] But it is a terribly ambiguous way of expressing the fact. What is here meant by a state of consciousness? So far as cognition is concerned it is, or at any rate it involves, a relationship between something known and the organism, as knowing—for Spencer assuredly the organism, though a so-called inner aspect therein. Of course it is a very complex relationship. It comprises relations in what is known, and relations in the organism as knowing. Hence Spencer defines life, psychical as well as physical, as 'the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations'.[65]

'That which distinguishes Psychology is that each of its propositions takes account both of the connected internal phenomena and of the connected external phenomena to which they refer. It is not only the one, nor only the other, that characterises cognition. It is the connexion between these two connexions.'[66]

So far well. Cognition is a very complex network of relatedness involving many terms. What are these terms? For Spencer the internal terms are ultimately nervous (= psychic) shocks in highly integrated aggregates; and the external terms are, proximately at least, things in the environment. But both alike are spoken of as states of consciousness. There is surely an opening for ambiguity here. Sometimes, too, the words subjective affections are used in place of states of consciousness. 'Thus we are brought to the conclusion that what we are conscious of as properties of matter, even down to its weight and resistance, are but subjective affections.'[67] Well, these states of consciousness, these subjective affections, fall into two great classes—the vivid and the faint. The former, which we know as sensations, accompany direct and therefore strong excitations of the nerve-centres; the latter, which we know as remembered sensations, or ideas of sensations, accompany indirect and therefore weak excitations of the same nerve-centres.[68] And then we are told that the aggregate of the faint is what we call the mind, the subject, the ego; the aggregate of the vivid is what we call the external world, the object, the non-ego.[69] It would seem, then, that the aggregate of vivid subjective affections is the objective world so far as knowable. To say the least of it, this terminology is somewhat perplexing.