and either directly or indirectly operates on.  If it resemble without operating, it is a dream; if it operate without resembling, it is an error. [Footnote:  Among such errors are those cases in which our feeling operates on a reality which it does partially resemble, and yet does not intend:  as for instance, when I take up your umbrella, meaning to take my own.  I cannot be said here either to know your umbrella, or my own, which latter my feeling more completely resembles.  I am mistaking them both, misrepresenting their context, etc.

We have spoken in the text as if the critic were necessarily one mind, and the feeling criticised another.  But the criticised feeling and its critic may be earlier and later feelings of the same mind, and here it might seem that we could dispense with the notion of operating, to prove that critic and criticised are referring to and meaning to represent the same.  We think we see our past feelings directly, and know what they refer to without appeal.  At the worst, we can always fix the intention of our present feeling and make it refer to the same reality to which any one of our past feelings may have referred.  So we need no ‘operating’ here, to make sure that the feeling and its critic mean the same real q.  Well, all the better if this is so!  We have covered the more complex and difficult case in our text, and we may let this easier one go.  The main thing at present is to stick to practical psychology, and ignore metaphysical difficulties.

One more remark.  Our formula contains, it will be observed, nothing to correspond to the great principle of cognition laid down by Professor Ferrier in his Institutes of Metaphysic and apparently adopted by all the followers of Fichte, the principle, namely, that for knowledge to be constituted there must be knowledge of the knowing mind along with whatever else is known:  not q, as we have supposed, but q plus myself, must be the least I can know.  It is certain that the common sense of mankind never dreams of using any such principle when it tries to discriminate between conscious states that are knowledge and conscious states that are not.  So that Ferrier’s principle, if it have any relevancy at all, must have relevancy to the metaphysical possibility of consciousness at large, and not to the practically recognized constitution of cognitive consciousness.  We may therefore pass it by without further notice here.] It is to be feared that the reader may consider this formula rather insignificant and obvious, and hardly worth the labor of so many pages, especially when he considers that the only cases to which it applies are percepts, and that the whole field of symbolic or conceptual thinking seems to elude its grasp.  Where the reality is either a material thing or act, or a state of the critic’s consciousness, I may both mirror it in my mind and operate upon it—­in the latter case indirectly, of course—­as soon as I perceive it.  But there are many cognitions, universally allowed to be such, which neither mirror nor operate on their realities.