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Presidential Address
803
Idealistic school, which is not that the so-called external reality owes its existence to mind, but that it is in mind and is a part of its activity. That a part is in the whole, does not mean that it is caused by the whole. According to Alexander, mind has a neural basis. In place of the old doctrines of parallelism and interaction of mind and matter he substitutes one of continuity amounting to identity. "All psychoses”, he says "are neuroses”. They imply, however, the emergence of a new feature which he explains as a case of "emergent evolution". (I do not know how far this doctrine of “emergent evolution" can escape the horns of Sankara's anirvacaniyatāvāda or save itself without the help of the anekānta-syādyāda of the all-merciful Jaina.) His statement that a process with the distinctive quality of mind or consciousness is 'in the same place and time with a neural process' is a bit of dogmatic philosophy in which the problem of bridging the gulf between consciousness and physiological process is evidently shirked. Equally unsatisfactory is his account of the cognitive relation which he understands as a case of 'compresence' or 'togetherness' of a higher finite and lower finite, the mind and its object.
To reduce the relation of the subject and the object which is the whole problem of epistemology to the 'compresence of co-ordinates, as in the NyāyaVaiseshika system of Indian Philosophy is to miss the singularity of the cognitive relation in which the object is not cognized as co-ordinate with the subject but as antithetic to it. Moreover, he speaks of the mind as 'enjoing' itself, yet 'contemplating' its object.
