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K. C. BHATTACHARYYA
635
of the tree) is like the felt body, not dissociated from what is actually perceived. The absent known by conscious non-perception (the book) has no locus, is free from space, but not from time (the present), and so is not fully dissociated from object (II 60), but it is partly so dissociated, and is a transitional stage to the fully psychic fact of imagination (II 60).
Psychic subjectivity involves psychic fact, in which knownness is distinguished from the known in introspection. Abstract knownness, however, emerges only with the positive awareness of what is unknown (II 63). Psychic subjectivity begins with imagination. Image is fact, but a different sort of fact from object, a "substantive something from which the object is distinct” (II 62).50 External object is known as with position, perceived body is imagined to have position, felt body is known as with an unknown position, absence is not known to be with position, but image is known to be without position. Like absence image has no locus, but unlike absence it has no time-position either, not even present absence, though time-position is not denied to it (II 64). We must reject "the current banality that psychic facts are only in time while objective facts are in both space and time" (II 65). Image has objective form but no objective position and no necessary time. Image is always incomplete, a form being formed, substantive and functional (II 67)-else it would be percept. The completed form which fulfills the forming is idea (II 68). Idea, however, may be dissociated from image, idea of object as not imaged but sought51 to be imaged, conscious want of image (II 69). Contrasted to such pictorial thought is thought proper, the content of which is unpicturable yet meaningful and therefore object. Thought is about object, but of something unobjective about object. Unimaginability of content and consequent awareness of the impossibility of its objectivity involve complete detachment from objectivity (11 70). Thought is eternal, altogether dissociated from time. It is about object, but its content is characterized "as what the object is distinct from” (II 71). It is a psychic fact, but having, an object is not pure subjective activity. As compared with pure subject it is "objective in its very dissociation from objectivity” (II 71), necessarily characterized as what theobj ect is not.
Spiritual subjectivity begins with feeling. While thought is negatively unobjective, as dissociated from the object to which it refers, feeling
50 Fact in general means what is asserted, but the meaning of facthood as a predicate apart from the assertion changes as we pass from perceived object to perceived body, felt body, absence, and image.
51 Sought, in this context, seems to indicate the object-directed constructive faculty (maya), whereas demanding indicates the subject-oriented self-realizing activity (moksha).
