PHENOMENOLOGY 1073
analysis, can be approached from the gates of any of the positive sciences: and, being
once reached, demands only a reemployment, in a more stringent mode, of its formal
mechanism of reduction and analysis, to disclose the transcendental phenomena.
But it is not to be doubted that transcendental phenomenology could be devel-
oped independently of all psychology. The discovery of the double relativity of
consciousness suggests the practice of both reductions. The psychological reduction
does not reach beyond the psychical in animal realities, for psychology subserves
real existence, and even its eidetic is confined to the possibilities of real worlds. But
the transcendental problem will include the entire world and all its sciences, to
“doubt” the whole. The world “originates” in us, as Descartes led men to recognize
and within us acquires its habitual influence. The general significance of the world,
and the definite sense of its particulars, is something of which we are conscious
within our perceiving, representing, thinking, valuing life, and therefore something
“constituted” in some subjective genesis.
The world and its property, “in and for itself,” exists as it exists, whether I, or we,
happen, or not, to be conscious of it. But let once this general world, make its “appear-
ance” in consciousness as “the” world. It is thenceforth related to the subjective, and all
its existence and the manner of it, assumes a new dimension, becoming “incompletely
intelligible,” “questionable.” Here, then, is the transcendental problem; this “making its
appearance,” this “being for us” of the world, which can only gain its significance “sub-
jectively,” what is it? We may call the world “internal” because it is related to conscious-
ness, but how can this quite “general” world, whose “immanent” being is as shadowy as
the consciousness wherein it “exists,” contrive to appear before us in a variety of “partic-
ular” aspects, which experience assures us are the aspects of an independent, self-
existent world? The problem also touches every “ideal” world, the world of pure number,
for example, and the world of “truths in themselves.” And no existence, or manner of
existence, is less wholly intelligible than ourselves. Each by himself, and in society, we,
in whose consciousness the world is valid, being men, belong ourselves to the world.
Must we, then, refer ourselves to ourselves to gain a worldly sense, a worldly being? Are
we both psychologically to be called men, subjects of a psychical life, and yet be tran-
scendental to ourselves and the whole world, being subjects of a transcendental world-
constituting life? Psychical subjectivity, the “I” and “we” of everyday intent, may be
experienced as it is in itself under the phenomenological-psychological reduction, and
being eidetically treated, may establish a phenomenological psychology. But the tran-
scendental subjectivity, which for want of language we can only call again, “I myself,”
“we ourselves,” cannot be found under the attitude of psychological or natural science,
being no part at all of the objective world, but that subjective conscious life itself,
wherein the world and all its content is made for “us,” for “me.” We that are, indeed,
men, spiritual and bodily, existing in the world, are, therefore, “appearances” unto our-
selves, parcel of what “we” have constituted, pieces of the significance “we” have made.
The “I” and “we,” which we apprehend, presuppose a hidden “I” and “we” to whom they
are “present.”
To this transcendental subjectivity transcendental experience gives us direct
approach. As the psychical experience was purified, so is the transcendental, by a reduc-
tion. The transcendental reduction may be regarded as a certain further purification of
the psychological interest. The universal is carried to a further stage. Henceforth the
“bracketing” includes not the world only but its “souls” as well. The psychologist
reduces the ordinarily valid world to a subjectivity of “souls,” which are a part of the
world which they inhabit. The transcendental phenomenologist reduces the already