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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Notes on Contributors
Introduction to the Second Edition
Introduction to the First Edition
Content
Physicalism
The Place of Consciousness in Nature
Conclusion
References
PART I: MENTAL CONTENT
IS THERE A VIABLE NOTION OF NARROW MENTAL
CONTENT?
CHAPTER ONE: Cognitive Content and Propositional
Attitude Attributions
1. Background
2. Doubting Definitions
3. Paderewski Variations
4. DeRe and De Dicto
5. Attitude Attributions, Neologisms, and
Generalizations
Acknowledgments
References
Notes
 CHAPTER TWO: There Is No Viable Notion of Narrow
Content
1. Narrow and Broad Content
2. Narrow Narrow Content
3. Epistemic Narrow Content16
4. Thoroughly Narrow Content
5. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Notes
IS EXTERNALISM ABOUT MENTAL CONTENT
COMPATIBLE WITH PRIVILEGED ACCESS?
CHAPTER THREE: Externalism and Privileged Access
Are Consistent
1. Anti‐individualism
2. The McKinsey Problem
3. Types of Response to the McKinsey Problem
4. Anti‐individualism Does Not Imply (2)
5. Reconsideration of McKinsey’s Position
6. Problems for McKinsey
7. Unproblematic Privileged Access to the World?
8. Conclusion
Acknowledgment
References
Notes
CHAPTER FOUR: Externalism and Privileged Access
Are Inconsistent
1. The Reductio Argument for Incompatibilism
2. The Proper Response to the Reductio
3. Why Semantic Externalism (SE) Is True
4. The Retreat to MSE Is Unmotivated
 5. Individuating Thoughts
6. What’s Wrong with Metaphysical Externalism
(ME)
References
Notes
IS THE INTENTIONAL ESSENTIALLY NORMATIVE?
CHAPTER FIVE: Resisting Normativism in Psychology
1. The Background Normativity Claims
2. Norms and Psychology3
3. Wedgwood’s Arguments
4. General Qualms
References
Notes
CHAPTER SIX: Normativism Defended
1. A Version of the Claim That “the Intentional Is
Normative”
2. An Argument for the Claim That “the
Intentional Is Normative”
3. A Hopelessly Panglossian Picture of the Mind?
4. Psychology, A Priori and Empirical
Acknowledgments
References
Notes
IS THERE NON‐CONCEPTUAL CONTENT?
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Revenge of the Given
1. Introduction
2. Kinds of Representations
3. Some Data at Last
4. Conclusion
Reference
Note
 CHAPTER EIGHT: Are There Different Kinds of
Content?
1. What Is Conceptual Structure?
2. What Non‐conceptual Content Is: Cognitive
Maps
3. What Non‐conceptual Content Is: Visual
Perception
4. Syntax and Semantics
Acknowledgments
References
Notes
PART II: PHYSICALISM
IS NON‐REDUCTIVE MATERIALISM VIABLE?
CHAPTER NINE: Everybody Has Got It
References
Notes
CHAPTER TEN: The Evolving Fortunes of Eliminative
Materialism
1. An Epistemological Detour
2. The Independent Case for Theoreticity
3. Totting up the Prospects: Sensory Qualia
4. Totting Up the Prospects: The Propositional
Attitudes
5. Is There a Residual Case for Propositional
Attitudes in Humans?
References
Notes
SHOULD PHYSICALISTS BE A PRIORI PHYSICALISTS?
CHAPTER ELEVEN: A Priori Physicalism
1. Physicalism and the Mind–Brain Identity
Theory
 2. The Disagreement between A Priori and A
Posteriori Physicalism
3. De Re versus De Dicto Versions of the Debate
4. The Epistemological Argument from Zombies
for A Priori Physicalism
5. The Semantic Argument for A Priori Physicalism
6. Some (Substantial) Tidying Up
7. The Analogy with Shapes and the Relevance of
Functionalism
8. De Re A Posteriori Physicalism and the Problem
of Distancing De Re A Posteriori Physicalism from
Dual Attribute Theories
Acknowledgments
References
Notes
CHAPTER TWELVE: On the Limits of A Priori
Physicalism
1. Common Ground
2. Disputed Territory
Acknowledgments
References
Notes
IS THERE AN UNRESOLVED PROBLEM OF MENTAL
CAUSATION?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Causation and Mental
Causation
1
2
4
5
6
References
 Notes
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Mental Causation, or
Something Near Enough
1. What Is “Non‐Reductive Physicalism?”
2. Why NRP Replaced RP
3. The Exclusion Argument Defanged
References
Notes
PART III: THE PLACE OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN NATURE
IS CONSCIOUSNESS ONTOLOGICALLY EMERGENT
FROM THE PHYSICAL?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Dualist Emergentism
1. Conscious Individuals and Consciousness
Properties
2. The Evolution of Consciousness
3. Substance Dualism
4. Qualitatively New Properties
5. Subject Causation
6. Causal Relevance of Consciousness Properties
7. Why Believe in Subject Causation?
8. The Adequacy of Amazement
Acknowledgments
References
Notes
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Against Ontologically Emergent
Consciousness
1. Introduction
2. The Emergentist Idea
3. Some Non‐Starters
4. Anodyne Novelty
5. The Role of Ontological Emergence
 6. How to Implement the Role of Emergence
7. More than Merely Nomological Supervenience
8. Analytic Necessitarianism
9. An Ontology of Powers
10. Necessitarianism with Strong Necessity
11. Other Roles for Ontological Emergence
12. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Notes
ARE PHENOMENAL CHARACTERS AND INTENTIONAL
CONTENTS OF EXPERIENCES IDENTICAL?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: New Troubles for the Qualia
Freak
1. Against Phenomenal Dualism
2. Why the Phenomenal Character of an
Experience Is Not One of Its Intrinsic Properties
3. Why the Phenomenal Character of an
Experience Is Not One of Its Nonrepresentational
Properties
4. Phenomenal Externalism
5. Lolita, XP1, and Bodily Sensations
6. An Alternative Proposal and Some Final
Thoughts on Qualia
Acknowledgments
References
Notes
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: A Case for Qualia
1
2
3
4
 5
References
Notes
IS AWARENESS OF OUR MENTAL ACTS A KIND OF
PERCEPTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS?
CHAPTER NINETEEN: All Consciousness Is
Perceptual
1. Perceptual Consciousness
2. Action
3. Thinking
4. Why Peacocke’s View Isn’t PC
5. Conclusion
References
CHAPTER TWENTY: Mental Action andSelf‐
Awareness (I)
1. The Distinctive Features of Action‐Awareness
2. The Nature and Range of Mental Actions
3. The Principal Hypothesis and Its Consequences
4. The Principal Hypothesis: Attractions and
Possibilities
5. Describing and Explaining Schizophrenic
Experience
6. The First Person in Action Self‐Ascriptions
7. Concluding Remarks: Rational Agency and
Action‐Awareness
Acknowledgments
References
Notes
PART IV: PERCEPTION AND MENTAL CAPACITIES
SHOULD PERCEPTION BE UNDERSTOOD IN TERMS OF
REPRESENTATION, DIRECT CONTACT WITH THE
WORLD, OR A HYBRID VIEW?
CHAPTER TWENTY‐ONE: Naïve Realism, the
Slightest Philosophy, and the Slightest Science
1. Naïve Realism
2. The Slightest Philosophy
3. Is Naïve Realism Inconsistent with
Contemporary Vision Science?
4. Cognitive Penetration
5. Multimodal Perception
6. Dorsal and Ventral Visual Streams
7. Unconscious Perception
8. Conclusion
References
Notes
CHAPTER TWENTY‐TWO: Naïve Realism v.
Representationalism
1. Internal Dependence: The Organismic
Contribution to Experience
2. Representationalism Accommodates Internal
Dependence
3. Basic Naïve Realism v. Representationalism
4. French and Phillips’s Modified Naïve Realism v.
Representationalism
5. Conclusion
References
Notes
CHAPTER TWENTY‐THREE: Capacities‐First
Philosophy
1. What Is Explanatorily Fundamental in an
Analysis of Perception?
2. Why Analyze the Mind in Terms of Mental
Capacities?
 3. The Hallucination Question and Perceptual
Particularity
4. Particularism and Attributionalism
5. The Commitments of Capacities‐First
Philosophy
6. Perceptual Capacities
7. Ways of Perceiving, Perceptual Capacities, and
Modes of Presentations
References
Notes
IS PERCEPTION GENERAL, PARTICULAR, OR A
HYBRID?
CHAPTER TWENTY‐FOUR: Perceiving Particulars
1. Introduction
2. Two Arguments for Existentialism
3. Two Objections to Existentialism
4. Perceptual Awareness of Particulars
5. Visual Objects
Acknowledgment
References
CHAPTER TWENTY‐FIVE: Abstract and Particular
Perceptual Content
1. Background
2. Alleged Benefits of Abstract Content
3. Alleged Benefits of Particular Content
4. The Pluralist View: The Best of Both Theories
5. Conclusion
References
Notes
HOW SHOULD WE UNDERSTAND THE DISTINCTION
BETWEEN PERCEPTION AND COGNITION?
 CHAPTER TWENTY‐SIX: The Perception–Cognition
Border
1. Introduction
2. The Dimension Restriction Hypothesis
3. Objections to DRH
4. The Full Iconicity View
5. Challenges to Block’s Format‐Based View
6. Block on Iconic Object Representations
7. Conclusion
References
Notes
CHAPTER TWENTY‐SEVEN: Let’s Get Rid of the
Concept of an Object File
1. Perceptual Object Representations Are Iconic
2. Object Files of Working Memory and Thought
References
Note
IS PAIN A NATURAL KIND?
CHAPTER TWENTY‐EIGHT: Scientific Eliminativism
for Pain
1. Introduction: Clarifying the Landscape
2. The Promiscuity of Pain
3. Spotlight on Utility
4. What the Problem Is and What It Isn’t
5. Conclusion: Why It Matters
References
Notes
CHAPTER TWENTY‐NINE: Pain Is a Natural Kind
Introduction
1. Why Theorizing about Pain Is Such a Pain (a
Quick Recap)
 2. Natural Kinds for Psychology
3. Moderate Pluralism about Pain
4. The Eliminativist Alternative
5. Concluding Thoughts
References
Notes
DO WE NEED IMAGINATION OVER AND ABOVE
IMAGERY AND SUPPOSITION?
CHAPTER THIRTY: Against Imagination
1. How Not to Explain the Mind
2. Varieties of Skepticism about Imagination
3. Mental Imagery
4. Mental Imagery and Imagination
5. Sensory Imagination / Propositional
Imagination / Supposition
6. Mental Imagery in Propositional Attitudes
7. Between Sensory Imagination and Supposition
8. Conclusion: Imagistic versus Linguistic
Cognition
References
Notes
CHAPTER THIRTY‐ONE: Why We Need Imagination
1. What Imagination Is
2. The Challenges from Supposition and
Conception
3. The Challenge from Belief
4. The Reductionist Challenge
5. Concluding Remarks
References
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 10
FIGURE 10.1 THE HURVICH–JAMESON NEURAL
NETWORK MODEL (HURVICH, 1981).
FIGURE 10.2 THREE OPPONENT‐PROCESS NEURONS.
Chapter 14
FIGURE 14.1 KIM’S FAVORITE DIAGRAM.
Chapter 21
FIGURE 21.1 THREE‐DIMENSIONAL EBBINGHAUS
ILLUSION.
Chapter 22
FIGURE 22.1 COINCIDENTAL VARIATION.
Chapter 26
FIGURE 26.1 THE RAT‐MAN.
FIGURE 26.2
FIGURE 26.3
FIGURES 26.4A (LEFT) AND 4B (RIGHT)
Chapter 27
FIGURE 27.1 IF A AND B ARE QUICKLY ALTERNATED,
ONE SEES APPARENT MOTION, USU...
FIGURE 27.2 THE LIKELIHOOD OF SEEING
HORIZONTAL (RATHER THAN VERTICAL MOTION...
FIGURE 27.3 A CLOCKWISE ORIENTED BAR CAN BE
SEEN TO ROTATE TO A COUNTERCLOCK...
FIGURE 27.4 IF CUED TO C, SUBJECTS ARE FASTER TO
DETECT TARGETS AT S THAN AT...
FIGURE 27.5 A VISUO‐SPATIAL NEGLECT PATIENT
WAS ASKED TO COPY THE TOP PICTUR...
FIGURE 27.6 SEQUENCE OF EVENTS IN A BASIC
MULTIPLE OBJECT TRACKING EXPERIMEN...
FIGURE 27.7 ILLUSTRATION OF THE EFFECT OF
DIVISIVE NORMALIZATION. THE CENTER...
FIGURE 27.8 VERSION OF THE OBJECT‐SPECIFIC
PREVIEW BENEFIT THAT SHOWS THAT O...
FIGURE 27.9 VERSION OF THE OBJECT‐SPECIFIC
PREVIEW BENEFIT.
Contemporary Debates in Philosophy
In teaching and research, philosophy makes progress through
argumentation and debate. Contemporary Debates in Philosophy
provides a forum for students and their teachers to follow and
participate in the debates that animate philosophy today in the
western world. Each volume presents pairs of opposing viewpoints
on contested themes and topics in the central subfields of
philosophy. Each volume is edited and introduced by an expert in the
field, and also includes an index, bibliography, and suggestions for
further reading. The opposing essays, commissioned especially for
the volumes in the series, are thorough but accessible presentations
of opposing points of view.

1. Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion

edited by Michael L. Peterson and Raymond J. VanArragon
2. Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Science
edited by Christopher Hitchcock
3. Contemporary Debates in Epistemology
edited by Matthias Steup and Ernest Sosa
4. Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics
edited by Andrew I. Cohen and Christopher Heath Wellman
5. Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art
edited by Matthew Kieran
6. Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory
edited by James Dreier
7. Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science
edited by Robert Stainton
8. Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind
edited by Brian McLaughlin and Jonathan Cohen
9. Contemporary Debates in Social Philosophy
 edited by Laurence Thomas
10. Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics
edited by Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne, and Dean W.
Zimmerman
11. Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy
edited by Thomas Christiano and John Christman
12. Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Biology
edited by Francisco J. Ayala and Robert Arp
13. Contemporary Debates in Bioethics
edited by Arthur L. Caplan and Robert Arp
14. Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, Second Edition
edited by Matthias Steup, John Turri, and Ernest Sosa
15. Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics, Second Edition
edited by Andrew I. Cohen and Christopher Heath Wellman
16. Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion, Second
Edition
edited by Michael L. Peterson and Raymond J. VanArragon
17. Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind, Second Edition
edited by Brian McLaughlin and Jonathan Cohen
Contemporary Debates in
Philosophy of Mind
SECOND EDITION

Edited by

Brian P. McLaughlin and Jonathan Cohen

This edition first published 2023
© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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We dedicate this volume to Judy H. McLaughlin and Liza Perkins‐
Cohen.
Notes on Contributors
Louise Antony is Professor Emerita at the University of
Massachusetts, and Regular Visiting Professor at Rutgers University.
In her research she attempts to develop naturalistic accounts of
meaning, knowledge, and agency that square with our scientific
understanding of the mind. She is the author of numerous articles in
the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and feminist theory, and has
co‐edited two collections of original essays, Chomsky and His
Critics (with Norbert Hornstein) and A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist
Essays on Reason and Objectivity (with Charlotte Witt).
Ned Block is Silver Professor at New York University in the
Department of Philosophy with secondary appointments in
psychology and the Center for Neural Science. He works in
philosophy of mind and cognitive science, with a focus on philosophy
of perception.
‐
David Braddon Mitchell is Reader in Philosophy at the
University of Sydney. He has published papers in the philosophy of
mind and metaphysics in Noûs, the Journal of Philosophy, Mind, the
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, the
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Erkenntnis, Synthese,
and various others. He is author, with Frank Jackson, of The
Philosophy of Mind and Cognition.
Anthony Brueckner (1953–2014) taught at Yale and University of
California, Santa Barbara. He wrote influential papers on topics in
epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of
language. He also wrote two books: Essays on Skepticism (Oxford,
2010) and Debating Self Knowledge (Cambridge, 2012, co‐
authored with Gary Ebbs).
Paul M. Churchland is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the
University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Scientific
Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, Matter and Consciousness, and
Neurophilosophy at Work. His research lies at the intersection of
cognitive neuroscience, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind.
Jonathan Cohen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
California, San Diego. He has published widely in philosophy of
perception, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy
of science, and aesthetics. He is the author of The Red and the Real:
An Essay on Color Ontology (OUP 2009), and the coeditor of Color
Ontology and Color Science (with Mohan Matthen, MIT, 2010).
Jennifer Corns is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University
of Glasgow. Her published research focuses on pain, affect, and
suffering. She is interested in how everyday thinking is appropriately
employed for specialised scientific and ethical theorising.
Jerry Fodor (1935–2017) held appointments at MIT, CUNY
Graduate Center, and Rutgers. He published widely and influentially
in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and cognitive
science. Among his most important works are The Language of
Thought (1975), The Modularity of Mind (1983), Psychosemantics:
The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind (1987), Holism:
A Shopper’s Guide (1992, with Ernie Lepore), Concepts: Where
Cognitive Science Went Wrong (1998), and LOT 2: The Language of
Thought Revisited (2008).
Matthew Fulkerson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the
University of California, San Diego. He has written on haptic touch,
pain, perceptual emotion and motivation, and bodily awareness.
Craig French is an Associate Professor in the philosophy
department at the University of Nottingham. He is author of
numerous articles focusing on the metaphysics and epistemology of
perception.
E. J. Green is Associate Professor of Philosophy at MIT. He has
published articles in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive
science, and philosophy of perception. Recent papers focus on the
perception of spatial properties, multimodal perception, and the
border between perception and cognition.
Richard Kimberly Heck (formerly Richard G. Heck, Jr.) is
Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. They have written
about philosophy of language, logic, mathematics, and mind, and the
work of Gottlob Frege. Currently, they are working on issues related
to gender and sexuality.
Christopher S. Hill is Faunce Professor of Philosophy at Brown
University. He is the author of five books and a number of articles on
topics in epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of
mind.
Frank Jackson is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the
Australian National University.
Jaegwon Kim (1934–2019) taught at Swarthmore College, Cornell
University, Johns Hopkins University, Notre Dame University, the
University of Michigan, and Brown University where he was William
Perry Faunce Professor Philosophy until his retirement. One of the
world’s leading philosophers of mind and metaphysics, Kim wrote
many seminal articles and authored five books: Supervenience and
Mind (Cambridge, 1993), Mind in a Physical World (MIT, 1998),
Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (Princeton, 2005),
Philosophy of Mind (Westview, 2006), and Essays on Metaphysics
and Mind (Oxford, 2010).
Amy Kind is Russell K. Pitzer of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna
College. Though her philosophical work centers on issues relating to
imagination, she has authored numerous articles across a range of
topics in philosophy of mind. She has also written two introductory
textbooks, Persons and Personal Identity (Polity) and Philosophy of
Mind: The Basics (Routledge).
Barry Loewer is Distinguished Professor at Rutgers, Director of
the Rutgers Center for Philosophy and the Sciences. He is the author
of many articles in the philosophy of physics, the philosophy of
mind, metaphysics, and logic. He is the author of a forthcoming
book, What Breathes Fire into the Equations, on the metaphysics of
laws, causation, and chance.
Heather Logue is Associate Professor at the University of Leeds.
Her research interests lie mostly in philosophy of mind (focusing on
metaphysical, epistemological, and methodological questions related
to perception) and feminist philosophy (particularly the metaphysics
of gender and feminist epistemology).
Michael McKinsey is Professor of Philosophy at Wayne State
University. He is the author of many articles in the philosophy of
language, the philosophy of mind, and ethics. His work has primarily
concerned the semantics of natural language, especially the meaning
and reference of proper names, indexicals, and natural kind terms, as
well as the meaning and logical form of cognitive ascriptions.
Brian P. McLaughlin is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He has published
numerous papers in a wide range of fields, including philosophy of
mind, philosophy of psychology, metaphysics, epistemology, and
philosophical logic. He has a forthcoming book with Oxford
University Press, co‐authored with Vann McGee, entitled
Terrestrial Logic: Formal Semantics Brought Down to Earth.
Bence Nanay is professor of philosophy and BOF research
professor at the University of Antwerp. He published three
monographs with Oxford University Press (Between Perception and
Action, 2013, Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception, 2016,
Aesthetics: A Very Short Introduction, 2019) with seven more under
contract. He has won the prestigious Bessel Award of the Humboldt
Foundation, Germany. He is the principal investigator of a two
million Euro ERC grant and the director of the European Network
for Sensory Research.
‐
Martine Nida Rümelin is Professor at the Department of
Philosophy, University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Her research
focuses on issues in the intersection of philosophy of mind and
metaphysics concerning the ontological status of conscious beings,
their identity (across time and possible worlds), and the nature of
their experiential properties. Further topics in the center of her
research are pre‐reflective self‐awareness and self‐reference; and
agency, freedom, and the capacity of being active (in human and
nonhuman animals). She aims at developing a naturalistic version of
subject‐body dualism which avoids the weaknesses of traditional
substance dualism. She has been awarded the Jean‐Nicod‐Price
2019 for her work in philosophy of mind and is the announced
recipient of the Frege Prize 2022.
Adam Pautz is Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. He
works on the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. He is the author
of Perception (Routledge, 2021) and is writing a book on
consciousness.
Christopher Peacocke is Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at
Columbia University and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of
Philosophy in the School of Advanced Studies in the University of
London. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ian Phillips is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of
numerous articles, focusing especially on the nature of perception,
the science of consciousness, and our experience of time.
Jesse Prinz is Distinguished of Philosophy at the City University of
New York, Graduate Center. His books and articles concern various
aspects of the mind, including consciousness, concepts, emotion,
moral psychology, aesthetic experience, and cultural cognition.
Georges Rey is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Maryland at College Park. He works primarily in the philosophy of
psychology, particularly the foundations of cognitive science,
particularly linguistics. He has written extensively on the nature of
concepts, qualia, consciousness, and language and is the author of
Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (Blackwell, 1997), the editor of
the cognitive science entries for the Routledge Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (with Barry Loewer) of Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His
Critics (Blackwell, 1991), and, most recently, Representation of
Language: Philosophical Issues in a Chomskyan Linguistics (Oxford
University Press, 2020).
Sarah Sawyer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Sussex. Her research is in the philosophy of mind and language,
epistemology, and metaphysics. She is the author of numerous
articles on a range of topics within these areas and editor of New
Waves in Philosophy of Language.
Susanna Schellenberg is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. She is the author of The
Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, Evidence (OUP, 2018).
Her contribution to this volume was generously supported by a
Guggenheim Fellowship, a NEH Fellowship, and a Mellon New
Directions Fellowship.
Gabriel Segal is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at King’s
College, London. He is author of A Slim Book about Narrow Content
(MIT Press, 2000) and Twelve Steps To Psychological Good Health
and Serenity—A Guide (Grosvenor House Publishing Limited, 2013,
2nd ed., 2017), co‐author, with Richard Larson, of Knowledge of
Meaning (MIT Press, 1995), and co‐editor, with Petr Kotatko and
Peter Pagin, of Interpreting Davidson (CSLI Publications, 2001)
and, with Nick Heather, of Addiction and Choice: Rethinking the
Relationship (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Sydney Shoemaker is Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy
‐
Emeritus at Cornell University. He is the author of Self Knowledge
‐
and Self Identity, Identity, Cause and Mind, and The First ‐
Person Perspective and Other Essays.
Michael Tye is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at
Austin. He is the author of several books on consciousness, including
Ten Problems of Consciousness (1995) and most recently Vagueness
and the Evolution of Consciousness (2021).
Ralph Wedgwood is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Southern California. He is the author of The Nature of Normativity
(Oxford, 2007) and The Value of Rationality (Oxford, 2017), and
numerous articles on various aspects of ethics, epistemology, and
related issues in the philosophy of mind.
Introduction to the Second Edition
Jonathan Cohen

The first (2007) edition of Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of

Mind has aged surprisingly well (surely better than its editors). We
had set our topics for that edition by looking for issues that were
both controversial and fundamental in the dual senses that “(i) the
resolution of these topics has implications of other issues inside and
outside philosophy of mind, and (ii) past rounds of debate have
revealed these topics as underlying broader disagreements” (Cohen,
2007, xii). The three clusters of such topics we settled on were
mental content, physicalism about the mental, and the place of
consciousness in nature. We believed then and continue to believe
that the contributions in the first edition are excellent interventions
on these topics: they usefully frame relevant philosophical disputes,
advocate powerfully for their respective positions, and provide a
clear, comprehensible entry to the vast literatures they concern.
We've both used the first edition in the classroom and believe it is an
effective and interesting way to introduce students to contemporary
issues in the philosophy of mind.
We have attempted to add value in this second edition of the volume
by including debates on similarly controversial and fundamental
topics that have assumed new prominence in the philosophy of mind
literature.
The first concerns the phenomenal character of perceptual
experience. When you have a perceptual experience of the particular
gorilla before you (as one does), your conscious mental state has a
phenomenal character: there is something it is like for you to
undergo it, a way that it subjectively seems to you. What is the best
metaphysical account of such experiential states and their
phenomenal character? Chapters 21–23 offer rival answers to this
question.
In Chapter 21, Craig French and Ian Phillips defend the “naive
realist” view that perceptually experiencing the gorilla involves
standing in a primitive relation of perceptual acquaintance to the
distal beast. On their view, perceiving the gorilla (unlike undergoing
a perceptual illusion or hallucination as of a gorilla) is not a matter of
being related to some mental/mind‐dependent object, such as a
representation of the gorilla. Rather, it is a matter of being “open,” or
appropriately related, to the gorilla itself—which means that a gorilla
must be present in the local environment in order for you to be in
such a state. They contend that the naive realist view is the default
(hence “naïve”) answer to the questions about the metaphysics of
and phenomenal character of perceptual experience, and they defend
it from two important classes of threats. First, they respond to
traditional philosophical objections to the effect that naive realism
lacks resources to account for hallucinatory and illusory experience.
Second, they contend, pace its critics, that naive realism is fully
compatible with contemporary vision science in both general tenor
and specific detail.
In Chapter 22, Adam Pautz defends a “representationalist” view on
which the phenomenal character of perceptual experience is
constituted by the way in which perception represents the world.
Thus, in contrast to naïve realism, representationalism understands
your perceptual experience of the gorilla not directly in terms of a
relation you bear to the distal animal, but in terms of your
representing it. Crucially, this is possible even when, as it might
happen in cases of perceptual error, there is no gorilla present in the
local environment; therefore this view extends smoothly between
cases of veridical perception, hallucination, and illusion. Pautz
argues that representationalism is superior to naïve realism because
the phenomenal character of experience seems to reflect significant
and systematic contributions of the mind itself (he calls this thesis
“internal dependence”), and so seems not to be as fully determined
by the character of the mind‐independent world as the naïve realist
contends.
In Chapter 23, Susanna Schellenberg proposes to dissolve the
dispute between naïve realists and representationalists by setting the
study of perception within her favored “capacitist” framework.
According to her capacitism, perception is, in the first instance, a
deployment of repeatable capacities to discriminate and single out
environmental particulars (objects, events, and property instances).
She contends that, when understood this way, instances of
perceiving will automatically be associated with representational
content—viz., the content that the environment contains the
particulars it is the function of the deployed capacities to
discriminate and single out, thereby sustaining the commitments of
representationalism. However, she also holds that the relevant
capacities, and so the instances of perceiving that are the
deployments of such capacities, are themselves individuated by the
particulars they function to discriminate and single out. Hence, she
maintains, this view will allow that perception is constitutively a
matter of being related to environmental particulars, and so
vindicates at least one key commitment of naïve realism. She
concludes that we can compatibly endorse versions of both
representationalism and naïve realism (albeit not more “austere”
versions of these views), and that by embracing capacitism about
perception we can enjoy the benefits of both.
A second new debate addresses the role of particulars in perceptual
representational content. One can, of course, accept that perceptual
experience has representational content without committing to more
hotly debated claims (of the sort under dispute in Chapters 21–23)
such as the idea that perceiving consists in entertaining such
contents, or that such contents provide the best explanation of
phenomenal character. If we allow that perceptual experience has
representational content, we can ask: is that content object‐
dependent—i.e., tied essentially to the particulars perceived? For
example, suppose again that you perceive a particular gorilla before
you. Does your perceptual state represent that this particular gorilla
(this very one) is before you? Or does it, rather, represent the
general/existential/abstract content that there is a hairy, gorilla‐
shaped thing before you? One way to bring out the contrast between
the particularist and existential conceptions of perceptual content is
to compare our initial case of perceiving a gorilla against a second
case, in which one perceives a qualitatively identical but numerically
distinct gorilla, and a third case, in which one perceives nothing but
hallucinates a qualitatively identical gorilla. The particularist about
perceptual content holds that, because there is no shared particular
gorilla between any pair of these cases, perceptual content varies
between them as well. In contrast, the existentialist holds that all
three cases involve representation of the very same (general)
content, even though that content turns out to be satisfied by
different particulars in the first case and the second, and by no
particular in the third.
Christopher Hill begins Chapter 24 by offering two arguments to
support existentialism. First, he argues that we want our notion of
perceptual content to be one that admits sharing of content by
qualitatively identical cases of perception and hallucination (say, the
first and the third cases considered above), and he notes that
existentialist but not particularist contents are up to this task.
Second, he contends that existentialism, but not particularism, is
compatible with the widely accepted teleosemantic view that
representational contents are best understood in terms of lawful
covariation with ecologically relevant environmental conditions. He
then goes on to defend existentialism from objections before
explaining how the view can best be elaborated to account for
perceptual awareness of particulars, and just how we should
understand the particulars that are the primary objects of visual
awareness.
In Chapter 25, Heather Logue argues for a pluralist position on
which perceptual experiences have both existential (she prefers
“abstract”) and particular contents. Her argument for this view is
straightforward: she claims that both abstract and particularist
contents have their own genuine theoretical benefits, and therefore
that there are reasons to retain both types of content. On the one
hand, she argues that appealing to abstract contents makes available
an attractively simple account of the content of both (i)
hallucinations and (ii) experiences in which we misperceive one
object as two. In so far as an account of content applicable to such
cases provides us with the tools for understanding the epistemic and
action‐guiding roles of such experiences, this can be a significant
explanatory advantage. On the other hand, she also argues that
particularist contents provide a simpler account of how perceptual
beliefs about particular objects are rationalized. Her advice is that we
should avoid choosing between these ostensibly competing benefits
by adopting a pluralist view that sustains both.
Our third new debate takes up the relation between perception and
cognition. In Chapter 26, E. J. Green contrasts a conception of the
perception/cognition distinction based on representational format
with one grounded in architecture. According to the first, perceptual
representations are iconic (/depictive/imaginal) in format, while
cognitive representations have a format that is discursive
(/language‐like). According to the second, perception differs from
cognition in terms of the range of information each computes over —
roughly, that cognitive processing is significantly more flexible, and
perceptual processing is significantly more delimited, in the range of
parameters over which each carries out its computations. Green
argues against the format view and for the architectural view of the
distinction. As against the format view, he urges that there are
counterexamples in both directions: perceptual representations that
are discursive rather than iconic, and cognitive representations that
are iconic rather than discursive. This leads him to propose an
architectural conception of the distinction on which perceptual
process types “are constrained to compute over and output a
restricted range of dimensions or variables”, while cognitive process
types are not dimensionally restricted in this way.
In Chapter 27, Ned Block takes up a more focussed version of the
controversy about the perception/cognition distinction involving the
contrast between perceptual and cognitive object representations
(“object files”), and argues that there is an important difference in
format between perception and cognition. He offers a range of
evidence to show that perceptual object representations always enjoy
a thoroughly iconic format, while cognitive object representations in
working memory are conceptual and partly discursive (though he
allows that they may incorporate iconic materials, or “remnants,”
that are outputs of earlier perceptual stages). And, indeed, he
contends that apparent counterexamples to this generalization turn
on failing to distinguish the format of the whole from that of its
remnants. Block goes on to argue that perceptual and cognitive
(working memory) object representations differ in important
psychological respects (even when the latter incorporate perceptual
remnants). This leads him to the conclusion that, though the term
“object file” is ordinarily used indifferently for object representations
in both perception and cognition, these two sorts of entities are so
different that we would be better off dispensing with the term.
Our fourth new debate concerns the status of pain as a natural kind.
In Chapter 28, Jennifer Corns argues that while the category of pain
serves our everyday explanatory needs, it is inadequate for the
purposes of scientific explanation and prediction, hence that
references to pain should be eliminated from scientific
generalizations. She begins her case for this “scientific eliminativism”
about pain by arguing that the class of pains is wildly heterogeneous,
or “promiscuous,” in function, biological pathway, mechanism, and
qualitative character. Moreover, she claims, each token pain is
realized by an idiosyncratic convergence of complex mechanistic
activity, such that while it might initially appear that framing
generalizations in terms of pain serves our scientific explanatory and
predictive purposes, those purposes are in fact better served by
generalizations framed in terms of non‐pain kinds. She concludes
that, while individual token pains are real, and the category of pain is
usefully referenced for everyday purposes, pain does not earn its
keep as a natural kind for the purposes of figuring in scientifically
useful projectible generalizations.
In Chapter 29, Matthew Fulkerson pushes back against Corns's
scientific eliminativism about pain. He urges that widely held
contemporary (realist, anti‐essentialist, explanatorily grounded)
conceptions of natural kindhood make room for categories with the
extensive heterogeneity and complexity manifest in the case of pain.
He argues that, since, “even in the most fundamental sciences,
putative natural kinds are almost always messy, complex categories
with fluid borders, exceptions, and cross‐cutting interactions”, the
presence of such pathologies with respect to the category of pains is
irrelevant to the question of its kindhood. Moreover, he contends
that pains (and pain types) share sufficiently many explanatorily
interesting properties that these categories support explanatorily
useful projectible generalizations. His conclusion is that, so long as
we are working with a notion of natural kindhood adequate to the
needs of many other explanatory domains in sciences at all levels, we
have good reason to accept pain as a natural kind.
Our final new debate addresses the mental capacity of imagination.
It is uncontroversial that imagination plays a crucial role in our
mental lives, and that, from the point of view of everyday talk about
the mind, reference to imagination is commonplace. Recently,
however, a number of theorists have put forward the hypothesis that
the notion of imagination is at least partly dispensable within the
broadly scientific project of explaining the workings of our minds—
that explanatory appeals to imagination can in many or all cases be
replaced by references to a range of distinct mental capacities to
which we are antecedently committed—and that, therefore, the
notion of imagination is more or less explanatorily otiose.
In Chapter 30, Bence Nanay advances one version of this
deflationism about imagination, according to which the explanatory
role of imagination is largely (though not fully) captured by appeals
to the (in his view, better established) capacity for mental imagery.
Nanay takes mental imagery to consist of “representations of sensory
information without a direct external source”. Given this
understanding, he makes the case that sensory imagination is just a
species of mental imagery. Of course, many have held that
imagination comes in propositional/nonsensory forms as well, which
might be thought to resist understanding in terms of imagery. But
Nanay argues that propositional imagination is best understood as
supposition of a proposition that is ordinarily elaborated by sensory
imagery. Thus, he claims that imagery is a crucial element in even
propositional imagination.
In Chapter 31, Amy Kind responds to several forms of deflationism
about the imagination. She begins by arguing against attempts to
construe imagination as a species of either supposing or conceiving.
Part of her case here involves mental skills. She contends that a
collapse of imagination to supposition is unsuccessful because the
former is a skill while the latter is not. She argues against collapsing
imagination into conceiving on the grounds that, while conceiving
may be a skill, it is plausibly a different skill from imagination. She
next argues against recent proposals that see imagination as
continuous with the notion of belief, charging that these proposals
rest on an overly restricted conception of the functional role of both
mental state types. Finally, she takes on a stronger form of
imagination deflationism that aims to reduce imagination to a
combination of imagery and attitudinal thought, and urges that this
view neither captures the full range of imaginative states nor makes
sense of the unity of imagination as a mental type. She concludes,
then, that imagination is a genuine mental type that earns its keep
within our best attempts to explain and theorize about the mind.
At the conclusion of the introduction to the first edition of this
anthology we lamented that the volume was necessarily unable to
treat every important topic in our subfield. Sadly, what with modality
being what it is, those necessary limitations remain in place despite
additions to the second edition. Still, we hope and believe that the
present volume will provide a useful introduction to a range of the
central and fundamental controversies defining our subfield. We
hope you will enjoy reading it as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it
together.
Introduction to the First Edition
Jonathan Cohen

Philosophy of mind today is a sprawling behemoth whose tentacles

reach into virtually every area of philosophy, as well as many
subjects outside of philosophy. Of course, none of us would have it
any other way. Nonetheless, this state of affairs poses obvious
organizational challenges for anthology editors. Brian McLaughlin
and I have attempted to meet these challenges in the present volume
by focusing on ten controversial and fundamental topics in
philosophy of mind. “Controversial” is clear enough: we have chosen
topics about which there is not a settled consensus among
philosophers. By “fundamental” we don’t mean that the issues are
easy or that the approaches taken toward them are introductory.
Rather, we mean that (i) the resolution of these topics has
implications for other issues inside and outside philosophy of mind,
and (ii) past rounds of debate have revealed these topics as
underlying broader disagreements. We asked leading philosophers of
mind to defend one side or another on these topics. The result is
what you now have in your hands.
In the remainder of this introduction I’ll say something by way of
explanation of the topics covered and attempt to say how the topics
relate to one another.
Content
A first cluster of topics concerns the nature of mental content. To say
that mental states have content is to say that they can be about other
things: for example, my current belief that there is a coffee cup on
my desk is about the coffee cup and the desk. That mental states can
be about things is a striking fact about them, and one that
distinguishes them from most entities in the world (e.g., atoms,
rocks, tables, numbers, properties). Moreover, insofar as things other
than mental states (e.g., words, some paintings, scientific models)
can have content, many philosophers have followed Grice (1957) in
maintaining that they do so only by deriving their content from that
of the mental states of the makers or users of these other things;
thus, while a painting might also be about the coffee cup, the Grice‐
inspired thought is that it has this content only by virtue of the
content of the painter’s intentions (e.g., her intention to produce a
painting that is about that particular coffee cup), which are of course
mental states. If this general picture is right, then mental content is
more fundamental than other sorts of content. But what sort of a
thing is mental content? And how is it constituted? What makes it
the case, for example, that my current thought is about a coffee cup
rather than a palm tree or nothing at all? These and related questions
lie at the heart of the first cluster of topics in this volume.
Our first topic in this cluster is best appreciated against the backdrop
of work starting in the mid‐1970s (e.g., Putnam, 1975; Burge, 1979)
arguing that the content of a thought is not wholly determined by the
internal state of the thinker’s brain. On the contrary, these writers
argued for what has come to be called content externalism – the view
that what a thought is about is partially determined by factors
outside the head of the thinker, such as the thinker’s physical and
social environment. In Chapter 1, Gabriel Segal argues against
content externalism. More specifically, he argues that what he calls
“cognitive content” – the kind of content invoked in psychological
explanations and propositional attitude ascriptions – is not fixed
externalistically. His claim is that, even if externalists are right that
the extensions of public language words (e.g., “water”) are
determined by factors outside the thinker’s brain, nonetheless the
cognitive content expressed by such terms is (i) idiosyncratic to
individuals (or even time‐slices of individuals), and (ii) determined
by factors inside their heads. If so, then cognitive content is best
understood as a kind of narrow or individualist (as opposed to
externalist/anti‐individualist) content. Sarah Sawyer argues against
this approach in Chapter 2. She argues that if cognitive contents were
to float free from the shared meanings and extensions of the public
language words we use to attribute contents, as Segal holds, then it
would be a rare miracle if any verbal attribution ever succeeded in
capturing anyone’s cognitive contents. And this, she claims, would
make a mystery of the utility and ubiquity of our practice of making
verbal ascriptions of psychological contents to others. Ultimately, she
contends, proponents of narrow content have failed to appreciate the
significance, force, and scope of extant arguments for content
externalism.
A second issue connected with content externalism comes up in
Chapters 3 and 4, and concerns privileged access about the content
of our mental states. It seems deeply plausible that our access to the
content of at least some of our thoughts has some sort of epistemic
privilege. For example, it seems deeply plausible that if I take myself
to be thinking about water, it is truly water (not coffee, not a palm
tree, and not some clear, tasteless liquid other than water) that is the
subject of my thought. However, in recent years philosophers have
argued that content externalism poses a serious threat to this
plausible idea. The thought here is that if, as per externalism, the
contents of my thoughts depend on factors outside my head
(including contingent facts about the existence of particular elements
of my physical and social environment), then I won’t know what
those contents are whenever I am ignorant about the relevant
external factors. In Chapter 4, Michael McKinsey argues that
privileged access and content externalism are indeed incompatible,
and that we should respond to the incompatibility by giving up the
former. Anthony Brueckner holds, in Chapter 3, that the alleged
incompatibility is merely apparent. He argues that, although content
externalism entails that the content of my thought depends on
contingent facts about my environment, it does not entail that my
knowing the content of my thought requires knowing contingent
facts about my environment: consequently, Brueckner holds, it is
consistent with content externalism that I can know the content of
my thoughts without having knowledge of contingent facts about my
environment. Their debate raises important issues about exactly how
to understand the entailments content externalism has about
thinkers’ environments, and about how we should individuate
thoughts.
The volume also contains debates on two other foundational debates
about content: one about the alleged normativity of content and one
about how best to think about non‐conceptual content.
The debate about the normativity of content is joined in Chapters 5
and 6 by Ralph Wedgwood and Georges Rey. The issue here is
whether intentional (/contentful) mental states, such as beliefs,
desires, the acceptance of inferences, and so on, are constitutively
tied to “normative” properties such as value, goodness, and, in
particular, rationality. Such normative properties are traditionally
contrasted against the “descriptive” properties one finds invoked in
the natural sciences. Thus, this debate has important implications for
the question of whether the standard explanatory apparatus of the
natural sciences can provide a complete account of contentful mental
states.
Wedgwood argues that the intentional is essentially normative. He
holds that intentional states are constituted by concepts, and he
argues that the best theory of concepts has them constitutively linked
to the normative. In particular, Wedgwood is attracted by a two‐
factor theory of concepts according to which each concept is
constituted by (i) its correctness condition together with (ii) “certain
basic principles of rationality that specify certain ways of using the
concept as rational (or specify certain other ways of using the
concept as irrational)” (p. 86). Thus, for example, on this account, we
might understand the concept of logical conjunction as constituted
by (i) the systematic contribution made by AND to the truth
conditions of the complex contents in which it appears (its
correctness condition) together with (ii) a principle specifying that
(inter alia) the inference from (P AND Q) to P is rational while the
inference from P to (P AND Q) is not. Insofar as this conception of
the constitution of concepts ineliminably invokes notions of
rationality, it results in an essentially normative view of the
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 “Do you think it’s a fair track?” inquired Miss Yale, anxiously, as they
came in sight of it. “It is an eight-lap track, you see, and of course a great
many girls only go around four times at first—girls get tired so absurdly
easy! Now I suppose men think nothing of making two miles at a time—it is
just play for them. Men are so strong—that is their greatest fascination, I
think,” she ran on enthusiastically. “Haven’t you seen foot-ball players after
a hard practice game start off and run two miles around the track, and seem
to think absolutely nothing of it?”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Newbold, unwarily and warmly. “Fellows are
so different from girls, you know. A girl cries when she’s tired, doesn’t she?
Well, a man just keeps going, you know, and doesn’t let it make any
difference to him.”
“I am so glad to hear that, Mr. Newbold,” said Miss Yale, with prompt
and suspicious sympathy, and a sudden firmness of tone, “because I wanted
dreadfully to ask you to try the track, but hated to do so, for I knew you were
tired—at least you look so. But since you just keep going, and it doesn’t
make any difference to you, why I would be so awfully obliged if you would
run around three or four times. I want to see just how you hold your head
and arms. I don’t believe we do it in the best way, you know.”
It was a rare and pleasingly curious sight that Miss Yale and Miss Thayer
and a great many other young women assembled near the track, apparently
by a strange coincidence, looked upon. It is not often that one has the chance
of seeing an immaculately dressed youth, with flushed and desperate
countenance, tear madly around an eight-lap track in the presence of a
number of flatteringly attentive young women. It occurred to Newbold as he
dashed around and around that it would be far preferable to keep going until
he fainted away or dropped dead, than to stop and encounter the remarks and
glances of those young women. They would at least feel sorry for him in that
case, he thought, gloomily. But even that modest and simple desire was not
granted him. As he started on the fifth lap he heard Miss Yale call to him to
stop. He had a wild inclination to pay no attention to her, but to keep going
on and on, but as he got nearer he saw her step out toward him and put up a
warning hand.
“Thank you so much,” she said, warmly. “I think we have all had a lesson
in running which we shall not forget soon. I hope you are not tired?” she
went on, anxiously.
 Newbold said, “Oh, no!” but he felt very tired indeed. His feet ached
horribly and his head felt hot and dizzy, and there were queer, sharp pains
shooting through his body which made him think forebodingly of
pneumonia.
“The surprise is ready—Miss Atterbury is going to have the crew out for
your especial benefit!” went on Miss Yale, triumphantly. “Don’t you feel
complimented? And you are to pull Miss Thayer and myself about while
they go through a little practice for you. Not much, you know, but just
enough to show you the stroke and speed we get. The boat is a beauty—but
then, of course, you know so much more about it than we do! I imagine from
your article that you must pull an oar capitally. Miss Thayer says a cat-boat
is your especial hobby, though.”
“Did Miss Thayer say that?” began Newbold, hotly. “Beastly things, I
think—hate ’em!”
Miss Yale smiled incredulously and brightly at him.
“How modest you are!” she said, admiringly. “Ah! there is Miss
Atterbury!”
Newbold saw some one waving frantically at them.
“Come on!” exclaimed Miss Yale; “we want to see them start off—that’s
the best part.”
Newbold never remembered afterward how he got across the intervening
space, or how he got into a boat with the two young women. The first thing
he heard was Miss Atterbury asking him anxiously how he liked the new
sliding-seats, and what he thought of the proportions of the boat, and about
outriggers in general, and where he thought they could be built best and
cheapest. Newbold felt about as capable of instructing her on such points as
of judging the pictures at a Salon exhibit, and he longed, with a longing born
of utter exhaustion and desperation, to get away. As he wearily pulled the
heavy, unwieldy boat about after the light practice-barge, which kept an
appalling distance ahead of him, he decided within himself that the physical
development of women had been carried to an absurd and alarming extent,
and that men simply were not in it with them when it came to endurance and
enthusiasm, and that he had made the mistake of his life when he wrote that
article on athletics in girls’ colleges, and that his chief might talk until he
was blue in the face before he would ever consent again to write about
anything of which he knew so little.
 They were very disappointed when he told them firmly that he could not
stay to dinner or to the concert, but that he had a pressing engagement that
would take him back to the city. And they said that there were still the
Swedish gymnastics and basket-ball and pole-vaulting to see, and that they
were afraid he had not enjoyed himself or he would have got rid of that
engagement in some way; but he assured them impressively that he had
never spent a more instructive or peculiarly interesting afternoon in his life.
Miss Thayer took him back to the station in her trap, and remarked on
how much shorter the way seemed with a good horse; and when she bade
him good-by she told him that she would be looking out for another article in
his paper, and that she would be much disappointed if his visit had not
inspired him to write something. To which Newbold replied that that was his
pressing engagement—he was going back to the city to write another article
on athletics in girls’ colleges, and that he thought it would be different and
better than the former one, but that he would not put his initials to it this
time.
 THE COLLEGE BEAUTY

I T was a sort of farewell party, and the young woman who was going away
and who was the object of so much solicitude and tender concern was
sitting, enshrined as it were, on a divan covered with a Navahoe Indian
blanket and surrounded by innumerable cushions, while the rest hung about
her or took up precarious attitudes on the table in dangerous proximity to the
student lamps, or settled themselves in steamer-chairs, or sat upon the tiger-
skin on the floor. That is, the American girls did; Kan Ato, the pretty
Japanese who had come arrayed in a gorgeous new kimono—dull blue
embroidered splendidly in silver—sat upright and very stiffly in the window-
seat with the dark red of the curtains showing off her jet black hair and her
gown wonderfully well; while the tall Scotch girl, a cousin of the guest of
honor, had trusted her generous proportions to the only large, comfortable
American chair in the room.
There was a great deal of noise and confusion and questioning, and Miss
Lavington, as she leaned back against her cushions, half wished that after all
the doctor had not let her come. She had been very ill—a short, sharp attack
of typhoid—and although she had enjoyed tremendously the wine jelly, and
the violets, and the hushed, anxious tones of her friends as they inquired
after her at the infirmary, and the many remarks about her good qualities and
how clever she was in Conic Sections—“just as if she were really dead,” as
she said—still she felt rather too weak properly to appreciate her friends’
enthusiastic sympathy at such close range. And then the thought of going
away—and so far away—had made her feel blue and dispirited.
She was a very pretty English girl, whose father—a colonel in an Indian
regiment—had sent her to America in the care of a sister of his who had
moved to “the States;” and so it had come about that, instead of being a
Girton or Newnham girl, she had matriculated at this American college. And
now her father had written decisively for her to come out and join him in
India, and her college friendships and ties were all to be broken. He had been
writing about it for some time, and her illness had finally precipitated the
affair. She had only waited until she grew strong enough to start, and the
following day had been decided upon. The long sea-voyage would be the
very thing for her, the doctor had thought.
 She was trying to explain to the interested young women just what route
she would take, and was rapidly filling their souls with envy at the familiar
mention of Brindisi and Cairo and Aden, when there was a knock and a
quick opening of the door and a girl came into the room. She was a very
beautiful young woman, and when she sat down on the divan beside Miss
Lavington she seemed suddenly to absorb all the attention and interest, and
to become in some magical way the guest of honor and centre of attraction.
She met with a very enthusiastic reception, for she had that afternoon gained
the tennis championship for her class—she was a senior—and had not yet
changed her white flannel suit with scarlet sumach leaves worked on it, and
as she dragged off her soft cap, one could see that her hair still lay in damp
curls upon her forehead.
After she had entered the room one would have realized that they had
really been waiting for her. Her mere presence seemed to make a difference.
It was this magnetic quality which rendered her so irresistible and all adverse
criticism of her so absurd. People might differ as to her beauty—there were
some indeed, who said that she was too large, or that her eyes were not very
expressive, or that her mouth was too small, but they all fell under her
influence in some remarkable way, and were very much flattered when she
asked them to drive with her, and never failed to point her out to their friends
as “the College Beauty, you know;” and even those who honestly wondered
how she ever got through her examinations were forced to admit that she had
a great deal of natural talent, which she did not always care to exercise. She
was a fine tennis player too, using either hand equally well, and when the
Tennis Association got itself into debt and she saved the situation by
beguiling, in some inexplicable way, the famous musical organization of a
certain university into giving a concert for its benefit, her popularity reached
its climax. To the less sought-after girls, her composure and ease of manner
while surrounded by an admiring circle of college men was nothing short of
marvellous, and the recklessly generous disposal which she made of these
youths to her less attractive friends seemed to betoken a social prodigality
little short of madness.
Miss Lavington looked at her imploringly.
“Make them keep quiet, won’t you?” she said. The Beauty looked around
her—“Are you trying to make her ill again, so she can’t go?” she asked.
Her words had the desired effect, and the girl who had been twanging
abstractedly at a banjeurine put it down.
 “She oughtn’t to leave!” she declared, plaintively. “It’s a shame! Here we
are, just beginning the semestre, and she’s only half through her college
course anyway, and just because her father wants her she has to give up
everything and go.”
“Yes, and you know she’ll be sure to have jungle-fever or get bitten by a
cobra or something, and die,” suggested someone cheerfully, if a trifle
vaguely.
The girl lying on the tiger-skin looked up.
“I know why her father wants her,” she began calmly. “There is an officer
—young, handsome, well born, a fine place in Surrey or Devon or Kent,
been in the family for generations, old uncle, no children—just the thing for
her. Her father will take her up to some place in the Himalayas to spend the
summer, and he will arrange for the handsome, young, etc., officer to be
there, and next fall we will receive the cards. It sounds just like one of
Kipling’s stories, doesn’t it?”
They were all laughing by the time she had finished, but The Beauty,
looking at the girl beside her, suddenly stopped smiling. There was a
conscious flush on Miss Lavington’s face which set her to thinking, and then
she glanced over to the big Scotch girl and waited an instant.
“Tell us all about it,” she said finally to Miss Lavington. The girl looked
up quickly and then dropped her eyes again.
“There isn’t much to tell,” she began. The others were listening now.
Even Kan Ato, smiling in her pensive, oriental way, leaned far forward so as
not to lose a word.
“He isn’t rich and he hasn’t any place in Surrey—or anywhere else that I
know of, except perhaps in India,” she went on. “But he is young and
handsome. We used to know each other when we were children—he is a sort
of cousin—but I haven’t seen him for years. We used to be very much in
love with each other.” She smiled. “My father writes me that he says he is
still in love with me, and so—perhaps we are to be married.”
“I knew it,” sighed the girl on the tiger-rug, in a satisfied sort of way.
The Beauty looked at the English girl curiously. “And you haven’t seen
him for years? and yet you think of marrying him! How do you know you
will love him now?—you are both changed—you may be two totally
different people from the children who fell in love.” She had spoken
vehemently and quickly, and Miss Lavington gazed at her with languid
surprise.
“You are not in love with him yourself?” she said, smilingly.
The girl made a quick, impatient gesture.
“I am speaking seriously,” she said. “You are several years younger than I
am, and you don’t know what you are doing. Don’t let your father—don’t let
anyone—persuade you to bind yourself to a man you don’t know, whose life
has been so vitally different from your own as to render the possibility of
sympathy between you very slight.”
Miss Lavington looked at her rather coldly.
“You are interesting yourself unnecessarily,” she said; “I loved him not so
many years ago—it cannot be possible that so short a time would change us
completely.”
The Beauty leaned her head back with sudden wearied look on her face.
“A few years at our time of life makes all the difference in the world,” she
said, earnestly. “What pleased and interested and fascinated us at eighteen
might very possibly disappoint and disgust us at twenty or twenty-two. I do
not mean to preach,” she said, smiling deprecatingly and turning to the rest,
“but you know as well as I what an influence this college life has on us, and
how hard it is to go back to former conditions. If we get stronger here we
also get less adaptable. We are all affected by the earnestness and the culture
and advancement of the life we lead here for four years, whether we will or
no, and it is very hard to go back!”
They were all looking at her in amazement. The Beauty was not much
given to that sort of thing. She stopped abruptly as if herself aware of the
sensation she was creating, and laughed rather constrainedly.
“Don’t marry your handsome officer unless you are in love with him!”
she said insistingly still to the girl beside her. “Don’t mistake the childish
affection you felt for him for something deeper. You have your whole life
before you—don’t spoil it by precipitation or a false generosity or a reckless
passion!” There was an anxious, troubled look in her eyes.
The girl still stretched out on the tiger-skin glanced up again at The
Beauty. “I seem to have started a subject in which you are deeply
interested,” she said gayly to her. “And one in which you have had enormous
experience too. Do you know you have an almost uncanny way of
fascinating every man who comes near you. It’s a sure thing. None of the
rest of us have a chance. I believe you could marry half a dozen or so at any
time that you would take the trouble to say ‘yes’!”
The girl addressed looked openly amused—“Please take a few off your
list,” she said. But the other refused to notice her remark and ran on in her
light way.
“And they are all so nice too—it is really hard to choose, but I think on
the whole I prefer a certain young man who shall be nameless. Now, would
you call his devotion to yourself ‘mad precipitation or a false generosity or a
reckless passion?’ ” She moved herself lazily over the yellow skin until her
head rested against the girl’s knee.
“And he is such a nice, eligible youth too. I hope you are not going to
spoil his life by refusing him. Only think how lovely it would be to have
one’s father-in-law representing the majesty of these United States at an
Emperor’s court,” she went on, turning gayly to the others. “And he is so
handsome and clever! He will be representing Uncle Sam himself some day,
and she will be reading up the rules of court etiquette and receiving
invitations from the Lord Chamberlain to dine with the Queen, and fuming
because the Grand Duchess of something or other has the right to walk in to
dinner before her.” She was not noticing the girl’s significant silence. “Of
course he is just the man for you—you wouldn’t make any but a brilliant
match, you know, with your beauty and society manner. But just for the
present—well, next winter you will début, and you will be much talked
about, and the youth will not be with his father at the European capital, but
will be very much en évidence here, and then—after Easter we shall get your
cards!”
She twisted her head around, smiling, so as to get a look at the girl’s face
above her. It wore so grave and hopeless an expression that she gave a little
cry.
“Forgive me,” she said, confusedly, “but you do love him, don’t you?”
The Beauty turned her eyes away and shook herself slightly, as if
awakening from a dream.
“As confession seems to be the order of the hour,” she said in a dull tone,
and smiling peculiarly, “I don’t mind owning that I do love him very much.”
She got up abruptly and moved toward the door amid a chorus of
protests, but she would not stay. At the threshold she turned to Miss
Lavington.
 “Send your things down by the coach,” she said. “If you will let me I will
be glad to drive you to the station myself to-morrow.”

When she got to her own study she found a letter thrust under the door
with the familiar number of her room scrawled upon it in pencil. She picked
it up, and as she looked at the address an expression of profound dislike and
weariness came into her face. She opened the door slowly and put the letter
down upon her desk, looking at it thoughtfully for a few moments. The
handwriting was irresolute and boyish. She shivered slightly as she took the
letter up with sudden resolution and tore it open. As she sat there and read it
a look of hatred and disgust and utter hopelessness, strangely at variance
with her usual brilliant expression, settled harshly upon her lovely, young
face.
“My Dearest Wife,” it ran, “Forgive me! but this is about the only
luxury I indulge in!—calling you in my letters what I dare not call you as yet
before the world.
“I am in a retrospective mood to-night, and feel like writing all sorts of
things which I am afraid you won’t much like. Do you know I think that
college is doing you harm! Don’t get angry at this, but sometimes I’m afraid
you have repented of our boy and girl runaway match; but God knows I
haven’t, and I’m glad I didn’t go to college but came out West and went to
work for us both. I haven’t succeeded very brilliantly and may be the life has
roughened me a bit, but I guess you can have the best there is out here, and I
am still as devoted to you as in those old days of the summer before you
went to that confounded (excuse me!) college, when you were just eighteen
and I barely twenty-one. How interminably long four years seemed to wait
then! But it was a case of getting married secretly and of waiting, or of not
getting you at all. Sometimes I can hardly stand it, and I’d come back now
and take you away, if I wasn’t so afraid of that blessed old father of yours—
but I’m just as big a coward as I was three years ago, when I couldn’t screw
up courage enough to go to him and tell him that he’d have to relinquish his
pet scheme of sending his daughter to college, for she belonged to me.
Whew! what a scene we’d have had! It was best to wait, I suppose.
“After all, only a year and then I can claim you! Have you changed any?
I’m afraid you’re way ahead of me now. I always had an uncomfortable
suspicion that you were very much my superior, and I have half fancied that
perhaps you only loved me because I was so madly—so passionately in love
with you. Did I over-persuade you? have you ceased to love me? Sometimes
I get half sick with fear. You are all I have! But after all I feel safe enough—
I know you too well not to know that you will never break your promise—
even one you hate. But you know I’ll never hold you to that marriage—
though it was all valid enough—if you don’t want to be held. I can simply
blow my good-for-nothing brains out.
“I won’t write any more to-night. There is so much swearing and noise
down in the street that I can hardly think; besides I don’t feel just like it, and
lately your letters have only irritated me. But I won’t complain, for I know
how generously you have acted and what brilliant prospects you have given
up for my precious self!
“Devotedly yours and only yours,
“G. G. B.”
 A TELEPHONED TELEGRAM

W HEN Miss Eva Hungerford married Stanhope there was one young
lady intensely glad of it, although it was whispered that there were also
two or three who were quite the contrary. But Mrs. Renford Phillips—
once Miss Violet Featherstone—had particular reasons for rejoicing, and she
wrote a long letter to Miss Hungerford when she heard of the engagement,
and said that she hoped “by-gones would be by-gones now, and that she was
sure her friend would be a broader-minded and more perfect woman, if that
were possible, now that she was going to have the additional experience of
getting married.”
Miss Hungerford wrote her a most cordial reply, and the two girls, for
several years slightly estranged, became again the friends they had been
during the first three years of their college life.
The blow had fallen very suddenly, and Miss Hungerford had found it
hard to forgive what she called, in her heart, her friend’s tacit deceit and
culpable silence. But, as she wrote in her reply to Mrs. Phillips’s letter, her
opinions had undergone a decided change, and she felt that perhaps she had
been a little hard on her friend and had not understood her feelings and the
pressure brought to bear upon her, and she acknowledged that circumstances
might materially alter one’s views and actions. And Miss Featherstone, who
had been the most talked about girl in college during the last semestre of her
junior year, and who had suffered acutely under Miss Hungerford’s
indifferently concealed displeasure and surprise at her conduct, replied that
now she could be truly happy in her husband and her home, and insisted that
Mr. and Mrs. Stanhope should visit her in the Berkshire Hills that summer.
This they did, and though, of course, each thought her husband much the
handsomer and more distinguished-looking, still they were very affectionate
toward each other, and planned to be at Cowes together the next summer for
the yachting.
As has been said, their estrangement happened very suddenly and came
about by an unfortunate occurrence one morning in the office of the college.
Anyone who has never had the privilege of being in that office on a
Monday morning, just after chapel, can have but a faint idea of
pandemonium. The whole seven hundred students seem to be revolving
about. There are the young women standing around, waiting to take the next
train into Boston, not having been able to go on the early express because
they had foolishly forgotten to get a leave of absence on the Saturday
previous, and who are furtively trying not to see their friends who are not
going on at all, so as to keep from having to attend to their commissions; and
there is the girl who is telephoning for roses to wear at the concert that night,
and those who are booking boats and tennis courts, and others reading
bulletins; and when there is an extra commotion and the crowd is forced
back a little to let the cords be pulled up around the desk so as to clear a
space; and when the carrier comes in and tumbles the big mail-bags into the
middle of it with one hand and unlocks them at apparently the same instant
with the other; and when about ten young women fall upon the bags and
rend their contents from them, and begin to assort and number and tie up the
letters, all the time besieged by their excluded friends to give them their mail
on the spot as they are going away, the noise and excitement reach a climax.
But it is all very pleasant and enlivening except the telephone bell, which
rings constantly and is wearing on the nerves. It rings not only for all
telephone messages but for all telegrams, for the college, being a mile or so
from the telegraph station, everything is simply telephoned up to save
delays, and that a long and continuous procession of small messenger boys
may not be forever circulating between the college and the station.
It was this unfortunate custom of telephoning telegrams, unknown of
course to the majority of outsiders, that precipitated the affair. On that
particular Monday morning, when the confusion in the office was at its
worst, the telephone bell suddenly rang unusually loudly and long, and the
nervous Freshman on duty jumped toward it with a warning motion to the
rest to keep quiet.
“Hush! it’s a telegram,” she said in a moment, and instantly there was
silence, for a telegram is always dreaded where there are so many to whom it
could bear ill news. She reached for a pad of paper and a pencil to take it
down. From the other end came “Important. Repeat slowly as I deliver it.”
The nervous Freshman said “All right,” and braced herself against the
support to write.
“To Miss Violet Featherstone.” The docile Freshman repeated it and then
said “Wait!” and looked around.
“If Miss Featherstone is here,” she remarked, “she can come to the
telephone;” but someone volunteered the information that Miss Featherstone
had left by the early train for Boston, and the telephoning proceeded.
“My darling—” the Freshman gasped a little and then repeated slowly
“My darling.” There was some suppressed commotion for an instant among
the crowd around the doors, and the two at the telephone went at it again.
“I have not heard from you for three days.”
“I have not heard from you for three days,” mumbled the Freshman.
“What is the matter? Renford Phillips.”
“What is the matter? Renford Phillips.”

When Miss Featherstone reached the college that afternoon she thought
she detected a suppressed excitement about the whole place, though she felt
rather too tired to think much about it, but when she got to her room she
found a telephone message for her which made her sink weakly into a chair.
An appalling vision of the consequences rose before her. She tried to
think connectedly, but the effort was too much. Her only thought was of the
effect it would have on her friend Eva Hungerford. She would go to her
immediately and find out how much she knew.
As she went along the corridors more than one acquaintance smiled
knowingly at her, but she only hurried on. When she reached Miss
Hungerford’s rooms, she found that young lady looking dejectedly out of the
windows. Her melancholy turned to stony haughtiness, however, when Miss
Featherstone approached her tremblingly.
“Yes, the whole college knew of it,” she assured her. “The message had
been telephoned up when the office was crowded, and by this time everyone
was aware of what her best friend had not known.”
Miss Featherstone rebelled a little under Miss Hungerford’s chilling
glance and attempted to explain, but her friend was very sad and firm, and
said she did not see how any explanation could do away with the fact that
Violet Featherstone had broken the solemn vow they had made together
never to marry, but to devote themselves to serious study as a life-work. But
when Miss Featherstone quite broke down under her friend’s disapprobation,
Miss Hungerford relented a little and asked her if she were really so fond of
Renford Phillips, and if she thought life with him in Morristown would
compensate her for the loss of Oxford and the Bodleian. Miss Featherstone
cried a little at that, and said she thought it would, and that she had started a
hundred times to tell her dearest friend about her engagement, but she knew
how she thought about such things, and how she would lose her respect for
allowing anything to interfere with their plans for mental advancement. And
Miss Hungerford only sighed and wrote that night to her mother that another
of her illusions had been dispelled, but that she was firmer than ever in her
determination to make something of herself.
Miss Featherstone did not return for her degree, but had a pretty church
wedding that summer at Stockbridge, and Miss Hungerford sent her a very
handsome wedding gift, but refused to be present at the marriage. They did
not write to each other much the next year, and Miss Hungerford worked so
hard that the Faculty had to interfere, and when she left college with a B. S.
degree, smiling sadly and saying that she would be a bachelor as well as an
old maid, everybody remarked what a superior girl she was to her friend
Violet Featherstone.
 “MISS ROSE”

S HE was always called that, and there were very few of the seven hundred
students who really knew or cared whether it was her little name or her
family name. The uncertainty about it seemed particularly appropriate
someway—her whole personality was vague. That is at the beginning; later
——
For the first month she passed comparatively unnoticed. In the wild
confusion of setting up household gods and arranging schedules, hopeless as
Chinese puzzles, of finding out where the Greek instructors can see you
professionally, and when the art school is open, and why you cannot take
books from the library, and when the elevator runs, anyone less remarkable-
looking than an American Indian or the Queen of the Sandwich Islands is apt
to be overlooked. But after the preliminary scuffle is over and there is a lull
in the storm, and one begins to remember vaguely having seen that dress or
face before somewhere, and when one no longer turns up at the history or art
rooms instead of the chemical laboratories, and when one ceases to take the
assistant professor of physics for the girl who sat next to you in the
trigonometry recitation—then the individual comes in for her share of
attention.
“Miss Rose” possibly got more than her share. Curious young women
soon began to nudge each other, and ask in whispers who she was. And just
at first there were covert smiles and a little cruelly good-natured joking, and
the inevitable feeble punning on her name and withered looks. There were
some who said she could not be more than forty-five, but they were in the
minority, and even the more generously inclined could not deny that her face
was very old and wrinkled and tired-looking, and that her hair was fast
getting gray around the temples, though her eyes still retained a brilliancy
quite feverish, and an eager, unsatisfied sort of look that struck some of the
more imaginative as pathetic. As a freshman she seemed indeed to be
hopelessly out of place—though not so much so, perhaps, as the little
Chicago beauty who was so much more interested in her gowns and looks
than in her work, that at the beginning of her second semestre she went
home with an attack of pneumonia, brought on by having been left out in the
cold after an examination in conic sections.
 That type, however, is not uncommon, while “Miss Rose” was especially
puzzling. They could not quite understand her, and there were even some
among the august body of ridiculous freshmen who somewhat resented her
entrance into their ranks, and wondered rather discontentedly why she did
not join the great body of “T-specs” to which she so evidently belonged.
But it was characteristic of this woman that she preferred to begin at the
beginning and work her way up—to take the regular systematic grind and
discipline of the freshman’s lot—to matriculating in an elective course where
she could get through easily enough if she were so inclined. She saw no
incongruity in her position; she rarely seemed to notice the difference
between herself and the younger, quicker intellects around her, and she
worked with an enthusiasm and persistence that put most of the young
women to shame. That she had taught was evident—in what little out-of-the-
way Western town, or sleepy Southern one, no one knew; but sometimes
there were amusing little scenes between herself and the professor, when the
old habit of school-room tyranny which she had once exercised herself was
strong upon her, and she lapsed unconsciously into the didactic manner of
her former life. And sometimes she became discouraged when the long lack
of strict mental discipline irked her, and when she saw in a glimpse how far
she was behind the girl of nineteen beside her, and how hopeless was the
struggle she was making against youth and training. There were moments
when she realized that she had begun too late, that the time she had lost was
lost irretrievably. But the reaction would quickly come and she would work
away with renewed energy, and they were very patient with her and would
lend her a helping hand where a younger student would have been let most
severely alone, to sink or swim after the approved method.
But if her mathematics and chemistry and Tacitus left much to be desired,
there was one field in which she shone resplendently. “No one could touch
her”—as one young woman slangly but enthusiastically remarked—“when it
came to the Bible.” There she was in her glory, and her vast knowledge of
the wars of Jeroboam and Rehoboam, and her appalling familiarity with
Shamgar and the prophets, and the meaning of the Urim and Thummim, and
other such things, was the envy and despair of the younger and less
biblically inclined. And if at times she was a trifle too prolix and had to be
stopped in her flow of information, there was very genuine regret on the part
of the less well informed.
 And in time she came to make a great many friends. Her peculiar ways no
longer struck them as comical, and if anyone had dared make reference to
the plainness of her gowns or the strict economies she practised to get
through, that person would have very soon discovered her mistake; and they
pretended not to know that she would not join any of the societies because of
the dues, and that she did her own laundry on Monday afternoons. Indeed,
she was so kindly disposed and so cheerful and helpful, and seemed so
interested in all the class projects and even in the sports, at which of course
she could only look on, that little by little she came to be a great favorite,
and the one to whom the rest naturally turned when there was any hitch or
especial need for advice. And then, of course, as she was not to be thought of
in the light of a possible candidate for president or vice-president or captain
of the crew, or any of the other desirable high-places, those misguided young
women who did have such literary, social, or athletic aspirations would go to
her and confide their hopes and fears, and in some strange way they would
all feel very much more comfortable and happy in their minds after such
confessions. And so she got to be a sort of class institution in a very short
while, and the captains of different stylish but rather un-nautical freshman
crews vied with each other in invitations to “come over the lake” with them,
and the president of the Tennis Association sent her a special and entirely
superfluous invitation to the spring tournament on the club’s finest paper,
and the senior editor of the college magazine, whose sister was a freshman,
was made to ask her for a short article on the “Study of the Bible,” and at the
concerts and receptions many young women, kindly and socially disposed,
would introduce her to their brothers and other male relations who had been
enticed out, before taking them on to see the lake, or a certain famous walk,
or the Art Building, or the Gymnasium.

It was about the middle of the winter semestre that it happened, and of
course it was Clara Arnold who knew about it first. Miss Arnold had liked
“Miss Rose” from the beginning. She had taken a fancy to the hard-working
woman, who had returned it with wondering admiration for the handsome,
clever girl. And so Miss Arnold got into the habit of stopping for her
occasionally to walk or drive, and it was when she went for her to go on one
of those expeditions, that she discovered the trouble. She found “Miss Rose”
sitting before her desk with a crumpled newspaper in her hand, and a dazed,
hopeless expression on her face which cut the girl to the heart. Her things
were scattered about the room, on the bed and chairs, an open trunk half-
filled stood in one corner. Miss Arnold stared around in amazement.
“The bank’s broken,” said “Miss Rose” simply, in answer to her
questioning glance, and pointed dully to the paper. “I might have known that
little bank couldn’t hold out when so many big ones have gone under this
year,” she went on, half speaking to herself.
Miss Arnold picked up the paper and read an article on the first page
marked around with a blue pencil. She did not understand the technicalities,
but she made out that the “City Bank” of a small town in Idaho had been
forced to close, and that depositors would not get more than five or ten cents
on the dollar.
“Every cent I’ve saved up was in that bank!” The woman turned herself
slowly in her chair and laid her face down on the desk with her arms above
her head. She spoke in muffled tones into which a strange bitterness had
crept.
“I’ve worked all my life—ever since I was twenty—to get enough money
to come to college on. I had barely enough to stay here at all—and now—”
she stopped suddenly, breathing hard. “I haven’t been here a year yet,” she
broke out at last.
“Well, I’ll have to go back to teaching. Great heavens! I thought I’d
finished with that!”
Miss Arnold seated herself on a clear corner of the bed.
“Look here, ‘Miss Rose,’ ” she said, excitedly, “of course you aren’t
going to stop college now, when you’re doing so well and—and we all like
you so much and—and you’re just beginning your course.” She stumbled on
—“Has everything gone?—can’t you do something?”
“Miss Rose” looked up slowly—“Everything,” she said grimly, and then,
with the pathetically resigned air of one who has been used to misfortunes
and has learned to accept them quietly, “I’ve worked all my life, I suppose I
can go at it again.” She looked around her. “I’ll be gone this time to-morrow,
and then I won’t feel so badly;”—she put her head down on the desk again.
Miss Arnold looked thoughtfully at her for a few minutes and then, with a
sudden movement, she got up and went out, closing the door softly behind
her.
It was about nine o’clock that evening and “Miss Rose” had almost
finished packing. She was feeling particularly disheartened and was taking
the books from the cases one by one in a very mournful way, when she heard
footsteps and a subdued but very excited whispering outside her door. She
got up languidly and threaded her way among the books and cushions and
odd articles of clothing heaped up on the floor. As she opened the door, the
light from her student-lamp fell upon the very red face of a freshman
propelled apparently into the room by the two or three others behind her,
who seemed to have a wild desire to efface themselves entirely.
“Miss Rose,” gasped the blushing freshman in the van, “here—here is a
letter for you. We’ve just had a class meeting—” she looked nervously at the
others who were edging away.
There was an indistinct chorus from them which sounded like “hope
you’ll accept,” and then they retreated with as much dignity as possible, but
in great haste.
“Miss Rose” opened the letter and gave a little cry as a check for a good
round sum drawn on the class treasurer fell to the floor. And then she sat
weakly down on the bed and cried a little from pure happiness as she read it
all over.
“The class of ’9—have just heard of ‘Miss Rose’s’ financial
embarrassment occasioned by the failure of the —— City Bank, and being
most unwilling to lose so valuable and appreciated a member, beg that she
will accept the enclosed and continue with the class until the end of the
year.”
 A SHORT STUDY IN EVOLUTION

A COLLEGE for women is generally looked upon by the outside world

and the visiting preachers as a haven of rest, a sort of oasis in the desert
of life, a Paradise with a large and flourishing Tree of Knowledge of
which one is commanded to eat, and where one is happily ignorant of the
“struggle for life,” and the woes and evils of the world.
Such views have been so often expressed and inculcated that it appears a
little ungracious and stubborn to insist that the bishop who comes out and
delivers a sermon once a year, or the brilliant young graduate from a
neighboring seminary—who is sent because the dean has been suddenly
called away and who is quaking with fear at the ordeal—cannot possibly
know all about a girl’s college life and its temptations and its trials and its
vanities.
When the heterogeneous mass of humanity which makes up a big college
is got together and in close relation for ten months at a time, there is bound
to be action and reaction. When New York society girls and missionaries’
daughters from India, and Boston Latin-school girls and native Japanese, and
Westerners and Georgians and Australians and “Teacher Specials,” and very
young preparatory-school girls, are all mixed up together, it inevitably
happens that there is some friction and many unexpected and interesting
results. One of these is that it not infrequently happens that a young woman
leaves college an entirely different person from the girl who took her
entrance examinations, and sometimes the change is for the better and
sometimes for the worse, or it may be unimportant and relate only to the way
she has got to wearing her hair, or the amount of extra money she considers
necessary. At any rate, a noticeable change of some sort always operates in a
girl during her four or five years’ stay at a college, and when she goes home
“for good” her friends will criticise her from their different points of view,
and will be sure to tell her whether she is improved or not.
When Miss Eva Hungerford returned for her senior year at college,
having been greatly disappointed in one of her friends, she determined to
make no new ones, but to work very hard and keep a great deal to herself.
She succeeded so well in her efforts that, after she had been there three
months, she became aware that she knew absolutely none of the new