THE WORLD NO ILLUSION.

It is easier to turn a great man's thought to ridicule than it is to rise to its comprehension. The silliest trifler may parody a wise saying, and pun upon the soundest maxims of philosophy. Carlyle and others have ridiculed Descartes' famous saying, that the consciousness of self is involved in all consciousness. Nevertheless, Descartes is right. There can be nothing more certain than that the thinker himself has a real being and is not merely a phenomenon. But, although we are thus absolutely certain of our own existence, and although the fact of our existence is involved in all our knowledge from the very beginning, there is nothing presented to our thought more difficult of analysis and examination than the conscious mind itself. It is so difficult to examine that the school of Positive Philosophy declare it impossible. As well, said Comte, may a man attempt to look at his own eye as to attempt to look into his own mind. On the other hand, every school of philosophy which is worthy of that name declares that the whole field of philosophy lies embosomed in consciousness; and

that it is only by an examination of the processes going on within us that we can arrive at any truth worth knowing. The great difficulty of analyzing the action of the mind is well illustrated by the familiar fact that uncultivated persons are wholly unable to give the real reasons for their daily judgments. Those judgments really rest upon sound reasons, but the uncultivated are unable sometimes to put into words the reasons which they distinctly see. Still more frequently, they lack the skill requisite to crossexamine the witnesses, consciousness and memory, concerning the processes by which the judgment was reached.

In looking at the conscious self, memory is an important witness. Comte was right so far as this: that, while the mind is wholly absorbed in any process, it cannot also be giving its strength to the analysis of the process. We must, in general, depend upon our memory of the process, and, while the memory is still vivid, hold off that subjective process as an object of thought. To attain much skill in this dissection of a past process requires long practice; and, of course, it requires still greater practice, still rarer power, to observe the process while actually going on.

The consequence is that very few persons know themselves, in any emphatic sense of the word. Their fancied knowledge of themselves is, in fact, only the knowledge of their own portrait, and that frequently of a portrait unskilfully taken. Dr. Holmes pleasantly describes one of the results of this self-ignorance; namely, that in every dialogue there are at least six speakers. In a dialogue between two men in official stations, we may say that there are twelve persons present, modifying everything that is said: first, the two men themselves; secondly, the two officials, in their official characters. Here are four persons. The other eight consist of the estimates or pictures of these four formed by each of the two men; and more could easily be described.

Passing, however, from these pictures of character, let us consider the nature of the reality, the subject or conscious self. Can thought be resolved into space or time

or force, or that material substance which appears to make force manifested at certain points of space?

Space and time are at once excluded. The ego, the me, or self, stands in relation to space and time only through its ability by an inward perception to see them and to measure them by the aid of real or imagined motion. The life, the manifestations of the ego, are, for the present, not only in time, but connected with the imagination of space. Yet the ego is not conscious of any dependence upon either. Neither are its manifestations modes of motion. That they may all be connected, for the present, with modes of motion in the nervous system of the body, is extremely probable, if not fully proved. But this by no means makes them consist of modes of motion. Modes of motion are recognizable only through sense perception. They are entirely outside the sphere of consciousness. The perception of motion is essentially the perception of the not-me. On the other hand, modes of consciousness are not recognizable by sense, but only through consciousness: they are thus absolutely discrete from motion.

Yet there are many writers, at the present day, who by a fallacious course of reasoning attempt to show that consciousness is only a manifestation of mechanical force. Their train of reasoning was set forth by one of their great leaders substantially in the following form: "Man dies, if either deprived of food or if overfed; if either frozen or overheated; if either drowned or too thoroughly dried; if deprived of air or supplied with too much oxygen; and, finally, if a metaphysician were compelled to stand on his head five minutes, all his eternal realities would become non-existent. Therefore, man is a part of the material universe; and his conscious thought is a result of its physical forces."

This reasoning appears to us utterly fallacious. It confounds the concomitant conditions of a phenomenon with its causes. The fallacy is most readily exposed by a carefully copied parody of the argument, which I have given elsewhere. Here is a mantel clock, which its owner affirms

goes by a spring within it. The fallacy of Comte says: "That cannot be so. The clock will stop, if not oiled, and will stop if it has too much oil upon it; it will stop, if frozen; it will stop, if overheated; it will stop, if plunged under water; it will stop, if it be exposed to dry and dusty air; and, if you turn it upside down, it will stop quicker than a metaphysician would stop thinking. The spring is, therefore, a conceit of the imagination. The clock evidently goes by gravity, by just temperature, by proper hygrometric conditions, and by a proper feeding with oil." But the owner of the clock knows that it has a spring in it, and every philosophic thinker knows that he has a soul within him. The infinite gulf between the motion of a nerve and the consciousness of a sensation can be bridged by no such loose and careless engineering. The conscious me is no more a part of the body, and a result of external agencies, than the mainspring of the mantel clock is a part of the train which it drives, or a result of the oscillation of the pendulum.

What, then, is the conscious me, the subjective subject? It is something recognizable only in consciousness, exactly as matter is recognizable only through motion. When matter ceases to exert any force,- ceases, that is, to produce even the infinitesimal motions of heat and light,-it ceases to exist to us. We cannot follow it, even in imagination: it has reverted to the abyss of potentiality. So with the conscious subject: if it ceases utterly from consciousness, then it ceases to exist to us and to our thought. We cannot follow it, even in imagination: it has reverted to the abyss of potentiality. Its resurrection to life cannot be construed to our imagination as other than a new creation. And this new creation will be more wonderful than the first, because, in order to be the same conscious being, it must come into renewed life with crowded memories of the past.

Consciousness is the distinguishing characteristic of the subject, just as motion is of matter, extension of space, duration of time. The mind itself, the will itself, can exert no finite mechanical force. Its manifestations and actions.