THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

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ent of the fact that a philosophy of consciousness, which should be perfect and complete, would, notwithstanding "the narrowness of consciousness" (die Enge des Bewusstseins), afford a sure and certain clue to the solution of our profoundest problems. The growth of consciousness means the increasing complexity of our problems, in the spirit of the saying, "Qui accroit la science, accroit le travail," and philosophy is seen to mean, as Ferrier said, "consciousness sublimed."

It is no part of our purpose here to follow the analysis of consciousness, as it yields its data in the triple forms of self, the world, and God; but we may very serviceably recall some of the results which that analysis of the Ego in its forms or modes has brought forth with increasing clearness, in so far as these results relate to that true personality with which we are here concerned. We cannot but think that, in the view of recent theistic thought, man is by all the processes of life driven back at last upon his own inner life as "the Archimedean point" from which as centre he has to unfold his world-a consideration which has served to make his need of a deeply grounded personality more truly felt. Not yet is his personality, with all its properties and implications, within near approach to being perfectly understood. But there has been a deepening and a widening process at work in our conceptions of human personality. Among the things now perfectly certain is the

existence of those "unconscious mental modifications" which John Stuart Mill was able, three decades ago, to regard as beyond the reach of experiment. What is more, it is becoming rapidly manifest that these subliminal strata or subconscious elements in our being are vastly more important than they have been thought. And other things also we shall presently find to be more beyond reach of doubt than they were. The analysis of the Ego has taken consciousness to be the "necessary knowledge which the mind has of its own operations. In knowing, it knows that it knows. In experiencing emotions and passions, it knows that it experiences them. In willing or exercising acts of causality, it knows that it wills or exercises such acts. This is the common, universal, and spontaneous consciousness." More accurately defined, it is "the the power and act of self-recognition; not, if you please, the mind knowing its knowledges, emotions, and volitions, but the mind knowing itself in these." Consciousness recent thought regards not simply as a "peculiar faculty," by which we are cognisant of our own mental operations, but views it as the universal condition of intelligence, the universal basis and inseparable element of human thought, the basal form of all the modes of our thinking activity. It accepts the words of Cousin: "We not only feel, but we know that we feel; we not only act, but we know that we act; we not only think,

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but we know that we think; to think without knowing that we think, is as if we should not think; and the peculiar quality, the fundamental attribute of thought, is to have a consciousness of itself. Consciousness is this interior light which illuminates everything that takes place in the soul; consciousness is the accompaniment of all our faculties; and is, so to speak, their echo." In the triad, composed of self, the world, and God, as the necessary factors-the unchangeable elements-of consciousness, the consciousness of the last named, that is, of God, has been regarded by recent theistic philosophy as that wherein the consciousness of the other two of self and the worldbecomes completely realised, while at the same time consciousness of self and the world has been viewed as forming the path by which we rise into consciousness of God. The relevancy and purpose of this insistence on these forms and developments of the consciousness of the single, permanent self—that is, the essential or noumenal self, which we take to be the indivisible unit in the sphere of personality will speedily appear. It is not, of course, held that any historical consciousness of the genesis of the conscious ego has been possible to philosophy all indeterminate lies the beginning— an undifferentiated complex: forth from the abyss of nothingness-or, if any prefer, from the deep sphere of feeling or impression, where sub-conscious elements dwell-philosophy has seen the ego spring

to learn the import of the saying, "I am I," as it sets itself to gather fruits of world - experience. For the self-conscious subject, which forms in itself the unity of thought and reality, knows itself as now existing, but memory does not carry it to the beginning of existence: there is a point beyond which Memory can no further go.

"No memory-haunted ways

Take our first footsteps; but in deep
And unremembered tracts of sleep

The immature creature dwells, nor can recall
Its former self or primal state at all."

Back to this point, however, at which we see self-consciousness rise-if we may be allowed so to speak-out of the loose sand-heap of unreflecting consciousness, or upon the crest of wavy sensations -or, in other words, back to the point at which we see the merely conscious individual emerge from consciousness in general (Bewusstsein überhaupt), and first become transformed by the assertion of will and reason into an ego or personality—we know that the self or unifying principle which has persisted through the long train of remembered experiences has been one and the same-an ever identical self. Even "the assertion of the evolutionist," as John Fiske in a certain place has said, "is purely historical in its import, and includes no hypothesis whatever as to the ultimate origin of consciousness; least of all is it intended to imply that consciousness was evolved from matter." Into

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that we may not now inquire; but we are led to say that the genesis of personality—with its rational powers and its ancestral similitude-is, in the view of that philosophy with whose latest developments we are concerned, due, not to physical force being transmuted into psychic states, but to a stage of development being reached at which the psychic aspects or elements of being run up into that unity which we call consciousness. But if consciousness is such a unity formed of psychic elements, why should we not say, as touching these psychic aspects or factors, that already they were there-truly preconditioning our consciousness?

We believe theistic philosophy has been always more firmly grounding consciousness in that only which is potentially conscious-in fact, in the world's immanent spiritual potentialities. Its ul

timate basis, of course, must be found in the nature or essence of the Absolute. This is not to say that consciousness, as developed in us, is the consciousness of the Absolute, which must be allowed to have a consciousness of Its own, perfect and entire, wanting no development. We recall the words of Lotze, that "no necessity of reason constrains us to shun the thought of a beginning of the soul. The organic body in process of being formed, certainly does not educe it from itself; but the living body itself is no incoherent heap of atoms driven to a particular development by a universal law, in an otherwise empty world. As,