whatsoever, and would allow the metaphysician still to triumph in our failure to accomplish what we have declared to be the true end and business of philosophy. The distinction is espoused by common sense, and is thrown out on the very surface of ordinary language: therefore the presumption that it is correct is in its favour; but it still remains to be philosophically vindicated, and made good. Let us, then, accept it faithfully as given; and gently construing it into a clearer form, let us see whether every fact connected with it under its philosophic aspect will not prove it to be the most important and valid of all possible discriminations.
To mark this distinction, this conviction and expression of common sense, by a philosophical formula, let us suppose a line terminating in two opposite poles. In the one of these we will vest "mind," that is, the whole assemblage of the various states or changes experienced—all the feelings, passions, sensations, &c. of man, and in the other of them we will vest the fact of consciousness, and the man himself calling himself "I." Now, we admit, in the first instance, that these two poles are mere postulates, and that our postulation of them can only be justified and made good that they are mutually repulsive:—by the fact that there is a reciprocal antithesis or antagonism between them, and between all that each of them contains: or, in other words, we must be borne out by the fact, that an increase of intensity at the one pole is always compensated by a corresponding decrease of intensity at the other pole—and vice versa. For if, on the contrary, it should appear that these two poles agree and act so harmoniously together, that the vividness experienced at the one pole (say that in which sensation, &c., reside) is answered by, a proportional vividness at the opposite pole of consciousness—and that a depression at this latter pole again takes place in accordance with a diminished intensity at the former pole: in short, if it should appear that these two poles, instead of mutually extinguishing, mutually strengthen each other's light—then we must own that the antithesis we are endeavouring to establish is virtually void and erroneous: that sensation and consciousness are really identical, and that the two poles are in fact not two, but only one. In a word, we will own that the distinction we have been all along fighting for does not exist, and that the ordinary doctrine of psychology upon this head is faultless, and beyond dispute.
This point, however, is not to be settled by speculation, or by abstract reasoning. What says the fact? The fact is notorious to every one except metaphysicians, who have seldom paid much attention to this or any other fact, that the degree of our consciousness or self-reference always exists in an inverse ratio to the degree of intensity of any of our sensation's, passions, emotions, &c.; and that consciousness is never so effectually depressed—or, perhaps, we may say, never so totally obliterated within us, as when we are highly transported by the vividness of any sensation, or absorbed in the violence of any passion. While, on the other hand, returning consciousness, or increasing self-reference, has always the effect of deadening the sensation and suspending the passion, until at length, when it reaches its ultimatum, the sensation or passion becomes totally extinct. This is decidedly the fact, and there is no denying it. Look at a human being immersed in the swinish gratifications of sense. See here how completely the man is lost in the animal. Swallowed up in the pleasurable sensations of his palate, he is oblivious of everything else, and consciousness sinks into abeyance for a time. The sensation at the one pole monopolizes him, and therefore the consciousness at the other pole does not come into play. He does not think of himself—he does not combine the notion of himself with the sensation, the enjoyment of which is enslaving him. Again, look at another man shaken by wrath, as a tree is shaken by the wind. Here, too, the passion reigns paramount, and everything else is forgotten. Consciousness is extinguished; and hence the expression of the poet—Ira brevis furor est—"Rage is a brief insanity"—is strictly and pathologically true; because consciousness, the condition upon which all sanity depends, is for the time absent from the man. Hence, too, the ordinary phrase, that rage transports a man out of himself, is closely and philosophically correct. Properly interpreted, it means that the man is taken completely out of the
