that our consciousness of sensation falls under the law of causality is totally unfounded, and may be disproved by an appeal to a stricter and more accurate observation.
The erection of this dilemma places us on a vantage-ground from which we may perceive at a glance both what we ought to avoid and what we ought to follow. On the one hand, realising the true facts, we can avoid the fate of those who expended their labour on a wrong question; and, on the other hand, hitting the right question, we can also avoid the fate of those who wrecked its solution upon false facts. We can now steer equally clear of the Scylla of an irrelevant problem, and the Charybdis of fictitious facts. Perception is, as we have seen, a synthesis of two facts, sensation, namely, and consciousness, or the realisation of self in conjunction with the sensation experienced. The former of these is possessed in common by men and by animals; but the latter is peculiar to man, and constitutes his differential quality, and is, therefore, the sole and proper fact to which our attention ought to direct itself when contemplating the phenomena of perception.
Chapter II.
We have already[1] had occasion to establish and illustrate the radical distinction between consciousness on the one hand, and sensation on the other, or any other of those "states of mind," as they are called, of which we are cognisant. We showed that consciousness is not only distinct from any of these states, but is diametrically opposed, or placed in a direct antithesis, to them all. Thus, taking for an example, as we have hitherto done, the smell of a rose, it appears that so long as the sensation occasioned by this object remains moderate, consciousness, or the realization of self in union with the feeling, comes into play without any violent effort. But, suppose the sensation is increased until we almost
"die of a rose, in aromatic pain,"
then we affirm that the natural tendency of this augmentation is to weaken or obliterate consciousness, which, at any rate, cannot now maintain its place without a much stronger exertion. We do not say that this loss of self-possession, or possession of self, always happens even when human sensations are most immoderate; but we affirm that in such circumstances there is a natural tendency in man to lose his consciousness or to have it weakened; and that when he retains it, he does so by the counteracting exercise of an unnatural, that is, of a free and moral power; and we further maintain that this tendency or law, or fact of humanity, which is fully brought to light when our sensations, emotions, &c., are rendered very violent, clearly proves that there is at bottom a vital and ceaseless repugnancy between consciousness and all these "states of mind," even in their ordinary and more moderate degrees of manifestation, although the equipoise then preserved on both sides may render it difficult for us to observe it. Had man been visited by much keener sensations, and hurried along by much stronger passions, and endowed with a much more perfect reason, the realisation of his own personality, together with the consequences it involves, would then have been a matter of much greater difficulty to him than it now is; perhaps it would have amounted to an impossibility. Even as it is, nothing can be more wonderful than that he should evolve this antagonist power in the very heart of the floods of sensation which, pouring in upon all sides, are incessantly striving to overwhelm it; and, secure in its strength, should ride, as in a lifeboat, amid all the whirlpools of blind and fatalistic passion, which make the life of every man here below a sea of roaring troubles.
We now avail ourselves of the assistance of this antagonism,—which has thus been established as fact by experience,—in order to displace the false fact generally, we might say universally, assumed in our current metaphysics, namely, that consciousness, or
- ↑ Vol. XLIII., p. 445
