tween man in his true Being and the universe that surrounds him—or, that if there be any, it is the communication of non-communication? Know ye not that ye are what ye are only on account of the antagonism between you and it—that ye perceive things only by resisting their impressions, by denying them, not in word only, but also in vital deed: that your refusal to be acted upon by them constitutes your very personality and your very perception of them; that this perception arises not in consequence of the union, but in consequence of the disunion between yourselves and matter; and, in fine, that your consciousness, even in its simplest acts, so far from being in harmony and keeping with the constitution of nature, is the commencement of that grand disruption between yourselves and the world, which perhaps ye will know more about before ye die?
Of all difficult entails to be broken through, the most difficult is the entail of false facts and erroneous opinions. If, however, the foregoing observations be attended to, we trust we have done something to cut off speculators yet unborn from their inheritances of error. Of all the false facts involved in the "science of the human mind," the greatest is this, that, starting from the assumption of "mind" as a given substance, we are thereby led to believe that the ego or central and peculiar point of humanity comes into the world ready-made. In opposition to this belief, the true fact is that the ego does not thus come into the world, but that the being which is now "I" was not "I" at first, but became "I" after a time and after a process, which it is the business of the philosopher to explain. Various other fictitious facts spring out of this tap-root of error. Thus, if we start from mind as a given substance, we, of course, are compelled to make this, in the first instance, passive, and only active through a species of reaction. But the ego is never passive. Its being is pure act. To hold it passive is to hold it annihilated. It is for ever acting against the fatalistic forces of nature. Its free and antagonist power shows itself equally to the eye of reflection in our simplest perceptive as in our highest moral acts. It lives, and has a being, only in so far as it refuses to bow under the yoke of causality; and whenever it bends beneath that yoke, its life and all its results are gone.[1]
One word to those who imagine that the ego is merely a variety of expression signifying nothing more than the proper name of the person employing it. There cannot be a greater philosophical error than to conceive that the non-manifestation of the ego is merely a verbal or logical defect, and that the reality of it may exist in a being, where the notion of it is wanting. Yet this appears to us to be one of the commonest errors in psychology. Metaphysicians, undisciplined by reflection, when contemplating the condition of a young child, and observing its various sensitive, passionate, or rational states, are prone, in the exercise of an unwarranted imagination, also to invest it with a personality—with consciousness—in short, with that which, in their own case, they call "I," transferring over upon it this notion and reality which exist only for them. For the child all this while does not think itself "I," and therefore it does not in reality become "I." It never can become "I" through their thinking. The "I" they think for it is a spurious and non-existent "I." To become "I" in reality, it must think itself "I," which it has not yet done. But what do we mean precisely by saying that the notion of "I" creates the reality of "I"? This we can best explain by a digression into the history of philosophy, and by rescuing a once famous dogma from the undeserved contempt into which it has generally fallen.
- ↑ The false facts of metaphysics" ought to form no inconsiderable chapter in the history of philosophy. Those specified are but a few of them; but they are all that we have room for at present. To state, almost in one word, the fundamental error we have noticed in the text, we should say, that the whole perversion and falsity of the philosophy of man are owing to our commencing with a substance, "mind,"—and not with an act—the act or fact of consciousness.
