AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
Part VI. — Chap. I.
Philosophy has long ceased to be considered a valid and practical discipline of life. And why? Simply because she commences by assuming that man, like other natural things, is a passive creature, ready-made to her hand; and thus she catches from her object the same inertness which she attributes to him. But why does philosophy found on the assumption that man is a being who comes before her ready-shaped—hewn out of the quarries of nature—fashioned into form, and with all his lineaments made distinct, by other hands than his own? She does so in imitation of the physical sciences: and thus the inert and lifeless character of modern philosophy is ultimately attributable to her having degenerated into the status of a physical science.
But is there no method by which vigour may yet be propelled into the moribund limbs of philosophy; and by which, from being a dead system of theory, she may be renovated into a living discipline of practice? There is, if we will but reflect and understand that the course of procedure proper to the physical sciences, namely, the assumption that their, objects and the facts appertaining to these objects lie before them ready-made—is utterly inadmissible in true philosophy—is totally at variance with the scope and spirit of a science which professes to deal fairly with the phenomena of man. Let us endeavour to point out and illustrate the deep-seated contradistinction between philosophical and physical science; for the purpose, more particularly, of getting light thrown upon the moral character of our species.
When an inquirer is engaged in the scientific study of any natural object, let us say, for instance, of water and its phenomena, his contemplation of this object does not add any new phenomenon to the facts and qualities already belonging to it. These phenomena remain the same, without addition or diminution, whether he studies them or not. Water flows downwards, rushes into a vacuum under the atmospheric pressure, and evolves all its other phenomena, whether man be attending to them or not. His looking on makes no difference, as far as the nature of the water is concerned. In short, the number and character of its facts continue altogether uninfluenced by his study of them. His science merely enables him to classify them, and to bring them more clearly and steadily before him.
But when man is occupied in the study of the phenomena of his own natural being, or, in other words, is philosophizing, the case is very materially altered. Here his contemplation of these phenomena does add a new phenomenon to the list already under his inspection: it adds, namely, the new and anomalous phenomenon that he is contemplating these phenomena. To the old phenomena presented to him in his given or ready-made being—for instance, his sensations, passions, rational and other states—which he is regarding, there is added the supervision of these states; and this is itself a new phenomenon belonging to him. The very fact that man contemplates or makes a study of the facts of his being, is itself a fact which must be taken into account; for it is one of his phenomena just as much as any other fact connected with him is.—In carrying forth the physical sciences, man very properly takes no note of his contemplation of their objects; because this contemplation does not add, as we have said, any new fact to the complement of phenomena connected with these objects. Therefore, in sinking this fact, he does not suppress any fact to which they can lay claim. But in philosophizing, that is, in constructing a science of himself, man cannot suppress this fact, without obliterating one of his own phenomena; bemuse man's contemplation of his own phenomena is itself a new and separate phenomenon added to the given phenomena which he is contemplating.
Here, then, we have a most radical distinction laid down between physics and philosophy. In ourselves, as well as in nature, a certain given series of phenomena is presented to our obser-
