nopoly of the man, it would, like them, have tended to keep down the establishment of his personal being.
Such are the chief powers that enter into league to enslave us, and to bind us down under the causal nexus, the moment we are born. By imposing their agency upon us, they prevent us from exercising our own. By filling us with them, they prevent us from becoming ourselves. They do all they can to withhold each of us from becoming "I." They throw every obstacle they can in the way of our becoming conscious beings; they strive, by every possible contrivance, to keep down our personality. They would fain have each of us to take all our activity from them, instead of becoming, each man for himself, a new centre of free and independent action.
But, strong as these powers are, and actively as they exert themselves to fulfil their tendencies with respect to man, they do not succeed for ever in rendering human personality a non-existent thing. After a time man proves too strong for them; he rises up against them, and shakes their shackles from his hands and feet. He puts forth (obscurely and unsystematically, no doubt), but still he puts forth a particular kind of act, which thwarts and sets at nought the whole causal domination of nature. Out of the working of this act is evolved man in his character of a free, personal, and moral being. This act is itself man; it is man acting, and man in act precedes, as we have seen, man in being,—that is, in true and proper being. Nature and her powers have now no constraining hold over him; he stands out of her jurisdiction. In this act he has taken himself out of her hands into his own; he has made himself his own master. In this act he has displaced his sensations, and his sensations no longer monopolise him; they have no longer the complete mastery over him. In this act he has thrust his passions from their place, and his passions have lost their supreme ascendancy. And now what is this particular kind of act? What is it but the act of consciousness—the act of becoming "I"—the act of placing ourselves in the room which sensation and passion have been made to vacate? This act may be obscure in the extreme, but still it is an act of the most practical kind, both in itself and in its results; and this is what we are here particularly desirous of having noted. For what act can be more vitally practical than the act by which we realise our existence as free personal beings? and what act can be attended by a more practical result than the act by which we look our passions in the face, and, in the very act of looking at them, look them down?
Now, if consciousness be an act of such mighty and practical efficiency in real life, what must not the practical might and authority of philosophy be? Philosophy is consciousness sublimed. If, therefore, the lower and obscurer form of this act can work such real wonders and such great results, what may we not expect from it in its highest and clearest potence? If our unsystematic and undisciplined consciousness be thus practical in its results (and practical to a most momentous extent it is), how much more vitally and effectively practical must not our systematic and tutored consciousness, namely, philosophy, be?—Consciousness when enlightened and expanded is identical with philosophy. And what is consciousness enlightened and expanded? It is, as we have already seen, an act of practical antagonism put forth against the modifications of the whole natural man: and what then is philosophy, but an act of practical antagonism put forth against the modifications of the whole natural man? But further, what is this act of antagonism, when it too, is enlightened and explained? What is it but an act of freedom—an act of resistance, by which we free ourselves from the causal bondage of nature—from all the natural laws and conditions under which we were born: and what then is philosophy but an act of the highest, the most essential, and the most practical freedom? But further, what is this act of freedom when it also is cleared up and explained? It turns out to be Human Will—for the refusal to submit to the modifications of the whole natural man must be grounded on a law opposed to the law under which these modifications develop themselves—namely, the causal law—and this opposing law is the law called human will: and what then is philosophy but pure and indomitable will? or, in other words, the most practical of all conceivable acts, inasmuch as
