way of illustration: "Similarly, phenomena in space imply, on the same hypothesis, transcendent conditions equivalent to space" (p. 368).
In fairness to Professor Read, he should be allowed to describe transcendent being in his own words, since any attempt to restate a view so puzzling is pretty sure to be misleading. Transcendent being, then, is a conscious thing "having also other characters" (p. 172). It is "some condition of a phenomenon which needs, for the actuality of that phenomenon, that the conditions of a perceptual consciousness should also be present" (p. 365). This notion is by itself necessarily empty; "it cannot be genuinely thought, because thought is a conscious process establishing relations between terms in consciousness." "Being is the condition of the world in abstraction from consciousness: consciousness is the condition of the World's being known or actualized, and of all Reality so far as knowable." Personal consciousness is "a function or activity, or (as it might be best to say) the actuality of that Being of which the body is the phenomenon. Again, as we have seen that consciousness is a continuum without beginning, and that it may be supposed to accompany in some degree all phenomena, I propose to attribute it to the Being of those phenomena. By that means we are able to think of the World as existing independently of us and before we existed, inasmuch as its consciousness can be thought of by its resemblance to our own. Consciousness is an everlasting continuum; it is an activity of something; it accompanies all phenomena, but cannot be dependent on them; so let us suppose that it is the activity of that which phenomena express. In the higher animals and ourselves we find phenomena organized in such a way that the accompanying consciousness, correlatively organized, supplies the condition necessary to actualize Being in a World of experience" (pp. 366-7).
These quotations will perhaps awaken in the reader the suspicion, which I think the work as a whole would confirm, that the concept of transcendent being is about as otiose as the Kantian thing-in-itself. It is invoked because consciousness cannot be regarded as self-existent. But since, by hypothesis, whatever other activities being may have, consciousness will always be one, Professor Read thinks that certain universal characteristics of consciousness may be ascribed to it. This would, however, not be true in so far as it is transcendent. As transcendent it remains a mere 'that which.' We might as well call it x and be done with it.
But waiving this difficulty, is it true that by attributing consciousness to the being of phenomena we are able to think of the world as existing independently of us and before we existed, because we are then able to think of its consciousness by its resemblance to our own? By what right
