scription, otherwise I shall not understand thee, and we shall never arrive at clearness.
I. I will attempt to open a way towards it. I beseech thee, O Spirit! if thy organ of sight be like mine, to fix thine eye on the red object before us, to surrender thyself unreservedly to the impression produced by it, and to forget meanwhile thy previous conclusions;—and now tell me candidly what takes place in thy mind.
Spirit. I can completely place myself in thy position; and it is no purpose of mine to disown any impression which has an actual existence. But tell me, what is the effect you anticipate?
I. Dost thou not perceive and apprehend at a single glance, the surface?—I say the surface,—does it not stand there present before thee, entire and at once?—art thou conscious, even in the most distant and obscure way, of this extension of a simple red point to a line, and of this line to a surface, of which thou hast spoken? It is an after-thought to divide this surface, and conceive of its points and lines. Wouldst thou not, and would not every one who impartially observes himself, maintain and insist, notwithstanding thy former conclusions, that he really saw a surface of such or such a colour?
Spirit. I admit all this; and on examining myself, I find that it is exactly so as thou hast described.
But, in the first place, hast thou forgotten that it is not our object to relate to each other what presents itself in consciousness, as in a journal of the human mind, but to consider its various phenomena in their connexion, and to explain them by, and deduce them
