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CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSCENDS CONSCIOUSNESS. 53

equally authoritatively, Sight, sight, hearing, hearing,-touch, touch; for each of these is consciousness, and each of these is at the same time capable of a formal investigation.

It is possible that Hamilton might reply here, But you fail to see that I speak of an ultimate fact of consciousness. By no means, we may rejoin; we know very well that you name the general fact in perception an ultimate fact of consciousness but consciousness here is not consciousness simpliciter, but consciousness secundum quid; it is still perception, and we admit, if you will, that the ultimate, and universal, and, pro tanto, necessary fact of perception is the cognition of something different from self; but it is still competent to consciousness qua consciousness, to transcend perception qua perception,-to begin where perception left off, and carry up or out the ultimate fact of perception into a higher and very different fact of its own. Nay, we may say that the special business of consciousness is to carry the outer fact of perception up or in to its own inner truth. Were we to stay by perception, we were but brutes: our business is to think, and to think is-in so many words-just to transcend perception. In more intelligible language, it is the business of consciousness to examine all special consciousnesses that may be submitted to it; and among these perception finds itself, and finds itself, too, in its own nature so peculiarly constituted, that there is no other special consciousness so well adapted for the inquisition of gencral consciousness as it is. By the very phrase,

ultimate fact, Hamilton, indeed, just refutes his own case; for it implies a foregone process that has pronounced it ultimate; and, implying process, it implies also a possibility of examining the same, even beyond the arbitrary term of his own ipse dixit.

We may remark, too, that the nature of this assumed ultimate fact of Hamilton's does not at all lessen the difficulty of how such substances as mind and matter can come into relation at all. Nor is it to any other motive than a desire to lessen this difficulty, that we can attribute the identification of consciousness with perception on the part of Hamilton, as well as his general attempt to reduce all the senses to that of direct contact-touch. In this way, too, we see that, despite his clamour of an ultimate fact, Hamilton is really obliged tacitly to admit the claims of reason and reasoning, and the demands of explanation.

It is possible, then, almost directly to negative every single statement of Hamilton's in the extracts with which we set out, and to which the reader will, perhaps, kindly consent to turn back a moment. As regards Aristotle, for example, we can see that his doctrine is simply that of universal mankind, and that the doctrine of Reid and Stewart by no means differs. Reid is not guilty of an 'error of commission' in discriminating consciousness as a special faculty. Consciousness is to Reid, as it is to Aristotle, and everybody else unless Hamilton, the genus, while perception and the rest are but the species. It is but a very unfair accentuation of certain words,

HAMILTON'S STATEMENTS NEGATIVED.

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which extends but a plausible pretext to Hamilton to speak differently. The truth of the matter is, that of all philosophers, and of all mankind, Hamilton is the only one who has converted consciousness into a special faculty-perception. Against which conversion, we again assert that it is possible to discriminate consciousness from the special faculties, as these from it.

Then we do perceive, and it is perfectly natural for us to inquire how we perceive, let us betray so, as Aristotle has truly said, an imbecility of the reasoning principle itself,'-let us betray this for thinking so if we must, but we will console ourselves that this spicula of Aristotle, however ornamental to Hamilton, has been probably wrested from its true connexion, and if not, that, as it stands, it is sufficiently valueless. Again, the so-called fact of perception is not ultimate: there are steps to it, there are steps from it. Perception is not inviolable; and, in a certain sense, consciousness itself is not inviolable. Lastly, the representationist does not postulate the falsehood of consciousness. These statements pretty well exhaust the burthen of our extracts, though it would be quite possible to carry the negative into the particular more deeply still.

Consciousness is veracious; consciousness is not mendacious; the facts of consciousness must be accepted; consciousness is our ultimate standard; in order to try consciousness another consciousness were demanded; the facts of consciousness are mutually congruent and coherent, else consciousness is itself

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false, and the whole edifice of knowledge-society itself-topples; the root of nature is a lie; God is a deceiver; unconditional scepticism is the melancholy result; our personality, our immortality, our moral liberty-in short, man is the dream of a shadow,' 'God is the dream of that dream!' No reader of Hamilton but knows these utterances well. How constantly, how unexceptively they are repeated! yet the pole on which they turn, all of them, is a sophism, a fallacy 'probably without a parallel,' as Hamilton himself says of Brown, 'in the whole history of philosophy, and this portentous error is prolific-Chimæra chimæram parit. Were the evidence of the mistake less unambiguous we should be disposed rather to question our own perspicacity than to tax so subtle an intellect with so gross a blunder.' (Disc. p. 57.) But the evidence is not ambiguous. Hamilton has started with the fallacia accidentis, and entangled himself in error ever the deeper the further. Why, were consciousness inviolable in the sense in which it must be understood to legitimate the conclusion of Hamilton in regard to the evidence of perception, then the tale of history is a dream, for that whole tale is but the transcendence of error after error, and these errors were the errors of consciousness. For what are all our reformatories, refuges, asylums,--for what are missions,--to what use schools,-if special need not the correction of universal consciousness? History! what is it else than this? What is it else than the transcendence morally, æsthetically, and intellectually of sense? Morally, for example, the good is now

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UNIVERSITY

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THE TRANSCENDENCE OF PERCEPTION ALIFORNIA above the personal, and aesthetically the beautiful is above the sapid: but was either so, when mankind belched the acorn? Then, intellectually, what original facts of consciousness, so far as sense-so far as perception is consciousness, have not been changed? The earth is no longer a plane; the firmament over it has gone into immensity, its lights are worlds. History has, in a manner, fixed the sun; and yet that in the morning he rises in the east, and in the evening sets in the west, if false to intellect is true to sense, if false to consciousness, is true to perception.

Nay, why talk of history, when the daily experience of each of us can tell but the self-same tale? For what is experience?-what but a later fact of consciousness transcending (i. e. falsifying) an earlier one?

The child is conscious that there is a crooked stick in the water; the man is conscious that the very same stick is straight. This same man, again, is conscious that it is the rose is red, the sugar sweet, &c.; but the philosopher, and, as we shall see presently, even such a philosopher as Hamilton, is conscious that all this is otherwise. Experience, then, is but a mutation of the facts of consciousness, and the assumption of an inviolability of consciousness (in order to counteract and nullify this mutation) would, if followed out to its legitimate consequences, terminate in an intellectual stand-still and a moral quietism destructive of philosophy, destructive of society, destructive of life. In a certain sense, indeed, had consciousness been inviolable, the universe had never been,-God had been but bare identity; and difference

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