Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 043.djvu/465

1838.] to what you please. They are indeed within the man's control, and it is his duty to control them. But this is not because they are himself, but only because they are not himself; because they are obscurations of himself. You may call them the false man if you choose; but if they were the true man, where would be the truthfulness of that mighty truth which says that the man waxes just in proportion as he makes his passions and his sensual feelings wane? How could this be the case if the man himself were identical with his passions and his desires? Can a creature live and thrive by suspending its own animation? Is it conceivable that a being should increase and strengthen in proportion as it is weakened and diminished? To return to our illustration: the point of it is this—the objects of consciousness, namely, the passions, emotions, &c., and Reason itself, might perfectly well exist (and in animals do exist) without any one being conscious of them, or combining with them the notion of self, just as the objects of vision exist without any eye perceiving them: and the fact of consciousness, or the fact that a being is conscious of these states, is just as distinct from the states themselves as the fact that the eye does behold mountains is distinct from the mountains which it beholds. These two things, then, the fact and the object, are in both cases distinctly separate. In the case of the eye and its objects they are never confounded; but in the case of consciousness and its objects we venture to affirm that the metaphysician has invariably confounded them. Our great primary aim is to remedy this confusion; to establish the fact of consciousness (and the being to whom it belongs) as something quite aloof from, and transcending, the objects of consciousness, namely, mind and all its states, and then to confine our science entirely to the elucidation of this fact, which will be found to be pregnant with many other facts, and with many mighty results,—neglecting the objects of it as of little importance or of none.

There is one ground, however, still left open to the metaphysician, which he may consider his impregnable stronghold or inner fortress, and which, if he can maintain it, will certainly enable him to set our strictures at defiance, and successfully to defend his tenets against all our objections. We are quite willing that he should intrench himself in this strong citadel, and, with his permission, we will place him fairly within it with our own hands—to stand or to fall. The metaphysician, fully admitting the distinction we have been insisting on, may say, "but this discrimination is itself a mere analysis of mind. The 'state' of which the being is conscious is mind; and the fact of consciousness, with the being to whom it belongs, is also mind. In a word, both terms or factors of the analysis are mind. Mind in a state of dualism perhaps; two minds, if you choose to call them so; but still susceptible of synthesis, still capable of having the one of them added to the other of them; and hence, though two, still capable of being united, and of being viewed in the amalgamation of one. Therefore," continues he, "mind, view it as you please, analyse it, or make what discriminations within it you like, is still rightly to be regarded as constituting the real and complete man, and as monopolizing the whole of that which is truly he."

If this argument be valid, we must own ourselves completely foiled, and the fight is done. For if it be true that the distinction we are contending for be merely a dead analytical discrimination, and not a real and wonder-working antithesis, a vital antagonism in human nature which, practically operating, brings about all the good and evil of man and of society; and which, working ceaselessly throughout all time, as well as in the individual breast, increases in energy the longer it maintains itself, marking distinctly the progress of the species, and advancing it on and on from that which it once was to that which it now is, and to that which it shall yet be—if it be not, we say, a distinction of this kind, but merely an inoperative "analysis of mind," then we give it up as virtually void, as altogether insignificant, and unworthy of a further thought.

But our whole system proceeds upon the reality and vitality of this distinction. It founds itself not upon any principle arising out of an analysis of mind; not upon any distinction made within mind; but upon a real antithesis to be established between what belongs, or may be admitted to