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448 "the human mind," we encounter, whichever way we turn, mere counterfeit, or else irrelevant phenomena, instead of falling in with the true and peculiar phenomena of man; or shall we say that consciousness, like the apples in the gardens of the Hesperides, grows on the boughs of humanity, and grows nowhere else, and that while it is the practical duty of all men, as well as the great aim of philosophy, to grasp and realize this rare and precious fact, it has ever been the practice of "the human mind," like the dragon of old, to guard this phenomena from the scrutiny of mankind; to keep them ignorant or oblivious of its existence; to beat them back from its avenues into the mazes of practical as well as speculative error, by raising its blinding and deceitful aspect against any hand that would pluck the golden fruitage.

Does the reader still desire to be informed with the most precise distinctness why the fact of consciousness, and we ourselves, cannot be conceived of as properly and entirely vested in "mind"? Then let him attend once more to the fact, when we repeat what we have already stated: perilling our whole doctrine upon the truth of our statement as fact, and renouncing speculation altogether. In a former part of this discussion we illustrated the distinction between the objects of consciousness (the passions, namely, and all the other changes or modifications we experience) and the fact of consciousness, by the analogous distinction subsisting between the objects of vision and the fact of vision. It was plain that the objects of vision might exist, and did exist, without giving birth to, or being in any way accompanied by, the fact of vision; and in the same way it was apparent that the objects of consciousness by no means brought along with them the fact of consciousness as their necessary and invariable accompaniment. But we have now to observe that this illustration is not strong enough, and that the two terms of it are not sufficiently contrasted for our purpose. Or, in other words, we now remark that in the case of consciousness and its objects, the rupture or antagonism between the two is far stronger and more striking than in the case of vision and its objects. It is not the tendency of the objects of vision, on the one hand, to quench the vision which regards them; it is not, on the other hand, the tendency of the fact of vision to obliterate the objects at which it looks. Therefore, though the fact of vision and the objects of vision are distinctly separate, yet their disunion is not so complete as that of the fact of consciousness and the objects of consciousness, the natural tendency of which is, on both sides, to act precisely in the manner spoken of, and between which a struggle of the kind pointed out constantly subsists. This, then, we proclaim to be the fact (and upon this fact we ground the essential distinction or antithesis between mind, i.e., the complement of the objects of consciousness, and the fact of consciousness itself), that mind, in all its states, without a single exception, so far from facilitating or bringing about the development of consciousness, actually exerts itself unceasingly and powerfully to prevent consciousness from coming into existence, and to extinguish it when it has come into operation. The fact, as we have said before, is notorious, that the more any state of mind (a sensation or whatever else it may be) is developed, the less is there a consciousness or reference to self of that state of mind; and this fact proves how essentially the two are opposed to each other; because if they agreed, or acted in concert with one another, it would necessarily follow that an increase in the one of them would be attended by a corresponding increase in the other of them. How, then, can we possibly include, or conceive of as included, under "mind," a fact or act which it is the tendency of "mind" in all its states to suppress?

Is it here objected that unless these states of mind existed, consciousness would never come into operation, and that therefore it falls to be considered as dependent upon them? In this objection the premises are perfectly true, but the inference is altogether false. It is true that man's consciousness would not develop itself unless certain varieties of sensation, reason, &c., became manifest within him; but it does not by any means follow from this that consciousness is the natural sequent or harmonious accompaniment of these. The fact is, that