Page:Essays in Philosophy (1856).djvu/104



One characteristic of the view of this economy that is taken in the Dissertations, is the development of a distinction—open to reflex observation and investigation— between that knowledge of the phenomena of matter, now and here present, to which the name Consciousness is exclusively appropriated, and which is asserted not to involve any act of mediate self-consciousness, and that other knowledge—of the past and possible—which is, on the contrary, maintained to imply an act of the mind conscious of its own state as representative of something separate from the state itself. Thus, when I imagine a scene described in the Iliad, or when I remember the events of yesterday, the immediate objects of my knowledge are certain phenomena of my own mind. Let the siege of Troy, or the events of yesterday be enacted before my senses, and the immediate objects of my knowledge are radically qualities of matter. When we know the possible and the past, the very operation of knowing is the only object of which the mind is conscious. But when we know the present states of our own minds, or the present primary qualities of matter, these states and qualities are known in themselves, and not through the medium of a representative mental state. Memory and imagination is thus each of them a species of self-consciousness, in which the intellect has for its immediate objects those phenomena of self, which form, in the one the acts of remembering past objects of perception or self-consciousness, and in the other of apprehending the creations of the poetical faculty.

This theory of the knowledge of what self once was