Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/479

 all our experience is in time. It is an error, if it is taken as the starting-point of an argument which either proposes to conduct us out of consciousness and to represent it as an unmeaning accident in a scheme of things which when perfectly equilibrated would transcend it, or even to bind us Ixion-like on an unresting wheel of change.

For the facts are susceptible of a better interpretation. May not the flow of appearances be due to a defect of consciousness engendered as an adaptive response to the impermanence of a defective world? Is it not a of a  impotent ?

At all events it seems to be the case that (1) we strive to prolong and retain pleasant states and objects of consciousness; (2) the fluttering of attention is protective, and necessary to survival under conditions which render it unsafe to become too much absorbed by the object of our attention (or attentions), lest something to which we have failed to attend should absorb us in a too literal sense; (3) even where practical exigencies do not compel us, we have to shift the objects of our attention because we never find them wholly satisfying. The unsatisfactoriness in this case would be the cause of the impermanence, and not vice versa. But could we once attain an object of contemplation which was wholly satisfying, should we not seek to retain it in consciousness for ever? If we had achieved, should we wish to change it, for the worse? if we had once reached heaven, should we lust again for the vicissitudes of earth?

Surely it follows from the very conception of the Good that it should be a permanent possession; and if it is attainable at all, it can only be as an. I suspect, therefore, that the objection to  is at bottom one to the whole notion of an attainable. But whether the advocates of this objection are naively optimistic enough to imagine that an unattainable ideal, recognised as such, continues to be an ideal a rational being can aim at, or whether they are pessimistic enough to renounce all ideals altogether, it is their notion and not that of which is fundamentally paradoxical.

As before, we may illustrate this more concretely by examining the moment immediately preceding the hypothetical fixation of consciousness. It must be reached, of course, by a progressive development of consciousness in fulness and intensity and power of attention and the gradual suppression of all interruptions and discords. There can be no doubt, therefore, that it is consciousness in a very high sense, i.e., a contemplation, most pleasant and