Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/98

 NOTES ON AEISTOTLE'S PSYCHOLOGY. 87 observed nor remembered, it is clear that it can only be assumed. Is then the assumption warrantable? It will be found, I think, by any candid and competent thinker who seriously applies his mind to the question, that the hypothesis of a genesis of con- sciousness involves a contradiction, and that no proposition is more certainly true than that consciousness is eternal eternal in the only possible sense of that much abused term as being un- conditioned in time. The method of dealing with time traditional with the English school consists in representing it as an abstraction from repeated experiences of succession. The truth, however, is that consciousness of succession presupposes consciousness of time. Thus, suppose that I am sensible of a given musical note, say the fifth, and after the last vibrations of that note have died away I hear the octave struck. What does such a consciousness in- volve ? It is clear that, if I merely retained in memory an idea of the fifth, i.e., the same sensation in faint form, the two sensa- tions would merely be present to consciousness simultaneously, the one in a faint, the other in a lively form ; the relation of former and latter would not subsist between them. In order that they should be thus related, in order that I should be conscious of the sequence of the octave upon the fifth, I must on hearing the octave struck be aware that I have already heard the fifth. Being, then, in the habit of cha- racterising certain of our present experiences as signs of past experiences, we instinctively regard the relation of sequence which we thus constitute as somehow inherent in the experiences as things in themselves, i.e., we forget that sequence and con- sciousness of sequence are identical. This is an illusion precisely similar to that whereby the untutored consciousness regards objects as existing in unperceived space ; but, because the idea of time is the form of our inner no less than of our outer sense, a profounder reflection is necessary to dispel the illusion. Once, however, it has been clearly apprehended that sequence has no being except for an intelligence which has cognition of former and latter, and former and latter no existence but for conscious- ness, it becomes apparent that it is as absurd to ask whether that intelligence had a genesis as whether it is extended. Further, the assumption that consciousness had a genesis in- volves the assumption that time is absolute, i.e., that it is a reality in which the genesis of consciousness takes place but which is itself independent of consciousness. But this assump- tion is denied by empiricism almost as soon as made ; since time, if it is an abstraction from experience, must be relative to con- sciousness ; and that time should be at once a reality independent of consciousness and a result of the operation of consciousness is a proposition the terms of which are repugnant. If time, whether as an a priori form of experience or as an abstraction from experi- ence, is relative to consciousness, then assuredly consciousness is