Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/362

 350 EDMUND MONTGOMERY: But by what means does it anyhow become possible ? The mental phenomena that make up our experience come to us as a broken sequence of more or less disconnected particulars. What then is the power in us that gathers up all these shifting and vanishing mental fragments, and con- structs therefrom an enduring system of knowledge ? And, as knowledge surely means the recognition of a permanently and universally valid consistency of something besides ourselves, what is the true nature of the objective validity thus recognised in knowledge ? These, no doubt, are the main questions on which our controversy has to turn, and by which we shall have to test the respective merits of the two opposite modes of explana- tion. First of all, it may be fully granted that there must be dwelling in existence a subject, not itself in its very being the mere succession of mental particulars, but somehow retaining the same as collected experience, and recognising it as such. Even Hume had to postulate some compara- tively indelible subsistence in memory of the experienced impressions and their customary agglutinations. But it is quite impossible to imagine, or to conceive in any way, how the subject, which thus experiences by dint of memory or otherwise, can ever have itself resulted from a combination of the experienced particulars. The mental presentations, which are the ostensible material of experience, are in them- selves ever-changing and perishing phenomena. If, never- theless, they are found in some way preserved and united, so as to be capable of reappearing as connected experience, this must certainly be accomplished by a power not them- selves. What kind of agency can it then be, that combines into actual mental presence and methodical order the irregularly appearing and successively lapsing particulars of conscious- ness ; that revivably stores up the memory of departed phenomena, recognising thereafter casual occurrences as fitting into the system of experience, which it has thus put together for itself, and of .which it is the enduring and ex- periencing subject ? Surely, it must be a miraculously active principle, that can snatch up from transitoriness and oblivion the variegated play of fleeting and fading appearances, and construct there- from the world of steady experience, of which we have knowledge. Whatever this preserving and combining prin- ciple may be, it is certain that, as soon as anything is recognised in consciousness, it has already exerted its power