Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/388

 376 EDMUND MONTGOMERY : with them a nature of which we never can become at all aware, i.e., conscious? It was the inexplicability of the intercommunication between the thinking and the extended world, between the world seemingly in consciousness and the world seemingly out of consciousness, that led to the assumption of such a supernaturally pre-established harmony. But we understand now quite well that our percepts and concepts are alike integrant parts of our own consciousness, and thus the ancient difficulty, how matter can possibly influence mind, has ceased to exist for us, if by matter be meant, as formerly implied, certain sensorially compelled affections hypostatised. If we are in any way affected by externalities, it is certainly no material stuff of theirs that makes impressions on our mind. The entity which we perceive as our own body, is affected by other entities which we perceive as bodies ex- ternal to it. Through the process, which we call stimulation, functions within our own organism, yielding sensorial affec- tions to us, are set going. These sensorial affections serve us as signs whereby we recognise the existence and, in a certain sense, also the constitution of those other entities perceived by us, together with their bearings on our own being. This is no more than direct observation teaches. If, however, we are so speculatively or transcendent ally possessed as to feel daring enough to deny sensorial compulsion or sensory stimulation altogether, then we find ourselves mercilessly driven to the untenable position exposed in the last section, where we had to declare our own body an altogether useless and obstructive nuisance, and at the same time an eternal fact in universal consciousness. That there exists between our own being and the world of externalities a wide range of connaturally established relations, is a belief and an interpretation so manifoldly corroborated that it cannot but appear evident to every unprejudiced mind. When I understand the gestures and speech of another human being, is not this sufficient proof of my standing in connaturally established relation to him ? Is not blood-affinity, involving similarity of origination and organisation, the efficient agency through which his being is rendered connatural with mine ? And is it not this con- naturalness which enables me to understand his expressions and thoughts ? Can Transcendentalism be believed when it is forced to maintain that all this objective recognition and consentaneity is accomplished by my individual understand- ing apperceiving in universal consciousness eternal facts, which render it true that there actually subsists in that