Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/392

380 we do not wish to pay ourselves with mere words, there arises a much more puzzling question: By what means is the synthetical activity of universal consciousness maintained in permanent efficiency? We can organically explain by what marvellous natural operations the consciousness of a human subject is kept efficient. And, as the hypostatised universal consciousness is constituted solely from analogies to individual consciousness, we ought to be able analogically to explain the source of restorative supply of a power conceived as continually expended. Of course, we may summarily settle this whole matter by a high-flown dictum; but we are therewith transgressing the sphere of legitimate thinking. The undiminished persistence of an unregenerated effect-producing power must ever remain to our mind an irreconcilable contradiction.

It is most obvious that only ignorance of the astonishingly interlaced conditions, actually co-operating in the production of natural manifestations, can seduce our fancy to project analogous manifestations into a region of unconditioned subsistence. Bearing this weighty truth in mind, it is interesting to trace the spiritual transmutation of other organic occurrences that have been dimly guiding the Transcendental mode of thinking.

Geometrical space-relations have, for instance, from early times to the present day afforded a welcome support for the assumption of an all-comprehensive substratum of existence. Geometrical figures, together with their properties, are in a certain sense necessarily implied in the very existence of space. It needs only a recognising or realising understanding to gather up into synthetical apperception the proper space-relations, in order to construct the geometrical figures therein implied, and to recognise the geometrical truths necessarily following from such permanent relations. In a similar manner all world-relations might be implied in the existence of the bearer of universal consciousness, and we should then through recognition become partakers of the eternal facts or truths involved in all-comprehensive being.

But, first of all, it is not clear how a universal understanding, fashioned after the model of conceptual consciousness, could by its permanent synthetical activity constitute anything at all analogous to space, which is essentially perceptual, essentially different from conceptual thought always taken to be unextended in all its phases. However, as with time, it will on close examination be found that in Transcendental conception space is not really annulled, but only its perception is brought to a focus, very much as in our own