Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/496

480 Of Pleasure and Pain. Let us notice what we have got, as he describes it: "When a red light flashes across the field of vision, there arises in the mind an impression of sensation which we call red. It appears to me that this sensation red is something which may exist altogether independently of any other impression or idea as an individual existence. . . . The whole content of consciousness might be that impression." These Impressions, with the Pleasure and Pain, are represented by him as knowledge; this without a thing knowing or a thing known. It is such knowledge with which man starts, such knowledge as man can attain, and the foundation of all other knowledge.

He has already laid the foundation of agnostics. He has started with an assumed principle, from which only nescience can follow. These impressions can never by logic or any legitimate process give us the knowledge of things. The addition or multiplication of can give us only; so the additions or multiplications of impressions, of sensations, of pleasures and pains, can give us only impressions in sensations and in pleasures and pains.

Now, all this is to be met by showing that the mind begins in sense-perception with the knowledge of things. It knows this stone as an existing and resisting object. It knows self as perceiving this object. "The whole content of consciousness" never is a mere impression, say a sensation of red. It is of a thing impressed. If I am asked for my proof, I answer that all this is contained in my very consciousness. I have, in fact, the same evidence of this as I have of the existence of the impression "red." I am conscious of self perceiving a red object. Indeed, any impression I may have is an abstraction taken from the self impressed.

2. Omitting for the present the impressions of Relation, we now view the only other content which he gives the mind, Ideas, which he defines "copies or reproductions in memory of the foregoing." We are here at the point at which Mr. J. S. Mill was so perplexed. He saw, and acknowledged in his candor, that in memory there is more than a mere copy or a reproduction. There is the belief that the event remembered has been before us in time past. We thus get the idea of time always in the concrete; that is, an event in time, and by abstraction we can separate the time from the events in time. We have got more. We intuitively believe that we are the same persons at this present time as we were when days or years ago we witnessed the event. We can not be made to believe otherwise. In this process we are adding knowledge to knowledge, and this a knowledge of ourselves and of other things. These are all revealed to and attested by consciousness, the organ of things internal. The person who would overlook such important facts as these in the animal structure would be terribly lacerated by our acute zoölogist.

3. The next step in the progress of the mind is the discovery of Relations. Hume's account of the relations which the mind can