Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/173

Rh attain general acceptance, to the destruction of a huge load of the world's misery. All this and more may come, but physiology will never remove or investigate a state of consciousness; it will never front the inner side of a single sensation. This, if I mistake not, is the annoying thing to many specialists. The resort has, for a long time, been a vigorous pooh-poohing of consciousness, or a ridicule of it as somehow synonymous with metaphysics and nonsense. It is a singular and natural thing—singular in its intensity and narrowness, natural in its origin—this conviction among many of the younger specialists that logical and psychological investigations are but rattle-boxes for babes and fools. The natural origin of this, I say, is plain. The chairs in many of our colleges and universities are occupied by men nobly endowed by nature for their special studies, and cultivated through years of investigation abroad. They have not, however, escaped the working of the association of ideas. All they have ever known about psychology, logic, or ethics, dates back to a few hours' perfunctory stumbling over the pages of Haven's "Mental Philosophy," Day's "Logic," Whately's "Logic," Thompson's "Outlines of the Laws of Thought," Butler's "Analogy," Haven's "Moral Philosophy," or, if specially fortunate, Hamilton's "Metaphysics." These exercises in torture were held during those groping years of college-boy experience. Here were given all the facts ever furnished for coming to an understanding of the processes of thought or the principles of morals. Interest in these matters, an interest natural to all who share human nature, was blasted at the outset of its development. Other pursuits that could and did take on the semblance of reality fastened attention, and led to the years of toil that fitted for life-work. What more natural than that henceforth (must it be said forever?) each approach to the subject of consciousness is, for these minds, an approach to confusion worse confounded? The fact that I occupy a chair in Philosophy will very much weaken the force of what I am about to say; still, the conviction will get itself expressed with whatsoever power it may have. The work of the workers would rise faster, stand firmer, come to more universal recognition, if guided by some living logic, and some appreciation of the processes of thought, emotion, and will. The fact is, that in consciousness and in consciousness alone all things are known. No physicist ever fronted or ever will front a pure fact, a thing as it is, apart from consciousness. What the physicist knows are not substances in themselves, out of consciousness. Force and matter are, in the way in which he uses them and must use them, products of his consciousness. He, the conscious person, is affected so and so, that is, is made to have such and such states of consciousness; to the common or resembling elements in these states, he gives a common name, believing, beyond a doubt, in the existence of a cause for these states, but often failing to realize that such cause is unknown and unknowable, not at all revealed, in its essence and apart from consciousness,