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 [UiriVEESITY 
 
 THE 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
AN 
 
 ESSAY ON THE PHILOSOPHY 
 
 OF 
 
 SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, 
 
 Contatnins an ainalssis of l^cason 
 anti tfje EationaU of iLobe. 
 
 BY 
 
 P. F. FITZGERALD. 
 
 "The logical formulae are the real predicates of God."— Hkgel. 
 
 " The confidence of reason give. 
 And in the light of truth thy bondman let me live I " 
 
 — Wordsworth, Ode to Duty. 
 
 " 'Tis a base abandonment of reason to resign our right of thought, 
 our last and only place of refuge." — Lord Byron. 
 
 " Unless we see that God is involved in our Self-Consciousness, His 
 existence must be for us ever contingent and unnecessary." 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR BY 
 
 TRUBNER & CO., LUDGATE HILL. 
 
 1882. 
 
 \All rights re served. 1 
 
3D 33 
 
 ss-pn 
 
PEEFACE, 
 
 As the author is sufferins^ from weakness of sight, 
 is engaged in preparing other essays for publication, 
 is in delicate health, and dreads any further delay 
 in giving to the public what is felt to be an important 
 truth, I am intrusted to prepare this essay for the 
 press. What the important truth referred to is I 
 give in the author's own words. 
 
 " Of the three discoveries to which I pretend, 
 and which are the motive of this work, the first 
 regards the intellectual nature of man, the second 
 his afifectional nature, and the third his moral 
 nature. The objection to metaphysics that has 
 hitherto been deemed unanswerable is, that the 
 primary fundamental beliefs of reason have them- 
 selves no foundation in actual fact, but are mere 
 philosophical assumptions. Now what I have en- 
 deavoured to show is, that the substance or hypostasis 
 of thought is Being — the Being of the individual 
 Ego being in every case the standpoint of rational 
 
viii PREFACE, 
 
 judgment. The necessary conception of the subjec- 
 tive facts of feeling, thought, and will are thus seen 
 to be the d priori grounds of the inferences or general 
 ideas of reason — ratiocination being always in the 
 ratio of Being. The above-mentioned objection not 
 having taken account of this has led to the primary 
 fundamental beliefs of reason being considered as 
 having no foundation in actual fact, the diver- 
 sity of judgment which has appeared to render 
 absolute truth unattainable. Still it must be re- 
 membered that the normal person or Ego, not the 
 idiatic or isolated being, is alone accepted as a stand- 
 point of humanity. The degree, relative and ab- 
 stract, of emotional, intellectual, and moral devel- 
 opment varies even in the cases of typical or repre- 
 sentative men, but using history and biography as 
 well as individual experience to help us to arrive at 
 a correct conception of normal humanitj^, a generally 
 admitted standard has been arrived at, and it is the 
 elementary constituents of this standard of humanity 
 upon which reason takes her stand and argues to 
 Being universal, which cannot conceivably be a con- 
 tradiction of our own Being, which is the subject of 
 mental representation in the idea of Being. 
 
 " The new view to which I pretend on the subject 
 of the affections or emotions is the essential correlative 
 reciprocity of their nature, whatever fancies we may 
 make to ourselves concerning them; such, for instance, 
 
PREFACE, ix 
 
 as I have often heard expressed in the case of married 
 people, where one will state that though their husband 
 or wife, as the case may be, is not truly companion- 
 able, and so satisfactory to them, yet that they are 
 themselves quite satisfying or satisfactory to their 
 husband or wife. Now the law of the material universe 
 is that action and reaction are equal and opposite, 
 and the law corresponding to this in the spiritual 
 world is that attraction is reciprocal and comple- 
 mentary. The closer we look into the relativity of 
 Being or the adaptation of beings to each other, the 
 more we realise that the necessary imperfection of 
 every finite being, so far from being a cause of dis- 
 tress to us, is the source of .our greatest joy, for what 
 is love but the clinging sense of mutual correlation 
 for dependence ? Love is both the condition of our 
 highest joy and the great aid to the fulfilment of the 
 moral law, inasmuch as love or sympathy is the only 
 real key to our duty to God and to our neighbour. 
 
 " The third novelty I profess to have given is the 
 answer to the great question of the day, which Mr. 
 Mallock has put in these words, ' Is life worth 
 living ? ' And to the complaint, continued from 
 Greville to Mr. Punnett in ' Mind,' July number, 
 that we are entirely without scientific guidance in 
 regard to the agencies contributory to happiness, 
 I reply : It is obvious, with regard even to the lower 
 animals, that the recognised end of action is avoid- 
 
X PREFACE. 
 
 ance of pain and endeavour after pleasure ; but in 
 the rational being, joy of life is only completely 
 attained through realisation of the ideals of feeling, 
 thought, and will. That happiness does consist in the 
 realisation of ideals is practically recognised even 
 by the least reflective of mankind, only that by them 
 it is made to consist of mere conformity to the 
 conventions of the particular country or time to 
 which they belong with regard to rank, dress, or 
 sensuous beauty of form, all which things are quite 
 inadequate to ontological satisfaction. * Heaven,' says 
 a great Persian poet, * is the vision of fulfilled desire ; ' 
 but this desire is spiritual according to the nature 
 of the soul. It is the satisfaction of self-love, of social 
 love, and of divine love. These are the essential 
 desires that require fulfilment, as they alone give the 
 satisfaction of Being which constitutes happiness." 
 " The crowning principle of thought which emerges 
 from these felt needs is the principle of Sufficient 
 reason — the satisfaction of Being a happiness of the 
 rational God conceiving Being, who alone is through 
 reflective reason constituted capable of communion 
 with his Creator, is necessarily regarded in reflective 
 reason as the ^ Raisoii Suffesaule' for the existence 
 of the material Cosmos, which, as Berkeley tauo-ht, has 
 its rationale or raison d'etre in its subserving the 
 purposes and exercising the intelligence of spiritual 
 beings, for matter, if it exist, cannot be regarded as 
 
PREFACE, xi 
 
 an end in itself and for itself by a creature whose 
 understanding is of pure or real (noumenal) Being. 
 Everything is explainable to us, constituted as we 
 are, only on this principle of Sufficient reason, the 
 ultimate good for Being ; as the means to this end pre- 
 sent suflfering and even permitted sin are conceivably 
 good as assisting through intellectual, emotional, and 
 moral development a thorough realisation of the order 
 of the universe." 
 
 The author also adds, " I have to apologise for 
 having presented quotations in verse in the form of 
 rugged prose to back out my arguments; but as it 
 has been said that * It is the audible where the value 
 of measured verse is alone of value/ I must beg my 
 readers to remember that it is simply as bearing 
 logical testimony to the emotional nature of man, 
 or to the principle of relativity, to the supremacy of 
 its joys and to the bottomless depths of its anguish, 
 that I have inserted these quotations from the poets." 
 
 The original essay was written three years ago, 
 and a few copies printed for private circulation. My 
 work has been to draw out a scheme, rearrange the 
 matter so as to bring under general heads those parts 
 which treated of the same subject, to give form to 
 thoughts expressed vivd voce, and combine with the 
 printed text such new matter, together with that given 
 me in notes by the author. I have striven as far as 
 possible to give the author's own words, and as to the 
 
xii PREFACE. 
 
 greater part, especially the conclusion, I have been 
 able to do so. Where it was not possible, I have 
 endeavoured to render faithfully the thoughts. 
 
 There is one remark I wish to make. I have been 
 very much struck, while engaged in this work, by 
 observing that modes of expression and thoughts 
 which one believes to be one's own are often to be 
 found in other authors. With regard to the first, 
 I suppose it is true that although, as Mr. Alexander J. 
 Ellis states, ** we each have our own peculiar language," 
 there is much that is common in modes of expression 
 to the thinkers and writers of any given period — " a 
 generic agreement with specific disagreement." As 
 touching the thoughts, I suppose it is a certain 
 characteristic way of looking at things common to 
 minds of a certain order that accounts for two or 
 more authors coinciding in thought independently of 
 each other. I think it is of deepest interest that cer- 
 tain germ- thoughts seem to spring up in the minds 
 of many, perhaps far-scattered thinkers, at about 
 the same period in the world's development. That 
 this is so is, I believe, one of the " good gifts " of the 
 Father of Lights ; and that it greatly aids the develop- 
 ment, of which it is' probably the outcome, cannot, 
 I think, be doubted. For it secures a much quicker 
 and more appreciative reception for the works of 
 those great thinkers in whose minds these germ- 
 thoughts fructify ; and as in each of the comparative 
 
PREFACE. xiii 
 
 few who are thus enabled to work out and develop 
 them the development always assumes a different 
 form, reflective of the personality of the thinker, the 
 light must be greatly increased by the blending of 
 all these scattered rays." 
 
 The author of the present work feels that just as 
 the rules of arithmetic afford a secure basis for all the 
 monetary transactions of the world, so what is here 
 given is a vade-mecum for rational thinking and for 
 the conduct of life. *' The science of thought is the 
 science or knovi? ledge of human life." 
 
 M. S. Handley. 
 
 Jvdy 1881. 
 
COI^TENTS. 
 
 -0- 
 
 PART I. 
 
 SECTION PACK 
 
 1. The Great Want of a Clear Conception of the Natural or Typical 
 
 Process of Thought 3 
 
 2. The Universe a Cosmos, not a Chaos — Physical Laws — Meta- 
 
 physical 10 
 
 3. A Threefold Process — three Principles or Intuitions : Suffi- 
 
 cient, Efficient, and Final Cause, and the Sciences depend- 
 ent on these 11 
 
 4. The Genesis of the Ideas of Reason shown in the Mind of a 
 
 Child 21 
 
 5. Importance of Realising the Necessary Inferences — this only 
 
 done in Reflection 26 
 
 6. Being the d 'priori Condition of Thought — Unity of Thought 
 
 and Being 50 
 
 7. Time and Space the Conditions of Imaginative Mental Repre- 
 
 sentation 62 
 
 8. The Author's Views compared with the Comtist Doctrines of 
 
 Agnosticism as to the Product, Purport, and Outcome of 
 Thought 65 
 
 9. Our own Want of Development in Feeling, Thought, and WiU, 
 
 the Cause of Want of Faith 70 
 
 10. The Fallacy of Altruism, or the Substitution of the Happiness 
 of others for the Happiness of the Ego, instead of the 
 Addition of the Happiness of others being necessary for 
 that of the Ego 78 
 
xvi CONTENTS. 
 
 PART II. 
 
 SECTION PAGE 
 
 1. Dualistic Attraction— The Law of Polarity the Law of the 
 
 Universe 87 
 
 2. The Summum Bonum, Happiness or Perfection of Being the 
 
 Divinely appointed Ideal of Human Conception, or Rational 
 Mental Representation as end of Action or purpose in Action 93 
 
 3. Perfect Spiritual Harmony its Condition — The Conditions of. 
 
 such Perfection of Being or Happiness are the Integrated 
 Union of Two Complementary or Correlated Personalities 
 together with Universal Spiritual Harmony . . .99 
 
 4. Quotations in Support of Doctrine 104 
 
 PART III 
 
 1. Morality Defined as the Sense of Responsibility to our Creator 
 
 to Act according to the Rational Nature He has given us — 
 Arising out of the Reflective Introspective Consciousness of 
 "Self- Love, Social and Divine" — The Rational Obligation 
 or Duty of Human Beings is Properly to Act always in Ac- 
 cordance with each and all of these Constitutive Elementary 
 Principles 135 
 
 2. Quotations in Support of Doctrine 185 
 
 3. Conclusion 189 
 

 OT 
 
 tS^ 
 
 
 IT 
 
 part L 
 
 AN ANALYSIS OP REASON. 
 
 BEING THE SOURCE OF CONCEPTION— THE TRUE- 
 THB REAL. 
 
^ 
 
 1?/^ 
 
 part L 
 
 AN ANALYSIS OF REASON— BEING THE SOURCE OF 
 CONCEPTION— THE TRUE, THE REAL. 
 
 § 1. In pondering over the infidelity and secularism 
 so prevalent at the present day, I have arrived at the 
 conclusion that it is mainly owing to the want of a 
 clear conception of what the natural or typical pro- 
 cess of thought is. This want I have endeavoured to 
 supply, feeling assured that a clear statement of the 
 process is all that is needed to make spiritual truth 
 self-evident. 
 
 Had any philosopher, either ancient or modern, even 
 attempted to draw up a definite scheme of sponta- 
 neous mental action, explaining the normal process 
 of thought and the genesis of mental representation 
 or ideation, so as to make it evident that the founda- 
 tions of our religious faith are rooted in the very 
 being of man, I should not have felt the need of 
 undertaking this work. It was only after a vain search 
 for any firm ground in the works of others on which 
 to rest, that I was forced upon myself for an examina- 
 tion into the nature of the foundations ; and having, 
 after long and careful thought, discovered the firm 
 basis On which man's highest hopes are grounded, I 
 
4 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 wanted others to share the great benefit which I feel 
 this knowledge confers. 
 
 I do not, of course, intend to convey the idea that 
 no trace of what I here produce can be found in any 
 other writer. On the contrary, the principle having 
 once been got hold of, confirmations of its truth, 
 partial and dim statements, in sentences found here 
 and there in diflferent parts of their works, may be 
 discovered in writers of every school, though the 
 full significance of what they really stated I believe 
 the writers themselves were not aware of. For what 
 I maintain is — that since, as has been shown 
 by several writers, the end of all human action, 
 the one never-absent motive in all that man ever 
 either does or proposes, is always either to get some- 
 thing that he regards as good, either for himself or for 
 some one else, or to do the best he can for himself or 
 for some one else, so the rational inference resultinor 
 from this, which has been so clearly shown, is, that we 
 cannot but believe that the good of all His creatures 
 is the ultimate aim of man's Creator. 
 
 Yet this teaching of the principle of sufficient 
 reason has either not been accompanied by the 
 doctrine of Efficient Causation, or, if this has been 
 insisted upon, the Principle of Sufficient Causation 
 has been omitted. What I feel has never before been 
 advanced is the demonstration of the triform nature 
 of thought, and this it is that I feel marks my theory 
 as original. For although, as I have said, it has been 
 shown by several writers that action is for the best 
 
SELF-CONSCIO USNESS. 5 
 
 for Being, those very same writers will probably 
 ignore the Principle of Efficient Causation, or the 
 knowledge of the relations which are for the good 
 of the body or of the soul ; or men like Professors 
 Huxley and Tyndall will, w^hilst endorsing the Prin- 
 ciple of Efficient Causation, ignore that of Final Cause 
 or moral purpose, or even that of Sufficient Cause or 
 Being itself What I profess to have done, therefore, 
 is to have been the first to show that intelligence or 
 understanding is of the Ego or self-conscious, subject, 
 and that from this understanding of Being ^e?^ se, which 
 is directly known to us, from the feeling of our relation 
 to other beings, we have the idea of relativity, and that 
 from the feeling of power and the ability to resolve, or 
 tendency or self-determination for the good for Being, 
 we have the idea of action being for the good for 
 Being, and also the idea of Being itself; for all 
 concepts are of persons or of things, of Being or 
 Existence in its modifications through relativity and 
 tendency. 
 
 Dean Stanley, in speaking of the education of 
 after life, once said, '' Bishop Butler said that com- 
 munities were liable to insanity equally at least with 
 private persons." If then, says the Dean, we as 
 communities, as churches, are liable to these fits of 
 madness, it is so much the more *^ necessary that we 
 should educate ourselves to be our own keepers." 
 This expression is the complete statement of my 
 object in ofi'eriug the present opuscule to the public : 
 
6 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 self- verification of wliat is rational in feeling, thought, 
 and conduct, such as is recommended in the ancient 
 rules, '' Do not unto others what thou wouldest not 
 have done to thyself," and '' Love thy neighbour as 
 thyself." This is what I assert to be equally the 
 rule of reason and the test of truth, in feeling and 
 thought as well as in action. Does my own experi- 
 ence in the constitution of my own being, as a being 
 powerful to affect other beings, and capable of being 
 affected. by them, as a being whose tendency in 
 action is the good for Being or for the preservation 
 of the integrity of Being, and as a rational or intelli- 
 gent agent, recognise similarity to my own feelings, 
 thoughts, and actions in the feelings, thoughts, and 
 actions of other beings ? Do I in any great work, 
 such as a cathedral or the starry heavens, recognise 
 the exhibition of my own attributes of personality — 
 power, wisdom, and goodness ? In other words, in 
 witnessing^ effects in some deorree similar to those 
 which I can and do produce, am I not necessitated 
 by reason or in reasoning from my own being, which 
 alone is positively known to me, to conceive a 
 similar cause for similar effects ? Professor Jevons 
 defines reason to be the '* substitution of similars," i.e., 
 the formal necessary assumption of similar causes for 
 similar effects in all argument — comprehension being 
 through and of similarity or identity of nature, the 
 intelligible being only so to the intelligent. 
 
 Before proceeding to my own definition of the 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 7 
 
 process of thought, I must call attention to the half- 
 truth and half-fallacy of the great argument of the 
 school of Locke and his French successors, that 
 nothing comes into the mind but through sensation. 
 This is true in as far as it is true that unless all 
 the telegraphic signs are made which constitute a 
 telegraphic message, the whole message will not 
 reach its destination. Mr. Lewes in his "Problems of 
 Life and Mind " has shown the correlation of neural 
 tremors in the brain with every act of feeling, 
 thought, and will. These are the signs to the Ego of 
 what is going on in its own organism, in the organic 
 system, in the head, liver, lungs, &c., or through 
 the peripheral nerves transmitting their signs to the 
 sensorium of what is going on in the external w^orld 
 about us. But as the movements of the telegraphic 
 apparatus are not thought or mental conception, so 
 the neural tremors in the diflferent cerebral centres 
 are also not feeling, intelligence, and will, but only 
 the means adopted by the Divine Wisdom for our 
 conveying or receiving messages to and from other 
 spirits. 
 
 Berkeley even supposed that sensation or sensible 
 objects might be altogether arbitrary signs to us of 
 non-existent things, or of a matter that was only appa- 
 rently, not really, existing. But the advances made in 
 physiology in late years have so clearly shown the 
 intimate connection of physiology and psychology, 
 that such a theory ceases to commend itself to our 
 reason. In fact, our conceptions or mental represen- 
 
8 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 tations are servile repetitions of the forces present 
 in our own being — of the material force which we 
 actually employ to eflfect any movement of our own 
 bodies, of the spiritual force which is shown by our 
 feeling and making others feel pain and pleasure, joy 
 and suflfering, and of our moral force or tendency to 
 act always for the good for Being or preservation 
 of the integrity of Being. Whenever we recognise 
 eflfects similar to those produced by these integral 
 forces of our own being, we categorise them as caused 
 by one or other of these forces ; and this very act 
 of classification or categorisinor under the head of 
 
 o o 
 
 similars is the direct result of the reproduction in 
 our nervous organism of similar states (when remem- 
 bering what has happened or imagining what may 
 happen) to those that we have already lived through 
 and in ; thus intimately is physiology interwoven 
 with psychology : Mr. Lewes having shown that for 
 feeling there is neural excitation, for logical classi- 
 fication there is neural grouping, and for self-deter- 
 mination, neuro-muscular discharge, although this 
 discharge may manifest itself in no visible action, as 
 in the formation by the vocal organs of words that 
 are perhaps not uttered aloud. 
 
 And as for our own senses to be impressed, there 
 must be some external object to impress them ; so we 
 cannot help according to our own normal experience 
 (of course I am not speaking of the abnormal expe- 
 rience of delirium, hallucination, or madness), postu- 
 lating or assuming an external agency, of a similar 
 
SELF- CONSCIO USNESS. 9 
 
 nature to tliat of our own body, as acting directly 
 upon others when their senses are similarly affected. 
 
 Again, even if direct or phenomenal action be con- 
 ceivable, yet action for final cause cannot be predicated 
 except of a noumenal or real being, to which kind 
 of being all phenomenal action is ultimately to be 
 traced. Thus all evidence is clearly seen to be based 
 on self-evidence ; and that self-evidence is the only 
 conceivable test of truth in the theory or compre- 
 hensive principle of reasoning, is what I propose to 
 endeavour to bring home to the mind and heart of 
 my reader. Christians have hitherto limited self- 
 examination exclusively to the sphere of conduct, 
 but it is of equally stringent necessity for the 
 attainment of intellectual and emotional truth — the 
 intellect having causation for its object, the emotions 
 relativity of Being or personal affections. 
 
 The point then for consideration is, what are the 
 necessary concepts or ideas of reason ? How do we 
 arrive, first, at the subjective concept ; * secondly, at 
 the abstract or universal ideas of reason which are 
 the subject-matter of metaphysics ? What I shall 
 endeavour to show is, that psychology is the ground 
 or source of metaphysics, and that physiology plays a 
 part in psychology ; logical conceptions being corre- 
 lated by neural representations of the presentations of 
 psychological activity through the processes of the 
 
 * The concept is a form of consciousness — having our ovm. being for 
 its object, " we cannot be conscious of nothing" — tendency of Being is 
 the product of Being and relatively of Being — syllogistic synthesis of 
 thou-ht. 
 
10 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 nervous system. We reason from similarity of eflfects 
 produced by our own causal forces to similar causes 
 to account for the production of these effects, and 
 when we have the presence of a being similar to 
 ourselves revealed to us, we cannot help inferring, 
 Le., arguing or supposing, that his feelings, thoughts, 
 and motive in action will be similar to our own. 
 Thus all reasoning is from the known Ego to the 
 unknown but inferred Non-Ego or object. 
 
 § 2. The universe of which we are a part being a 
 cosmos, not a chaos, just as there are physical laws 
 determining physical action, so of course there are 
 metaphysical laws d^etermining mental action ; and 
 as no physical action can be performed in defiance 
 of the former, so no metaphysical act or process of 
 reasoning can be accomplished in violation of the 
 latter. If a man asserts that he can perform any 
 act which we know to be directly opposed by the law 
 of gravity, we smile at the assertion. But the laws of 
 the physical world are too generally known for such 
 statements to be made. If the laws of reason were 
 equally well known, the contradictions so often per- 
 petrated in the very name of reason would be, to 
 say the least, of much more rare occurrence. It is 
 because of the extreme vagueness in the ordinary 
 conception of thought that I have tried to represent 
 the normal or typical process, feeling assured that 
 if the true significance of these laws was once 
 thoroughly understood, the firm indestructible basis 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, ii 
 
 on whicli religious faith really rests would be per- 
 ceived, and the position of infidelity be clearly seen 
 to be untenable. 
 
 § 3. First, then, let me call attention to the fact that 
 thought is a process comprising three distinct acts 
 of the mind : perception, apprehension, and compre- 
 hension, which, taken together, constitute the idea, 
 hegriff, intelligence. These three acts proceed from 
 three great principles or sources of action. Our own 
 being is such, we are so constituted that we are forced 
 to conceive or mentally represent a Sufficient, Efficient, 
 and Final Cause for every event and for every thing, 
 by reason of our being conscious of such causation in 
 our own being. 
 
 Perception is that act by which we recognise Being 
 or Existence. It proceeds from the Principle of Suf- 
 ficient Cause, for, for everything we perceive there 
 must be a Sufficient Cause, and this can only be 
 noumena or real Being, although it may be made 
 manifest to us either by signs, as when we recognise 
 different emotions in others by certain marks on 
 the countenance, or by sensations which the different 
 physical bodies excite in the sensorium. 
 
 Apprehension is the act by which we recognise rela- 
 tions, either the relation of one thing to another, of a 
 thing to a person, or of one person to another. It pro- 
 ceeds from the Principle of Efficient Cause, for an imme- 
 diate effect can only be produced by the mutual action 
 and reaction of essentially associated, though it may 
 
 -\ 
 
12 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 be unconscious, factors. These relations, which are 
 apprehended as pleasurable or painful, may be various. 
 There is a mechanical relation when one thing acts as 
 a support for another ; chemical relation, which is a 
 much closer, more intimate relation of the particles 
 of one body with those of another ; and the mental 
 and moral relations, which are spiritual ones, of love, 
 friendship, adoration, moral sense of duty to act 
 according to natural feeling and intelligence of cause ; 
 but in all these relations the Principle of Efficient 
 Cause is only the intermediate one, and, important as 
 it is, it is not the one Princi^^le of Causation ; it holds 
 an intermediate place between the Principle of Suffi- 
 cient and that of Final Cause ; for although no good 
 thing can be attained unless the right means for its 
 attainment are employed, yet unless there is a pre- 
 conceived, already designed end to be attained, no 
 adjustment of means would be possible. 
 
 Persons and things are created, and God, their 
 Creator, has made His creatures for enjoyment; but 
 in order that they may attain the joy He has pur- 
 posed for them, they must enter into manifold rela- 
 tions both with the things of sense and with one 
 another, in order that all their powers and faculties 
 being brought into play, the spiritual being may be 
 so developed that the man may claim his birthright — 
 a claim which the Great Father is sure to ratify, either 
 in this world or the next, to those who have made 
 good their title to it, and yet which He Himself 
 cannot grant to those who have not yet done this. 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 13 
 
 For altliough God has formed His creatures for 
 happiness, it is the happiness of a rational creature — 
 of man, whose nature is essentially moral and spiri- 
 tual, and which, therefore, cannot be bestowed on him 
 from without. God Himself cannot make those 
 happy who refuse to obey His laws, and work out 
 their own salvation by using the means suitable for 
 self-development. This it is that constitutes the true 
 value of the Principle of Efficient Causation. This 
 principle being clearly understood, it will be known 
 on what true happiness the perfection of our nature 
 depends ; for until men learn on rational grounds to 
 enter into those relations which tend to the develop- 
 ment of their spiritual life, they can never know 
 what joy is. And it is not only for the highest, but 
 for every subordinate degree of happiness that self- 
 development is needed. Society, nature, art, are all 
 enjoyable according to the degree of development of 
 the faculties of those who can delight in them. 
 
 Eelations are directly felt without reflective com- 
 prehension of the Principle of Sufficient Reason which 
 comes after ; and it is only a relation positively 
 experienced that can give us an idea of the negation 
 or absence of a relation. 
 
 It is because of this direct action of things or 
 persons upon us that people are found who say that 
 they never seek their own happiness. God has not 
 left us to invent sources of enjoyment ; He has 
 Himself provided them in the relations He has con- 
 stituted to exist between each of us and other beings, 
 
14 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 SO that as we are gradually thrown into these rela- 
 tions, we learn by actual experience in what enjoy- 
 ment consists. This is verified as much in the 
 different sensational relations of things to bodily 
 health and comfort as in the spiritual sphere of 
 emotional relations. Hence we seek both material 
 and spiritual objects for their own sakes, and devote 
 ourselves to great designs, political or benevolent, 
 without thinking of their effect on our own happiness. 
 Consequently a singular imprudence in pursuit of 
 special objects is often exhibited, which on reflection 
 we cannot approve of as being activity in accordance 
 with the Principle of Final Cause. 
 
 Comprehension is that act by which we recognise 
 tendency of Being. It proceeds from the Principle of 
 Final Cause ; for since everything that is done, either 
 by God or man, must be done for some purpose, and 
 we know that the end aimed at by man is always 
 something that he considers good for Being ; and 
 as there could be no principle of human nature im- 
 planted by God, the archetyipe of which did not form 
 part of His own nature, therefore we must believe 
 good, the perfection of rational, self-conscious, and 
 God-conscious beings, to be the final cause of the 
 universe. 
 
 Conception is the generic term for the entire 
 process of spontaneous and reflective thought, per- 
 ception, apprehension, comprehension constituting 
 the species ; and we shall find that in every concep- 
 tion we form, the notions of a Sufiicient, Efficient, and 
 
SELF- CON SCI O USNESS. 15 
 
 Final Cause are involved. These notions are all 
 replies to *'qualis — notions of quality, of cause, 
 which are the questions that circle around Being." 
 "When this threefold process has been performed, we. 
 have what we call *' thought a subject out." We 
 have answered or sought for answers to the spontane- 
 ously arising questions suggested to the mind by our 
 own sensations, emotions, and volitions, or spontaneous 
 self-determination. What produced this or that effect 
 upon me ? By whom or by what means was it 
 brought about ? and what was the good meant in it, 
 or of what use is it ? cui bono ? a quoi bon ? 
 
 But although these three acts constitute the entire 
 process of spontaneous thought, and because it is 
 the universal process, may be called the idea or 
 understanding, which is of the Ego or Being _per se, 
 yet by means of these separate acts of intelligence 
 or mental representation manifold conceptions are 
 stored up in the mind ; just as in the one act of 
 seeing we see colours of every degree of light and 
 shade, in the one act of hearing we hear many 
 different tones, musical notes and discordant sounds, 
 so in the one act of perceiving we perceive different 
 persons and things, in the one act of apprehending 
 we apprehend various relations, and in comprehend- 
 ing comprehend the many forms of pursuit of good. 
 Thus countless conceptions are formed, which we 
 intuitively arrange in the order of these categories of 
 thought, an order which is native and inherent in the 
 mind itself, and which alone makes science possible. 
 
i6 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 Keal thinking — thinking as thought — is thus seen 
 to possess an imminent process or function, the 
 function being the explanation of Being through 
 Being. The order of thought is the order of Being — 
 the object being understood by means of the subject, 
 the universe by means of our own states of con- 
 sciousness, which is the only medium through which 
 the universe is revealed to us. All objects are 
 classified by us according to the effect they produce 
 on us, and their qualities predicated according to the 
 relation in which they stand to us, the tendency of 
 everything being necessarily conceived by us as good 
 or not according as it tends to our well-being (happi- 
 ness), or the reverse. 
 
 All the sciences * have their source in one or other 
 of the three Principles of Causation. 
 
 The physical sciences, such as astronomy, physics, 
 chemistry, have their source in the Principle of 
 Efficient Causation, since all these sciences deal 
 primarily with relations. 
 
 The moral sciences, i.e., ethics and politics, in the 
 Principle of Final Cause, since tendency of Being, 
 object, aim in action, is the great point in each of 
 these sciences. 
 
 Ontology, zoology, botany, have their source in the 
 Principle of Sufficient Cause, because these sciences 
 have Being itself, spiritual Being or material exist- 
 ence, for their subject-matter. 
 
 * " The sciences are hut phases of the one fact of self-consciousness in re- 
 flection. It is in seZ/-conscioiisness that the verification and genesis of 
 the concepts of causation — the principles of science — are found. 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 17 
 
 Having now stated the principles of spontaneous 
 thought, it remains for me to speak of the supreme 
 act of reason — reflection, or the introspective applica- 
 tion of these principles to the consideration of the 
 subject-object, or Ego. 
 
 Introspective reflection is the one act that em- 
 braces all the other acts of the reasoning process. 
 Like the mirror of memory, it gathers up the 
 scattered rays of consciousness, and gives back the 
 perfect image of the Ego, so that in it we stand 
 revealed to ourselves. This culminating act of the 
 reasoning process has its own peculiar science, that 
 on which all the other sciences depend, namely, logic, 
 the science of the idea, i.e.y of the relation between 
 the facts of Beino^ and thous^ht. 
 
 The general ideas of reason which constitute 
 metaphysics being but generalisations of the con- 
 crete subjective concepts which have our own being 
 for subject, it always gives us the greatest pleasure 
 to find that the order of thought is the order of 
 Being, and vice versa. Thus we realise the sense of 
 truth. 
 
 Mr. Lewes says in his "Problems of Life and 
 Mind " that he has decomposed the working of the 
 sentient mechanism into the three fundamental 
 constituents ; and as his analysis of the sentient 
 mechanism afi'ords the strongest confirmation of my 
 theory, showing as it does how the three Principles 
 of Causation have their source in the nervous system, 
 that simultaneous corresponding nerve action, in 
 
1 8 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 fact, takes place with every act wliether of percep- 
 tion, apprehension, or comprehension, I quote the 
 following passage, p. 247, and also one from the 
 " Unity of Nature," by the Duke of Argyle. 
 
 " To illustrate this novel conception I proposed 
 to name the Triple Process The Psychological 
 Spectrum, It was not, perhaps, a very felicitous 
 name, but the optical spectrum furnished the readiest 
 image I could think of. That spectrum is said to 
 be constituted by three fundamental colours — red, 
 green, and violet — each due to a particular order of 
 vibrations. Not only so, but each colour is found 
 to contain among its conditions the orders of vibra- 
 tion which characterise the other two ; that is to 
 say, one colour owes its special character not to an 
 order of vibrations absent from the others, but to 
 the predominance of one order. Thus while there is 
 a quantitative value specially assigned to red, there 
 is in every red ray a certain amount of the vibra- 
 tions characteristic of green and violet ; in green there 
 are, over and above the special vibrations assigned 
 to green, both red and violet vibrations; in violet, 
 both green and red. What the physicist professes 
 to demonstrate with regard to the optical spectrum, 
 I profess to render acceptable with i:egard to the 
 psychological spectrum. We shall presently see how 
 every neural process is constituted by neural units 
 — tremors which may be likened to the ethereal 
 pulses — and how it is from the predominance of one 
 order of tremors that mental states are quantitatively 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 19 
 
 and qualitatively individualised. According to tlie 
 analogy I have indicated, the motor-impulse is bound 
 up with the co-ordinating and sensory activities, as 
 the red waves are bound up with the green and 
 violet. The sentient structure is such that *it 
 moveth altogether if it move at all,' every excitation 
 beiug necessarily neuro-muscular and central ; just 
 as the retina responds according to its structure, 
 whether its threefold response be due to three dif- 
 ferent kinds of fibre (according to Young and 
 Helmholtz), or to three difi'erent modes of excitation. 
 We cannot banish the red waves from the luminous 
 sensation — we can only lessen their energy and pre- 
 dominance ; and, as I maintain, we cannot extricate 
 a conception from a motor element, a movement 
 from a sensory element, a sensation from a grouping 
 and a motor element — we can only recognise the pre- 
 dominance of one or the other. 
 
 "In reflex actions, automatic actions, gestures, 
 and voluntary actions, there is a successive promi- 
 nence of the sensory element and occultation of the 
 motor element. In cerebral rehearsal, the motor 
 element, although present, is in complete occultation ; 
 so much so, that its presence has long been unsus- 
 pected, and will be disputed. As the idea passes into 
 act, and the motive becomes a volition, the motor ele- 
 ment is more and more conspicuous ; conversely in the 
 automatic and reflex actions, the sensory element is 
 so obscured that its presence has not been recognised. 
 
 /'The intermediate process (brain work) may be 
 
20 • PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 either desire or though fc, logical combination of 
 emotive or cognitive elements. The final process — 
 discharge — may be a movement of limb, an expression 
 of face, or a word : the word may be silent." "^ 
 
 Perception, Apprehension, and Comprehension t may, 
 to borrow an expression of the Duke of Argyle in " The 
 Unity of Nature," be called ''the senses of man's mind." 
 He says: ''The structure of the mind is seen to be a 
 structure whose very property and function it is to 
 take in and assimilate the truths of nature, and that 
 in an ascending order according to the rank of these 
 truths in the system and constitution of the universe. 
 Our moral and intellectual perceptions of things, 
 which in their very nature are invisible, come home 
 to us as invested with a new authority in the light 
 of the wonderful lanoruasje of the senses. It is the 
 authority of an adjusted structure, of a mental 
 organisation which has been moulded by what we 
 call natural causes, these being the causes on which 
 the unity of the world depends." 
 
 " The spirit of interpretation is in communication 
 with the realities which lie behind phenomena" 
 
 * " Des actions reflexes qui sont plus speciales au cerveau . . . pro- 
 duisent du c6t6 du mouvement des actions reflexes qui ne se traduisent 
 pas immediatement par des contractions musculaires, mais qui se bornent 
 a fournir les excitations et les images motrices les plus generales pour 
 les mouvements futurs de la complexite la plus grande et pour des 
 actions musculaires composees (actes)." — Griesinger : Traite des Mala- 
 dies Mentales, p. 20. 
 
 t Perception is of phenomena or effects. Apprehension is of causes 
 physical or spiritual. Comprehension is of special tendency or moral 
 purpose. 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, 21 
 
 (effects), "with energies" (causes) "which are kindred 
 with its own " (nature). 
 
 " The spirit of interpretation is in the nature of a 
 sense. In the lower animals every external stimulus 
 moves to some appropriate action ; in man it moves 
 to some appropriate thought." 
 
 " The sense of obligation applies to whatever course 
 of conduct reason" (Keflective Keason under principle 
 of sufficient reason) " may determine to be the most 
 fitting and the best." 
 
 " It is the essence of the theory of development 
 that all things should have worked together for the 
 good of the Being that was to be," — that was to be 
 made in the spiritual image of his Maker, and so 
 capable of holding communion with Him. 
 
 § 4. If we watch the development of thought in 
 the mind of a child, we shall see that directly he 
 begins to think at all, he thinks in the manner I have 
 described ; we shall see that it is the natural spon- 
 taneous process, and that no one ever does think 
 except under the three forms of Sufficient, Efficient, 
 and Final Cause.'"'' No sooner does the child begin to 
 act, to bring into play his muscular activity, and find 
 that he can exert an influence in the world around 
 him, than the germ of the idea of Sufficient Causation 
 
 * Physiology, as a part of psychology, thus confirms this theory of 
 mine of the genesis of the concept or of the categories of thought ; the 
 psychological laws are the neural representations of the order present 
 in the physiological or neural system. 
 
22 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 begins to unfold in his mind. He throws down his 
 toys, pushes things away from him, tries to grasp 
 anything that attracts him. Thus his own being, 
 his spiritual life, is the Sufficient Cause of the effects 
 which he produces. 
 
 A little later he begins to form plans of his own, 
 and with bricks, cards, &c., to make houses, lay out 
 gardens, model farms, and other buildings ; and here 
 it is that he begins to apprehend the meaning of 
 Efficient Cause ; that, in order to produce certain 
 effects, things must be brought into suitable relations 
 with one another ; that for the top to spin, the string 
 must be twisted round it ; for the horse to rock, the 
 foot or hand must be pressed upon one end ; for the 
 house to stand, the topmost bricks must have suf- 
 ficient support from the lower ones. Of course it 
 will only be these simplest mechanical relations, and 
 those moral ones of people being kind to him, that 
 the child will at first be able to understand, though 
 even here the practical notion of the right position 
 of the centre of gravity, the resistance of the air, and 
 other facts of elementary physics, as well as those 
 of certain acts being right or wrong, are beginning 
 to spring up in his mind, the unloving conduct 
 seeming bad to him whilst kindness appears right. 
 
 And it is the same with regard to the principle of 
 
 Final Cause, the idea of good or perfection of Being 
 
 can only at first take the form of something that is 
 
 .immediately pleasant to him. He plays with his 
 
 toys to amuse himself because he likes to. It will 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 23 
 
 take some time for the highest idea of Final Cause 
 to be conceivable by him. 
 
 But while he is thus in his own young life acting 
 out the idea in its threefold form, the entire process 
 (involving as it does the three principles of Sufficient, 
 Efficient, and Final Cause, which, though in thought 
 we can distinguish, we can yet never really separate 
 from each other) is constantly being presented to 
 him in the various trades, professions, household 
 occupations, and field-work that the people about 
 him are engaged in, and thus he learns by degrees to 
 enlarge his conceptions, comprehends that amusement 
 is not the highest aim, and the aim becoming loftier, 
 appropriate means will suggest themselves. But that 
 the idea in some form is inwrought into the very 
 being of the child we cannot help perceiving from 
 the constantly recurring questions, Why must I 
 learn this ? why do that ? what is the good of it ? 
 And these very questions we are all continually 
 asking either ourselves or others. The questions 
 assume various forms. What is it ? who made it ? 
 what is it for ? what is the good of it ? why must I 
 do it ? But they all spring from the same root, the 
 want that is implanted in the very nature of man, 
 and which grows and deepens as his j)owers unfold ; 
 the demand for the satisfaction of his reason, i.e., for 
 answers that will satisfy these constantly recurring 
 questions, and it is in proportion as the answers are 
 satisfactory that the mind is at rest. 
 
 But if it is thus natural to man to reason correctly, 
 
24 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 if it is the common heritage of the human race, how- 
 is it that we so constantly complain of people acting 
 so foolishly, being so unreasonable, of this or that 
 custom being absurd, hurtful, injurious ? 
 
 It is because this simple, unconscious, automatic 
 process, though spontaneously acted out, requires 
 ideal or generalised realisation in reflection. When 
 once so realised, the truths involved in the reasoning 
 process cannot be doubted, but they are not obvious, 
 and direct spontaneous thought is so much easier than 
 reflective, the" supreme act of reason, of which it 
 remains for me to speak, that many neglect the latter 
 almost entirely, and therefore few have understood 
 that we can only be and do good in proportion to our 
 realisation of the synthetic principle upon w^liich 
 rational action is conducted, viz., the Principle of 
 Sufficient Eeason; the wants of our ow^n spiritual 
 nature being the only standard by which we can 
 judge of the real needs of others ; the richness and 
 fulness of our own life being alone that by which 
 we know how to supply these needs ; for the only 
 light by which we can discern in w^hat true right- 
 ness of action consists is the light wdiich our ow^n 
 life, our own being, sheds on the w-orld of nature 
 and of spirit, thus enabling us to interpret both : 
 and not discerning this, many have thought that 
 to do violence to their own nature was to do that 
 Avhich w^as pleasing to God. This has been the 
 fruitful source alike of religious error and mistaken 
 notions as to social duties. So many kinds of artificial 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 25 
 
 goodness have been invented, that men have need to 
 be reminded that " obedience is better than sacrifice," 
 God's way of making men happy (blessed) better 
 than any man can devise for himself. 
 
 The principle of " sufficient reason,'* which is the 
 ground of reflective reason, and so of metaphysics, is 
 ''Actual Being,'' that which is present in a being, 
 being the only sufficient reason for his concepts 
 regarding objects external, all knowledge being 
 simply recognition of what is cognised in subjective 
 experience. Metaphysics, as the science of conscious- 
 ness, is the science of the grounds of our concepts — 
 understanding is through sympathy with kind — and 
 as the subjective understanding is a complex one 
 of three forms of causality, which are all involved 
 necessarily in one another. Being, relatively of Being, 
 and tendency of Being, or purpose in action. It is 
 not possible for reason (which is from actual Being) 
 to ignore any one of the three forms of causality. 
 Therefore, Professors Tyndall and Huxley cannot talk 
 of the relations between chemicals and chemicals 
 without implicitly believing in the existence of those 
 chemicals or objects of thought that are related — so 
 that when we see anything, from the performance of 
 a steam engine to the adapted action of the con- 
 stituents of the cosmos, can we, I say, help supposing 
 the purpose or Final Cause of both to be other than 
 the useful to, or the conducive to, the good for Being or 
 beings? the Final Cause accounts for Efficient Causa- 
 tion or established relations between thins^s and in the 
 
26 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 idea of purpose of an intelligent Final or originating 
 Cause. Being itself is necessarily assumed — therefore 
 our recognition of the exhibition of the attributes of 
 Personality. Power, wisdom, and goodness in the 
 order of the universe, and particularly in our own 
 intelligent and moral being, is the " sufficient reason," 
 in reflective consciousness, for our believing in a Per- 
 sonal God, as for our loving or rather adoring Him ; 
 adoration involving obedience in self-determination or 
 spiritual action, whether in thought, emotion, or will. 
 
 § 5. Eeflective reason is at once the badge of our 
 spiritual nature and the most important operation of 
 the human mind, it alone enablino^ us to read a meanino^ 
 into all the work that has been wrought without its aid. 
 
 For it must be remembered that it is only by means 
 of scientific or subjective inference from our own 
 states of being that we arrive at the knowledge of 
 the external world, which we can never know directly. 
 We feel different sensations, are affected in various 
 ways, by light, by colours, by sound ; these changes 
 in ourselves we are forced to ascribe to variety of 
 being in the Non-Ego, diversity of causes from diver- 
 sity in experienced effects. And while inferring the 
 existence of the external world from the effects it 
 produces on us, we are obliged to postulate real or 
 spiritual Being as its source, as the substance of which 
 power, wisdom, and goodness are the attributes or 
 phenomena. The intuitive principle upon which we 
 proceed in the exercise of reflective reason is that of 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 27 
 
 Sufficient Eeason. The question we ask ourselves on 
 every occasion is — Have I a sufficient reason for such 
 a belief, such a feeling, or such a hope ? Does the 
 faith correspond with my intelligence of causation, 
 does the feeling correspond with the impressions I 
 have really received from the object ? Does the hope 
 correspond with the intuitions of the moral sense ? 
 If not, in whichever respect I am without a sufficient 
 reason for any faith, love, and hope which should 
 represent the actual principle of my very being, then 
 I am believing, loving, hoping irrationally. This is 
 the transcendental principle of reason which differen- 
 tiates us from the lower animals. 
 
 This we are obliged to do, because we know that 
 our own works, everything by which we manifest 
 ourselves to others, has its source in our own spiritual 
 being, which answers to power, and in our intellectual 
 and moral nature, which answers to wisdom and 
 goodness ; and as the reasoning process may be 
 summed up as ''the recognition of similars," so, that 
 which we find in ourselves we predicate of athers ; 
 and as we are thus enabled to understand the actions 
 of other like beings from what we ourselves do, we 
 cannot, when we turn our attention from its especial 
 regard of ourselves and our fellow-creatures, and con- 
 template the entire world at large, with its marvels 
 of beauty and order, its vast expanse, its wonderful 
 adaptation of means to ends — we cannot suddenly 
 stop the natural current of thought, arbitrarily sus- 
 pend the normal process of ratiocination, and because 
 
28 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 the mode of working differs in many respects from 
 our own, chiefly as displaying a much higher degree 
 of wisdom and power, therefore deny conscious intel- 
 ligence in its Creator, any more than we are justified 
 by reason in denying intelligence in the lower animals 
 because their form of intelligence is of a lesser kind, 
 and presents another form of variety from our own. 
 
 And this is especially the case when we realise 
 how nature speaks to us in just the same kind of way 
 that the works of poets and painters do, only that all 
 those feelings of awe, of wonder, of repose, of joy, 
 which steal into our hearts as we gaze on or ponder 
 over the works of high imaginative art, are deepened 
 a thousand-fold when, instead of pictures or statues, 
 it is the mountains themselves, dreary wastes, frown- 
 ing skies, or sunny pastures on which we gaze. 
 Works of art may be called in some degree imita- 
 tions of nature, though we could not even imitate 
 unless we could comprehend, and comprehension of 
 an idea involves similarity of nature ; and works that 
 are simply copies are not those that bear the stamp 
 of genius, which is universally acknowledged to be 
 ideally creative ; these, therefore, we cannot help 
 taking as strong ground for the belief that all the 
 noblest qualities we find in man exist in his Creator. 
 
 It is also by means of reflection that we are enabled 
 to distinguish the phenomena both of the outer and 
 inner world from the soul or spirit. It is only thus, 
 when the " I " in " I think," " I feel," is seen to be the 
 ever-constant factor in the ever- varying world of phe- 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 29 
 
 nomena that the spirit awakes to self-conscious life, 
 the life of pure or transcendental reason, in which the 
 lower animals have no part ; and thus they can never 
 know God, for the knowledge of God can only be 
 attained by applying the simple spontaneous process of 
 thought consciously to the consideration of the subject- 
 object, or Ego in reflection. This is the necessary idea 
 of a Creator, for it arises imperiously in the mind. 
 
 Thus alike both for the external world, the world 
 of nature, and the phenomena of our own minds, we 
 are obliged to postulate spiritual beiug as the raison 
 explanatoire, the only reason by which we can 
 satisfactorily account to ourselves for the existence 
 of either. Those who argue against this view, and 
 try to prove (show) that we are only a '' bundle of 
 perceptions," a " cluster of sensations," seem uncon- 
 scious that in the very act of denying they cannot 
 help affirming, and do actually affirm, the existence of 
 something besides the *' bundle of perceptions ; " for 
 there must be a perceiver of the separate qualities of 
 things and attributes of persons, i.e,, a perceiving Ego. 
 
 Mr. Shadworth H. Hodgson has given a compre- 
 hensive summary of all the theories that have been 
 formulated to account for the origin of consciousness 
 in the finite individual. He says ("Time and Space," 
 p. 149, § 19), " All theories possible and actual as to 
 the origin of consciousness may be divided, first, into 
 such as place its cause in an object outside of con- 
 sciousness, inferred to be its cause from examina- 
 tion of the phenomena, and such as place its cause 
 
30 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 in an object within consciousness, revealed by an 
 analysis of consciousness itself. Another division 
 of such theories is the division into such as are 
 idealistic, seeking the cause of consciousness in an 
 immaterial object or essence ; and such as are 
 materialistic, seeking its cause in a material object 
 and its properties. A third division is into such as 
 place the cause of consciousness in an object or 
 essence considered statically, and such as place it 
 in a movement or an activity, which theories may 
 be called dynamical. All theories must fall, since 
 these divisions are each of them exhaustive, under 
 one alternative at least of each of these three pairs. 
 . . . There will thus be three classes of theories : 
 first, those which infer an external immaterial object, 
 called a soul, to be the invariable condition or cause 
 of consciousness ; secondly, those which find by 
 analysis an internal immaterial activity, called by 
 Fichtethe Ego, by Schellingthe Eeason, by Hegel the 
 Spirit, as the cause of consciousness, this activity 
 being also the Absolute, the cause of all things as well 
 as of consciousness, and the sum as well as the cause of 
 all its effects ; and, thirdly, those which infer an exter- 
 nal material object, such as the organised body, or the 
 brain, or nervous matter, belonging to such a body, to 
 be the cause or invariable condition of consciousness." 
 This comprehensive summary enables me to point 
 out a distinction which I believe is too little re- 
 garded. I know that this is psychological, and 
 that in psychology we can inquire into the origin or 
 
SELF. CON SCI USNESS, 3 1 
 
 cause of consciousness, but I think it would be so 
 much clearer, it would prevent much confusion and 
 uncertainty as to the meaning of writers, if, instead 
 of saying consciousness, the expression *' the pheno- 
 mena of consciousness" was used — for something, 
 surely, must be the subject of consciousness — surely 
 thinking supposes a thinking subject ; but I think it 
 a pity the term should be so often used indifferently 
 for man as a conscious being or for the phenomena 
 of consciousness. 
 
 Now this is the distinction to which I refer, and I 
 think it is peculiar to my theory to insist upon 
 Being as the only Sufficient Cause on which Efficient 
 Causation and Final Cause depend. Of course, the 
 l^henomena of consciousness would be explained by 
 the Principle of Efficient Causation. 
 
 For when we put a question in the form, What is 
 the immediate cause of this ? we are applying the 
 principle of Efficient Causation, and can ouly obtain 
 an answer if that of which we are seeking the cause 
 is a relation. We can ask what is the cause of a 
 sound or a colour, because each is the result of a 
 certain mode of air or ether vibrations on a sentient 
 organism ; and we can ask what is the immediate 
 cause of our experiencing certain emotions, such as 
 joy, or pleasure, or aversion, because these are pro- 
 duced by the relations of suitability or unsuitability, 
 of harmony or discord, which exist between us and 
 some other person or thing. But all the phenomena 
 of consciousness, feeling, thought, and will can in 
 
32 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 Eeflection be ascribed only to a conscious spirit, 
 the source of sensation, emotion, intelligence, and 
 volition. 
 
 When we state the fact that feeling implies some 
 one who feels, thinking some one who thinks, every 
 one acknowledges that it is true ; but when treating 
 of consciousness, the important fact that it is we who 
 are conscious seems often allowed almost to slip into 
 oblivion, and then it is not realised that the essential 
 nature of Being is spirit in some determinate state or 
 form. 
 
 Do we not mean by being conscious that ive, 
 realising our own existence and distinguishing the 
 Ego from the Non-Ego, are enabled by means of our 
 organism to hold communion with other like beings 
 and with the external world, for when this communi- 
 cation is cut off, either in sleep or from any injury 
 to the brain, we say the person is unconscious ? That 
 there may be a semi-consciousness such as when 
 dreaming does not affect the question, as this is 
 known to be the result of a partial excitation of the 
 organism. The important point is, that there is 
 always the ive or I and the organism, we and our 
 thoughts, we and the external world, of which our 
 organism is a part — always tioo factors in conscious- 
 ness, subject and object — and these two elements we 
 can never separate, nor yet by any effort realise to 
 ourselves or express as one. 
 
 Those who deny spiritual Being and would resolve 
 mind into a product of matter certainly attempt, as 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. MTJ'R I'^j'SB. ' - - 
 
 Principal Caird shows, to explain the known m terms 
 of the unknown, for the only immediate knowledge 
 we have is of spirit. But the only explanation I can 
 oflfer of what I mean by the word "spirit," is that it 
 is the term chosen to describe the source of pheno- 
 menal manifestations that are not material. The 
 existence of matter we can only infer from the effects 
 it produces upon our organism, in which molecular 
 tremors are the signs to us of external objects, or 
 suggestions, as Berkeley puts it. No analysis of the 
 material world has been able to discover what its ulti- 
 mate essence really is ; all that can be said of our own 
 organism is that it is the medium of communication ' 
 with the material universe. But just as we could 
 not say that any part of the telegraphic apparatus is 
 the sentiment we express, so the neural apparatus 
 cnnnot be said to be the intellio^ent agent which 
 receives or conveys impressions by means of it. That 
 greatest of mysteries as to hoiv we feel the organism 
 to be ours, though we have no direct consciousness 
 of our bodies as part of our real being, remains ; but 
 although the mystery itself is inscrutable, I think 
 we can see a reason for its beinor so in the effect 
 it has on the development both of the reasoning 
 powers and the character, but especially the latter, — 
 the feeling of awe and mystery, the wonder as to 
 how death will solve it, beinor one of the most 
 powerful counter-influences against frivolity. 
 
 And for all we know, Berkeley may be right — 
 right in his fundamental idea that perception is only 
 
34 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 an arbitrary effect produced in us by the divine 
 will, although he fails to treat exhaustively many 
 of the questions on which he touches, as Professor 
 Fraser has pointed out ; and his mode of expression, 
 especially in his earlier speculations, shows how much 
 we owe to the recent advances in physical science, 
 especially physiology, towards a science of psycho- 
 logy. 
 
 But although we really know what spirit is much 
 more truly (intimately) than what matter is, and 
 though we must believe in its existence, as it would 
 have been inconsistent with Divine Perfection to 
 'deceive us, yet we cannot express its existence ; the 
 reason of which is, as Principal Caird shows in his 
 ''Philosophy of Eeligion," that language has its 
 source in the metaphors of sense. We have not a 
 spirit language, and it seems reasonable to believe 
 it possible that we never should have — that some 
 organism will always be needful to make finite spirit 
 manifest. Thus though we can never prove that we 
 are not our sensations,* we are each of us conscious 
 that sensation does not resume all our being, and 
 what we are conscious of is the ultimate of reason 
 or necessary logical inference, t 
 
 I have only slightly touched on all that we can 
 know of God by applying the three principles of 
 reason to the explanation of the universe. Besides 
 
 * I find Professor Ferrier has given a proof of this, and I think his 
 demonstration conclusive. 
 
 t The Hindoo sage, Vassyayna, in his sixty-four arts, taught the 
 drawing of inference, reasoning or inferring. 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 35 
 
 the intelligence manifested in desim or definite 
 purpose of good or happiness as the Final Cause of 
 the spiritual universe, His omnipotence is exhibited 
 in the efficiency of the means He employs for the 
 ends that He has proposed to Himself, and the efficacy 
 of the relations He has established between things 
 to produce order. That there is in Him something 
 responsive to our moral nature, that He is supremely 
 good, is evident from His having made the pursuit 
 of good or happiness to be our instinctive individual 
 tendency and the categorical imperative of our duty 
 to others ; and it is not likely that He would have 
 made that the one constant motive in all our actions 
 which w^ould be contradictory to His own. The 
 absurdity of the supposition, the anarchy it would 
 involve, is so manifest, that it seems almost needless 
 to make the statement. 
 
 This is the simple unstrained natural outcome of 
 the idea as seen in Reflection, the intuitive appre- 
 hension of Being, relativity and tendency of Being, 
 through identity of Being with our own. It is the 
 subjective revelation of w^hat other beings are, 
 since we can only understand others through what 
 we ourselves are; and this natural, spontaneous 
 recognition, or logical, i.e., formal, " substitution of 
 similars," is the exhaustive definition of reason (Pro- 
 fessor Jevons). For a similar effect a similar cause 
 is always and everywhere postulated ; for similarity 
 of agency a similar agent ; from a similar agent 
 similarity of purpose in action, or conformity of 
 
36 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 action with the nature of the agent : good from the 
 good — bad from the bad — intelligence from the intel- 
 ligent. And the Principle of Final Cause being obvi- 
 ously the good for Being, the application of this prin- 
 ciple to the destiny of man throws a light on what that 
 destiny must be — a light which grows clearer and 
 brighter in proportion as his spiritual life, his reason- 
 ing powers, and emotional and moral nature become 
 developed and grow strong. 
 
 But it is only in reviewing the triune or triform 
 idea, not from dwelling on one principle of thought 
 taken separately, as though it were comprehensive 
 alone, that truth regarding the destiny of man can 
 be arrived at. Our consciousness is synthetical, par- 
 taking of the unity of Being. The one undeniable 
 fact or presentation in consciousness which makes the 
 starting-point of thought or mental representation, is 
 the sense of being. Efficient Causes, or the relations 
 between things manifested by their action or reaction 
 upon each other, cannot be stated or formulated in 
 thought without not only implying, but explicitly 
 affirming. Being or existence, which is the only Suffi- 
 cient Cause of conception or mental representation. 
 Things or objects of thought must exist to be able to 
 be related to each other ; nor can the Principle of 
 Final Cause or tendency of Being be predicated unless 
 the thing or being of which it is the tendency exists. 
 "Ex nihilo nihil." Nothing, no effect can be pro- 
 duced by nothing, i.e., without a cause; therefore it is 
 a necessity of mental representation or subjective con- 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 37 
 
 ception of Causation always to assume or recognise, 
 or, as Professor Jevons has it, " substitute a similar " 
 cause to account for a similar eflfect. Now we are con- 
 scious of ourselves as powers, or causes, intelligent, 
 emotional, and moral, or as powers existing, related, 
 and acting naturally for the good for Being, or for 
 the maintenance of the integrity of spiritual Being. 
 And as in reflection or introspection, or retrospec- 
 tive analysis of the Ego in the categorisation of its 
 manifestations in feeling, thought, and will, or self- 
 determination for the good for Being, the sub- 
 ject or Ego becomes to us an object of considera- 
 tion like any other object, a Sufficient, Efficient, 
 and Final Cause is necessarily and equally to be 
 inferred and assumed for the existence or being of 
 the Ego, as for that of any other object, a Creator, 
 Preserver, and ever to be depended uj)on Benefactor, 
 as the necessarily or reasonably assumed source of a 
 powerful, related and benevolent being. 
 
 Now the idea of good or perfection of Being, since 
 it is our own constant motive of action, is the one 
 we are necessitated to assume, even when the mode 
 of w^orking differs from our own, as it does in what 
 we call " the Creation," the mystery of which, even 
 the doctrine of evolution, sublime as are the vistas 
 of ever-changing worlds it opens out to us, scarcely 
 in any degree lessens, and after all the explanations 
 attempted by different systems of philosophy, the 
 only words that give us any satisfaction are, *' In the 
 beginning God created the Heavens and Earth." We 
 
38 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 feel we can rest in tliem and wait"'^ Yet tliougli the hoio 
 of all this world of wonders can be but dimly guessed 
 at, the why is our one beacon-fire of hope, which no 
 sorrow has power to quench ; for unfulfilled and un- 
 realised as it is on this planet, we are necessitated 
 by reason to postulate from this very disappointment 
 of the moral sense or principle of intelligent action 
 here, another or other states of existence in which 
 the ideals of the feelings (emotions), of the intellect, 
 which exacts the most perfect adaptation of means to 
 ends, and of the principle of self-determination for 
 good, which requires the perfection of Being, will 
 be attained. It stands to reason that all these ideals 
 will be realised by the Creative Being in the lives 
 of the creatures to whom He has imparted the faculty 
 of ideation; for the opposite conception, the suppo- 
 sition that, to the utter confusion of reason, our 
 individuality ends here, would induce the belief 
 that our nature is, to use Sir William Hamilton s 
 forcible expression, "a living lie," that hope of the 
 good or perfection of being is a delusion and a 
 snare. And this would involve the conclusion that 
 the Supreme Being or Person is defective in the 
 essential attributes of personality, or rational con- 
 scious Being, namely, power, wisdom, and goodness. 
 Imperfection of Being, with its consequent sufiering, 
 is contradiction or negation of Being, the inane, 
 
 * A First or Sufficient Cause being all that we require for the satis- 
 faction of our intellectual faculty. " II ne s'agit que de nos conceptions 
 necessaires," beyond these or contrary to these we cannot go. 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 39 
 
 the unintelligible, perfection always being in pro- 
 portion to amount of Being, the highest perfection 
 being the greatest amount of Being, fulness of Being, 
 fulness of life. We see this alike in the vegetable 
 and animal and moral worlds ; each thing is perfect 
 in its kind, and higher in its own kingdom, as it 
 is rich in form, in colour, in strength, in grace, in 
 beauty ; and then it is all these, with the added 
 noblest qualities of intellect and heart, that give us 
 our ideal of man. 
 
 The absurdity of the conclusion is thus shown in 
 that it would involve the effect being greater than 
 its cause — the creature would be conceived as more 
 perfect than his Creator; the subject of the moral 
 law more moral than the Lawgiver. Now, although 
 the good for Beiug is the constant motive in all that 
 man undertakes — yet that he very often fails in 
 accomplishing his end is only too evident ; but this 
 we know arises from various causes — from weakness, 
 from mistakes, through limitation of Being, and con- 
 sequently of knowledge. But these causes in no way 
 apply to the Supreme Personal Being ; He who has 
 so formed us, that we cannot but seek good for our- 
 selves and others, must Himself have good for His 
 purpose is obvious to reason ; for if there is one fact 
 of consciousness to which we cannot shut our eyes, it 
 is to the fact that we never consciously seek or actu- 
 ally desire our own harm ; and even those who seek to 
 injure others, do so from some mistake, because their 
 natures are so perverted, that they imagine that doing 
 
40 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 harm to others will conduce to their own good ; but 
 this in no way invalidates the argument, because we 
 are treating of the normal typical process, and no 
 science takes injured or defective organs as specimens 
 in describing their structure and function. And we 
 know that when we give ourselves any kind of 
 pain, it is in order to attain some good thing, some 
 higher satisfaction, for the sake of which we feel the 
 pain or discomfort is well worth bearing, or because 
 we are under a misapprehension as to the real nature 
 of happiness. And since we not only instinctively 
 put forth our hands, close our eyes, or move our body, 
 so as to escape some threatening danger, but also as 
 instinctively rush forward to save any one we love or 
 even any of our kind, can we, with all this weight of 
 concurring evidence, when the organism, not only of 
 man but of every sentient creature, acts automatically 
 instinctively, for the preservation of the integrity of 
 Being, its highest good, can we logically believe the 
 Maker of these creatures to have any other motive 
 of action than the perfection of Being, the greatest 
 amount of good that each one is capable of enjoying, 
 and this in an ever higher and higher degree as the 
 subjects of it are capable of development ? 
 
 . . . " I cannot go 
 Where universal love not smiles around, 
 From seeming evil still educing good, 
 And better then again and better still 
 In infinite progression." — Thomson. 
 
 William Law (the Mystic, 1752) says, "I allow 
 
SELF- CONSCIO USNESS. 41 
 
 of no other God but Love, who from eternity to eter- 
 nity can have no other will towards the creature but 
 to communicate good." 
 
 The essential attributes of Spirit being power, 
 wisdom, and goodness, can we suppose God to be 
 other than infinitely good ? 
 
 The ideas of reason are mental representations of 
 what is present in the being of the Ego ; the idea 
 is not of non-entity but of Being and its modifica- 
 tions. It is only through similarity that we can 
 understand each other, only know others in propor- 
 tion as we can recognise in them similar or identical 
 qualities ; and it being the essence of the idea to be 
 universal in its scope, and all-comprehensive in its 
 postulates, we can no more logically exclude the 
 Supreme Person from our estimate of personality than 
 the lowest or highest of our own kind. And besides, 
 in no conceivable case would it be so absurd to sup- 
 pose an exception to the moral law as in the case of 
 the Giver of that law, the Creator of the instinctive 
 individual tendency to good or well-being. He Who 
 has made us feel that we shall have to answer for 
 it if we are not true to reason, and do not respect 
 the nature He has given to other like beings, who 
 desire what is good for them just as we do ourselves. 
 He is necessarily conceived of as being ''a Power 
 that makes for righteousness," i.e., that wills and 
 will accomplish the fulfilment of His typical idea 
 in created beings. Bound as we are by our rational 
 nature to do good unto others, it follows equally 
 
42 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 that we naturally expect good from others, empliati- 
 cally including the all-powerful Possessor of all good 
 gifts. 
 
 And as this rational hope is so often — always to 
 a considerable degree — disappointed here, like the 
 phoenix born again out of its own ashes, out of the 
 present disappointment of the moral sense, the flower 
 of eternal hope is born — " Oh wunder aus der Asche 
 meines Herzens es bluthet eine Blume.'' '''^ 
 
 Even as the fallen foliage forms fresh soil for 
 the coming life of the spring-time (renewed life from 
 partial death), even as the vital germ pushes itself 
 through the dull soil, and lives by what strove to 
 bury it, even as the shadow on the dial, marks the 
 presence of the sun ; and as from the darkest hour 
 of midnight ^'springs the opal-tinted morn," so, born 
 of deepest sorrow, joyous Hope comes forth— hope 
 which the poets have loved to picture as the many- 
 coloured iris, the messenger of the gods, the token 
 of mercy, promising a life where there shall be no 
 more crying or tears, and where the sejDaration of 
 death shall threaten us no more. It is to this joyous 
 time that hope really points ; this is the justification 
 of the ways of Grod to man, for which the whole 
 rational creation groaneth and travaileth ; and this we 
 look for, not because we ourselves are good, though 
 that we shall become so is involved in our expec- 
 tation, but because of the necessarily postulated 
 goodness of God, the Creator and Inspirer of love 
 
 * " Adelaida," Beethoven. 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 43 
 
 and hope. As we cannot choose but hope, hope is 
 either a prophecy or a snare ; but the latter sup- 
 position being, as it is, the self-contradictory, is 
 inconceivable ; it must therefore be a prophecy 
 that the trustful desire for good which it inspires 
 will be fulfilled. We cannot conceive the nature 
 of the Creator to be a contradiction of the nature 
 of the rational creature whose capacity of discover- 
 ing His existence and comprehending His works 
 has no other possible source but the identity of 
 his own being with the being of the Supreme.* 
 Limited and partial though that identity must be, 
 it cannot rationally be denied. M. Thiers wrote — 
 " The crown of thorns man is doomed to wear here, 
 is an illustration of the law of progressive deve- 
 lopment." It is indeed given to the eye of the 
 mind thus to cast its own horoscope ; and this man 
 does, guided not by mere arbitrary fancy or vain 
 imagination, but as he is bound to do by the laws 
 of thought, the strict inferences of reason ; neces- 
 sarily to conceive is implicitly to believe, though 
 reflection may be required to make belief explicit. It 
 is our own want of subjective development of feeling, 
 thought, and will, that so limits our objective faith. 
 
 " 'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant, 
 Oh ! life, not death, for which we pant, 
 More life and fuller that we want." 
 
 Those who love not cannot recognise love in 
 
 * He who can read " the handwriting on the wall " must be of the 
 same nature as lie who wrote it. " Keco;;nition of similars." 
 
44 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 others ; those in whom intelligence is defective, or 
 but little cultivated, do not comprehend design ; and 
 those who are wanting in resolute self-determination, 
 so that they allow themselves to drift or be driven 
 into action, instead of rationally directing their own 
 actions towards the accomplishment of a preconceived 
 plan, not being very clear as to what their own pur- 
 pose habitually is, do not in consequence very clearly 
 apprehend the general law of action, which must 
 always be action for the good for Being. As we are 
 in what we hear and see, so we are also in what we 
 feel and think, judge or determine. Not to love is to 
 doubt of love ; not to reflect is to doubt of design ; 
 and not to will strongly for good for ourselves and 
 others, is not to believe in good as the natural uni- 
 versal law of action. 
 
 So little are the generality of mankind emotionally 
 developed that ^' they have not desire enough for 
 Hope — nor hope enough for desire." Hope is the 
 emotion towards God. Hope is of the good for 
 Being. 
 
 What Descartes dwells upon as the chief require- 
 ment in man is to have *' des iddes claires," so as 
 to be able consciously to follow the dictates of reflec- 
 tive reason. When we are tempted to imitate others, 
 to do things commonly held to be right, to follow 
 a course of conduct that would meet with general 
 approval, but which we feel is not our own highest 
 conception of duty, we should pause, reflect, and 
 look to reason, which alone can resolve all our doubts, 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 45 
 
 and show us tlie only right path for us to follow. 
 The principle of Suflficient Keason is binding alike 
 on feeling, thought, and will. 
 
 But those who would thus obey the voice of reason 
 have need of the highest courage, self-control, and 
 gentleness, for they must often appear selfish to those 
 who do not realise that things are so often " not what 
 they seem ; " the highest kind of self-sacrifice is often 
 that which appears the least like sacrifice at all, '' To 
 do Thy will, Lord." Obedience to the will of God 
 was what Christ taught, which is obedience to the 
 law of reason ; and listening to this teaching, we 
 shall see that to follow any lesser good, to put any 
 lesser good in the place of a higher, is to destroy our 
 own spiritual being, to act contrary to the principle of 
 Sufficient Eeason, which is always the preservation of 
 the integrity of, or action for perfection of, spiritual 
 Being. The ideal is universal in truth, in force, in 
 goodness ; and the nearer the life we realise is to the 
 truth of human nature, the more of this human life 
 it takes up into its own, the more moral, the more 
 spiritual it is. 
 
 "What we mean by the holiness of God is, that He 
 possesses, in infinite integrity or perfection, the attri- 
 butes of the Ego, or Person, power, wisdom, and good- 
 ness. This is our rational or necessary idea of God. 
 The holiness of finite beings consists in the endeavour 
 to approach this integrity or perfection of Being. 
 Thus Christ teaches, " Be ye perfect, as your Father 
 in Heaven is perfect," i.e., endeavour to conform 
 
46 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 yourselves to the type of personality. And not only 
 must we conform to the abstract type, cultivate those 
 essential qualities, such as deep and intense feeling, 
 clear apprehension of relations, and firm resolve to be 
 true to these in action. ''Plato taught that each 
 social unit should do that which it is most fitted 
 to do, each thus receiving from the other the ele- 
 ment of which it is itself most in need,'' ''^' without 
 which there could be no perfect character, but this 
 must be done after our own peculiar fashion, in 
 accordance with the idiosyncrasies that God has 
 allotted to each one of us. Thus if He has given you 
 one talent, be true to that one ; if two, be true to those 
 two ; if five, be true to the five. That A be really and 
 completely A, and that C be thoroughly C, that each 
 note give its full and perfect sound that it may help 
 to swell the universal harmony, is the categorical 
 imperative of the logical understanding, which is very 
 far from requiring either the denial of, or the attempt 
 to do away with, created idiosyncrasies. 
 
 And while thus trying to mould our character in 
 conformity with the law of reason, we shall see that 
 the culture of the emotions must not be neglected, 
 for the different logical axioms have each a corre- 
 sponding emotion. 
 
 That the Father or Creator of moral spirits should 
 have correlated the emotions faith, love, and hope 
 with the principles of thought, is an assumption that 
 we are rationally bound to make ; for if a kingdom 
 
 * Abbott, "Helleiiica.' 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 4'j 
 
 be divided against itself how can it stand ? '' The 
 ultimate subject of all educatiou," says Abbott, 
 "is a living organism, whose vital power, thougli 
 divisible in thought, is really one and undivided, 
 that its vital wants are equally such, whether they 
 be for fresh air, for useful knowledge, or for reli- 
 gious truth." This latter science theology has only 
 arrived at through introspective reflection on the 
 subject or Ego, which in the frame of memory be- 
 comes just as much an object to us as any part of the 
 external world. For the explanation of this object 
 of all objects — one's own soul — a Sufficient, Efficient, 
 and Final Cause is more imperatively required than 
 for any other object, because it is the object of the 
 greatest importance to us. Even the knowledge of 
 Efficient Causes does not reach the dignity of science, 
 without reflection on our own consciousness of the 
 efiects produced on us ; much less can it be expected 
 that the Invisible Father should be revealed, excepting 
 to our internal or spiritual consciousness. But as the 
 Duke of Argyle says, in his present work on the 
 Unity of Nature, " Man is accustomed to deal with 
 the invisible, and to recognise it from similarity and 
 relativity to his own essential being." The relativity 
 of existences and of beings in general I have already 
 treated of, under the principle of Efficient Causation, 
 but I shall particularly endeavour to exhibit in its 
 spiintuol form the conjugal bond, which in its in- 
 tensest and only satisfying form is founded on essen- 
 tial mutual complementariness of Being — that union 
 
48 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 of two beings only, in which an exact equilibrium 
 of forces or perfect whole of Being, is constituted 
 by the one presenting in excess the exact proportion 
 of what the other is wanting in of faculty or power. 
 Tennyson says " Love took the harp of life, — he 
 struck its chords with might ; he struck the chord of 
 self, it broke and passed in music out of sight." 
 This is quite true in a sense, but it is '^ pour cause," 
 as the French say, for the reason that the self is so 
 cared for and ministered to by the very being of 
 the beloved — that the sick hankering about self, that 
 comes from the sad sense of weakness and forlorn- 
 ness, has no longer any raison d'Stre. 
 
 Duty is a relation of responsibility to God to be 
 true to the nature He has given us, in all the various 
 relations in which we stand to other persons, and to 
 the things which He has made for our use and com- 
 fort. The self-destructive cannot be right, because 
 it is illogical as the contradiction or negation of 
 Being. In an old Chaldean cylinder there occurs 
 this expression, " Woe is me, for I have hurt my 
 own self!" ''What shall it profit a man," says the 
 Jewish Scripture, "if he gain the whole world and 
 lose his own soul V* ** In the hour of death and in the 
 day of judgment " we shall not be held responsible or 
 called to account for the form of government which 
 should prevail in France or England, but for how we 
 have preserved our spiritual relations with the Father 
 of Spirits, our Creator, and with our fellow-creatures, 
 in all their difierent degrees of affinity to us. The 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 49 
 
 question is, '' What works for good or for ill in the 
 soul of man ? '* The inquiry, How are we to act for 
 the best ? resolves itself into the inquiry, ** What is 
 the nature of the soul ? '' As action for the best for 
 the body must be action according to the nature and 
 needs of the body, so action for the best for the soul 
 must be action according to the constitution and re- 
 quirements of the soul. As the Stoics taught, virtue 
 consists in a life in accordance with the rational nature 
 of man. It is derived from ** vir," aman; thus virtue 
 is the quality of manliness — the being truly a man. 
 
 To know what sort of person a man is, or what 
 his particular character is, you must know what are 
 the ideals he holds of feeling, intelligence, and motive 
 in self-determination or will. This is what Socrates' 
 dictum, that a man is what he knows, really means. 
 Faith is adhesion to the principles of spiritual or 
 real Being — rational, loyal recognition of the attri- 
 butes of Personality. Love is natural attraction for 
 similars. Hope, or the expectation of receiving of 
 the good for Being at the hands of all other 
 rational, good, loving, or benevolent beings, is the 
 continual correlative of acting oneself for the good 
 for Being.'" Eational " substitution of similars," 
 or expectation of similar motive in action in every 
 fairly developed being. The only sufficient reason 
 for action, or the only motive in action which 
 approves itself to our reason, being action for the 
 
 * I have been the friend of all men, said a dying Persian king ; why 
 should I doubt that God will be my friend ? 
 
 D 
 
50 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 good for Being; hence emphatically do we expect 
 good from the Father, the Author of the emotional 
 and rational thought- life of the universe. 
 
 § 6. Hegel says — '* To thought it is absolutely neces- 
 sary that there be being* The notion or idea repre- 
 sents what is present in being. For the idea being 
 has to go into itself." " The first predicate of thought 
 is being, is I ; " all conceptions being but deduc- 
 tions from the root concepts of the understanding of 
 the Ego or Self. All rational ideas being the fruits 
 of experience, they are generated in us by the funda- 
 mental facts of our own being, by our experiences in 
 feeling, thought, or intelligence of causation, and will, 
 or motive in self-determination. And as these pre- 
 sentations of experience can never be contradicted, 
 they become formal a priori ideas of reason, every 
 concrete case of actual experience when interpreted by 
 the idea, is conceived as an illustration of one of these 
 universal laws or categories of thought. The ideas, of 
 reason in their ultimate analysis are simply inductions 
 of universal and eternal laws, formed by reflecting upon 
 the actually experienced modifications of being in the 
 Ego. The three primordial forms of our own being 
 are the moulds into which ideation is cast. The Ego 
 is the ratio in ratiocination. If the Ego were dif- 
 ferently constituted, its rational ideas would be 
 diff'erent from what they are, just as if our bodies 
 were diff'erently constituted we might have difl'erent 
 ideas of space relations, there might be four instead 
 
SELF-CONSCIO USNESS. 5 1 
 
 of three dimensions of space ; the modes of our own 
 being give form to our conception of Being, and only 
 through our own sense of being, i.e., Being, relativity 
 and tendency of Being, the subject-matter of thought, 
 can we recognise Sufficient, Efficient, and Final Causes. 
 This absolute union of thought and being was 
 what Descartes taught in the celebrated '' cogito ergo 
 sum," though the union is closer than the ''ergo" 
 seems to imply ; the " sum " is involved in the 
 " cogito." I think, being only a kind of contracted 
 form of *'I am a thinking being," all activity sup- 
 posing as it does an agent, being in fact a mani- 
 festation of real Being, reflection, that supreme act 
 of intelligent creatures, cannot even be conceived 
 of as separate from being. " All that thought begin- 
 ning could say to itself" (represent to itself), "as 
 thought, could only be " am " or '' is ; " the first act 
 or condition of thought would be the sense of being. 
 *' Taking thought at its moment of birth, it could 
 only say am " (Hegel). The ideas of reason repre- 
 sent what appears in the particular and contingent 
 as the universal and necessary, i.e., as a part of 
 universal, immutable, and eternal order. There we 
 have a system of noumenal logic, i.e., of universal 
 thought. If thought were not universal, there could 
 be no communication of it by one to another think- 
 ing being ; in other words, we could not understand 
 each other ; the understanding being of Self-hood, or 
 of the ideal Ego, all reasoning concerning others is 
 from this understanding. 
 
52 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 Kant said that ''scepticism is tlie severance of 
 thought and being." This is true as far as scepticism 
 itself is possible, one of those intuitions of genius 
 only seen by those who have the power of looking 
 into the heart of things; but we must remember 
 that scepticism itself is only possible to a limited 
 extent; we speak of a thorough sceptic, a complete 
 sceptic, but no such being could really exist ; for 
 although it may be possible to doubt of the being 
 of God, of human beings, and of the existence of the 
 external world, yet of these latter something must 
 be believed if only that they are a vain show, the 
 baseless fabric of a dream, and there remains the '* I 
 think " from which at least no sceptic could dissever 
 the '' therefore I am," and attributes such as intelli- 
 gence or feeling cannot be logically thought of apart 
 from some being of whom they are the attributes, 
 which brings us back to the standpoint of Des- 
 cartes. But one wonders more and more whenever 
 one either reads or attempts to state the refutation 
 of a sceptical, materialistic, or atheistic argument, 
 how the holding of such opinion could ever have 
 been esteemed a mark of intellectual superiority ; the 
 mere statement of them brings out so forcibly their 
 want of logical acumen and the overwhelming weight 
 of evidence against them, that the reasoning must 
 indeed have been sophistical that could have caused 
 them to appear tenable. 
 
 As the unity of thought and Being is absolute, 
 complete comprehension can only result from identity 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 53 
 
 of being. Our knowledge of God can therefore only 
 be a relative partial knowledge varying in proportion 
 to tbe number of attributes we share with Him, and 
 the degree of power in which they exist in us. Yet 
 since it is of the very essence of thought that 
 "the unknown cannot contradict the known," partial, 
 inadequate, and limited as our knowledge of Him 
 must be, it is not possible to doubt that we can truly 
 though not exhaustively, know Him in whom we live, 
 and move, and have our being. 
 
 It is the same with regard to the lower animals, 
 their differentia or the difference between them being 
 constituted by the more or less of being w^hich each 
 presents the one to the other class, and to the world 
 of human beinojs that surround them : as thouo^ht 
 cannot go beyond Being, our knowledge of them 
 depends on what we ourselves are. Though with 
 reo^ard to the lower animals our knowledo^e is much 
 less, more difficult to realise than our knowledge of 
 God. The life of mere sensation, and those lower 
 forms of intellect that animals share with us, is so 
 taken up into our higher life that we find it very 
 difficult to bring the one vividly before us apart 
 from the other, whereas those godlike qualities which 
 belong to man's spiritual nature are so much more 
 real to us, form so much larger a part of our conscious 
 life, that we feel we do indeed know the Father of 
 our Spirits. 
 
 In sensation the molecules of man's organism thrill 
 in responsive rhythm to the dance of the molecules 
 
54 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 outside of him ; thus does his own physical being 
 positively reveal to him the static and dynamic order 
 of the material universe, through his being actually 
 a part-constituent of that order ; and equally through 
 his own emotions of sympathy or antipathy does he 
 divine, through sharing them, the emotions of other 
 spirits. Emotion answers to emotion, as deep unto 
 deep. Again, it is as being himself a designer or 
 contriver of means to ends for the purpose of bringing 
 about some good end that the signs of intelligence 
 and goodness are manifest to him, or are recognised 
 by him in the works and ways of others. It is the 
 comprehension through his own faculty of ideation 
 of the Divine idea in creation which is the condi- 
 tion of man's delegated authority over nature and the 
 lower animals. 
 
 I hope I have now made it clear to the reader that 
 there are various kinds of demonstration, i,e., emo- 
 tional, intellectual, and volitional. Spinoza speaks 
 also of physical or sensible demonstration. Eeflec- 
 tive demonstration is sense transcending from the 
 spiritual or noumenal being of the Ego. Demonstra- 
 tion proceeds both from cause to effect and from 
 effect to cause, and is thus both inductive and de- 
 ductive. Eeflective deduction proceeds from cause 
 to effect. Eeflective induction is inference from 
 similarity of effects produced on us to similarity 
 of cause producing them. Perceptive induction is 
 from the individual to the class. Apprehensive in- 
 duction is through or from similarity to our own 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, 55 
 
 being — a similar cause is assumed for effects similar 
 to those we produce. Comprehension is deductive, 
 from principle to conclusion, from the nature of 
 the conscious cause to the nature of the intended 
 effect. Thus from a benevolent agent or intelli- 
 gent moral cause, benevolent action or action for 
 the purpose of good is necessarily postulated; the 
 means pursued must be in consonance with the end, 
 not subversive of it ; thus we cannot do evil that 
 good may ensue, the end of action being perfection 
 of Being. The relativity of our ideas of perception, 
 apprehension, and comprehension to our own feelings, 
 intelligence of causation and volition or motive in 
 self-determination, is equally if not still more seen 
 in our reflective judgments. That it is only in the 
 light of reflection on our own experiences,"^^ in self- 
 consciousness (self-consciousness being of the Ego as 
 physical force, intelligent force, and will force), that 
 we generalise the subjective concepts into objective 
 postulates or general ideas of reason. 
 
 It is because of his being thus a microcosm or 
 epitome of the physical and metaphysical order of 
 the universe that man can read off the laws or com- 
 prehend the order of the macrocosm. The scientific 
 or objective idea of the " uniformity of nature " is but 
 a corollary from the inconceivability of our changing 
 ourselves, and therefore of any agent changing itself, 
 
 * Spinoza says, " To perfect the understanding is nothing else than 
 to understand God and the attributes of God " (the -understanding is of 
 Being or Personality), 
 
56 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 and so of any change taking place in tlie relations of 
 any agents to each other ; all apparent change being 
 only the exhibition of the different essential relations 
 in which a thing stands to various other things. Thus 
 though the a priori ideas of reason find their confir- 
 mation in the d posteriori discoveries of the external 
 order of nature, yet induction of law is always and 
 only from the particular facts of Being or self-con- 
 sciousness in reflection, verification being always in 
 the last resort subjective or ration al/''*" The truth of the 
 reasoning process may be confirmed objectively, but the 
 induction and deduction by which we arrive at know- 
 ledge are intuitive, subjective processes, and without 
 faith in these, i.e., in the Ego, knowledge is unattain- 
 able. It is only through our reflective faculty of gene- 
 ralisation that the objective order of the universe stands 
 revealed to us.f Thought is always relative to the 
 
 * Kant stated that to the sense of our own organism we owe d 'priori 
 physical concepts, necessary subjective concepts being the d priori con- 
 •dition of all objective inference. 
 
 t All explanation of the universe is rational, i.e., an explanation of 
 effects produced on Being or consciousness. The "sufficient reason" for 
 an individual believing a proposition to be true is, that it tallies or 
 corresponds with his intelligence. The " sufficient reason " for his feel- 
 ing love or attraction, or hatred or aversion, for a person is, that their 
 nature is attuned to or harmonious with his own or the reverse. The 
 " sufficient reason " for his approving or disapproving of an act, pro- 
 nouncing it right or wrong, bad or good, is its appearing to him bene- 
 ficent or maleficent. Whilst the abstract emotions of faith, love, and 
 hope, admiration or contempt, apply to the abstract ideals of personality, 
 including the Supreme or Perfect Being, as the sensuous imagination 
 furnishes us with the ideas of material things through their property of 
 sensihly affecting us — so the conceptive nnagination furnishes us with 
 ideas of persons corresponding to the spiritual effects their attributes 
 produce in us ; thus does all speculative reasoning, inductive or deduc- 
 
SELF- CON SCI USNESS, 57 
 
 Eo^o, inasmuch as it is the modifications of the Eoco, 
 in sensation or emotion, that are the matters or 
 occasions of thought, which is the mental represen- 
 tation of the causes of those modifications."^'^ The 
 causes present in the modification of Being in the 
 Ego being always the causes rationally assumed to 
 account for all possible effects, these are the " similars 
 we substitute " instinctively. The empirical Ego or 
 the cerebral and nervous system, whilst modifying 
 the real Ego or noumenal substance of the soul, 
 is felt to be distinct from it, or at least is seen 
 in reflection to be so. The body being the means 
 of communication between the soul and the external 
 cosmos, the temporary lesion or partial disintegra- 
 tion of it stops more or less completely its com- 
 munication with the Non-Ego. When the circula- 
 tion of blood through the brain or the matter of 
 the brain is pathologically effected, the apprehen- 
 sion of God through reflection is impeded equally 
 with the perceptive processes, just as when the 
 telegraphic apparatus is deranged it fails to be a 
 medium of communication alike for trivial or for 
 important messages. 
 
 tive, spring from self-consciousness reflected on Being in general. The 
 unity of apperception, or consciousness of the Ego or Self, as Kant says, 
 accounting for the unity under which we apprehend objects. Though 
 when once we have arrived at the inductive inference (from effect to 
 cause) of a First Cause or Supreme Being, we then regard our own 
 nature and that of all other finite beings but as faint and broken reflec- 
 tions of the nature of the Supreme Being. 
 
 * Spinoza speaks of physical demonstration through the senses or 
 physical organism. 
 
58 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 The reason for the assumption of objective con- 
 tinuity of identity, which underlies every act of 
 thought, is the subjective sense of uniformity or con- 
 tinuity of our own being. If A were not always 
 recognised as A, and not A as no A, together with 
 the excluded middle that nothing is both A and 
 not A, thought or argument from similars could not 
 exist, the certainty or unalterableness of the pre- 
 mises or principles furnishing alone the ground of 
 any conclusion. 
 
 The principle of identity or correspondence with 
 our own being, physical or spiritual, is the logical 
 principle of phenomenal, objective classification, of 
 reflective reasoning from analogy as to design or 
 purpose, and of induction from efi'ect to cause as of 
 deduction from cause to effect. It is through this 
 principle that we predicate similarity of effect from 
 similarity of cause, and similarity of cause from simi- 
 larity of effect. Thus a salt spring cannot send forth 
 sweet waters ; an effect cannot be a contradiction of 
 the nature of its cause, the nature of a thing being 
 its mode of action and reaction. " Effects," says Mr. 
 Lewes, ''are processions of their causes." Effects are 
 exhibitions of the activity of their causes. 
 
 Thus the same principle underlies all these acts, 
 though analogy is only partial similarity, not abso- 
 lute or comprehensive identity. Thus Hegel says, 
 ** The logical formulae are the real predicates of God." 
 The real temple of God is the understanding of man, 
 man's reasoning powers enabling him to perceive 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 59 
 
 identity of nature, to recognise simUarity of being, 
 through signs or through the comprehension of 
 design or purpose. As letters from an absent friend 
 enable us to know that he is still alive, as well as 
 reveal his thoughts and feelings to us, so God by 
 sensible things speaks to us of the power of His 
 Being, and the correspondence of our ideas with the 
 Divine ideas manifested in creation reveal to us 
 both the existence of God and our spiritual relation 
 and resemblance to our Creator. And it is this sub- 
 jective experience of Being that solves the enigma 
 agitated by Plato as to how we must first know a 
 thing before we can seek for it. It is the knowing 
 ourselves as a cause that makes us seek for God, 
 or the great First Cause. A First Cause or Suffi- 
 cient Cause of our own and all existences, the Infinite 
 Perfect Being we call God, being the only conceiv- 
 able Sufficient Cause. Belief in God is the crowning- 
 point of metaphysics, God being the only conceivable 
 Sufficient Cause. In perception, material objects are 
 perceived through sensation ; in apprehension and 
 comprehension, spiritual objects and purpose in action 
 are conceived through the emotions and volition of 
 the Ego — apprehension being the recognition of simi- 
 lars through relations which signify spiritual opera- 
 tions. Thus through our own material organism 
 we are sensitive to material contact, and through 
 our spiritual being to spiritual intercourse. The eye 
 recognises in the creation or cosmos manifestations 
 or signs of its own attributes of power, wisdom, and 
 
6o PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 goodness. Cognition is experience in feeling or con- 
 sciousness of being — that wliich we have felt or ex- 
 perienced in our own being we hioio — and this is 
 the condition of the recognition of other beings, 
 and of sympathy in their experiences. Thus objec- 
 tive knowledge is not memory, as Plato taught, 
 but recognition of the principles of our own being. 
 Characteristics which we do not share with God are 
 neither imaginable nor conceivable by us : only what 
 is related to us as similar to us is recognisable by 
 us, yet we necessarily believe that the unknown can- 
 not contradict the known. This is the positive creed 
 which the constitution of our own nature gives us, 
 and which we are bound to hold under the penalty 
 of self-stultification on the denial of it : Belief in 
 a Sufficient Cause for the design manifested in 
 creation; belief, i.e., in an Intelligent or Spiritual 
 Creator; belief in good or perfection of Being or 
 happiness as the Final Cause or idea of the Creator 
 in creating; and belief in the efficacy of instru- 
 mental or proximate causation to produce the pur- 
 posed ultimate final good ; although, through our 
 imperfect knowledge of the relations between things 
 from which their action and reaction proceed, we 
 cannot always immediately see how the necessarily 
 anticipated good will be brought about by their in- 
 teraction. It is, however, by the exercise of introspec- 
 tive reflective reason, in its re-representation of the 
 automatic process of thought in the " substitution 
 of similars," that we arrive at the supreme object 
 
SELF- CO NSC 10 USNESS. 6 1 
 
 of aspiration — the sense of a personal and paternal 
 Providence, the centre and the source of the love, 
 joy, and hope of those capable of apprehending 
 a rational cause — i.e., of the universe of thinking 
 beings. And this faith brings with it reverence for 
 all beings invested with the august attributes of per- 
 sonality, a reverence from which proceeds the charity 
 that ^' beareth all things and hopeth all things " of 
 them and for them. The relations between persons 
 are as yet but dimly seen and little understood. The 
 reverence of piety or of pity, which is akin to love, 
 must ever be due to every person as such. To be 
 kind to all men is simply to be logical ; unkindness, 
 by the terms, is as illogical as it is cruel and wicked."^ 
 But in order that the true relations between persons 
 may be understood, it is the duty of each and every 
 one to reveal to others the relations, psychical and 
 moral, which have been particularly revealed to or 
 discovered by them ; just as the physicist is bound 
 to communicate his knowledge of physical nature, or 
 the medical practitioner his, or as the physiologist 
 would communicate his knowledge of things or pro- 
 cesses in their relations to the human frame, these 
 being nothing less than the revelation of the laws of 
 the universe. The "must be," i.e., that God must 
 be good, must be wise, must be powerful, is the 
 logical assumption of the absolute or perfect presen- 
 tation of the attributes of personality in the Deity or 
 
 * We ought morally or voluntarily to be what we really are, really 
 one of our kind. Homer speaks of '' the kindly race of men." 
 
62 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 prototype. The Father, from whom the Son eman- 
 ates, of whom He is therefore the image, cannot 
 be otherwise rationally conceived. Schiller says, 
 *' Harmony, truth, order, beauty, excellency, give me 
 joy because they raise in me the active state of their 
 designer, because they reveal to me the presence of 
 a rational being, and lead me to divine my affinity to 
 that being." 
 
 § 7. As an analysis of the reasoning process would 
 not be complete without some reference to those 
 essential forms of thought. Time and Space, I can- 
 not altogether omit to mention them ; but since the 
 honour of first calling attention to Time and Space as 
 forms of intuition belongs to Kant, and since Mr. 
 Shadwick H. Hodgson has devoted an entire essay 
 to the consideration of this subject, which, besides, 
 forms so important a part in all his writings, that 
 the manner in which the formal element modifies 
 the diff"erent types of character and its bearing upon 
 the classification of the sciences may be said to be 
 his peculiar discovery. As the subject has been 
 treated thus exhaustively, I suppose no one would 
 feel it necessary to do the work over again, even 
 if they felt they had the power. At all events, I 
 feel that that is not my discovery, and its considera- 
 tion has no important bearing on my especial sub- 
 ject. 1 shall therefore merely indicate its connection 
 with my analysis of the reasoning process. I fully 
 realise the difficulty of the subject, but I hold that 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, 63 
 
 of this one tiling there can be no doubt, viz. — that all 
 thought must have for its object real noumenal Being or 
 existence, its relation to the Cosmos or its tendency. 
 
 '' Locke," says Reid, " had reduced all things to 
 three categories — Substance" (or being), '^Mode" (ten- 
 dency), *'and Relations." *^ In this Time, Space, and 
 Number are omitted. Did he take sj^ace for a form 
 of existence ? " 
 
 Bayle says that " space or vacuum must be either 
 substance or mode. It follows that there must be 
 some incorporeal substance whose affection its exten- 
 sion is. It must either subsist by itself or by some 
 other thing which does subsist by itself." Is this 
 vacuum, says Bayle, this indivisible and penetrable 
 extension, a substance or a mode ? " The substance 
 is w^here the mode is." (True intellectual system 
 of the universe.) ''All bodies are situated in God" 
 (Isaac Watts). '' If you have absence of body, then 
 you have dark space." " Even the natural philo- 
 sopher denies the existence of absolute emptiness ; 
 given emptiness involves space." The idea of space 
 must be abstracted from something. " Ideas are 
 modes of a substance " (Dr. Watts) . " Ideas of space 
 and time are conceptions of modes of being." I 
 should rather say of conditions of finite being. Space 
 and time are forms or conditions of thought, the 
 frames in w^hich all our mental representations appear. 
 By things objects of thought are meant. Until we 
 know what substance is, how can we know if space 
 be substance, or mode, or relation ? 
 
64 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 In order to describe lohen a thing happened, some 
 commonly accepted standard of relation of succession 
 of events is referred to : thus the Greeks referred to 
 the Olympic games, the Eomans to the building of 
 Kome, Christians to the birth of Christ, Mahometans 
 to the Hegira or flight of Mahomet. 
 
 When we speak of space and eternity, these terms 
 comprehend all possible relations of beings to succes- 
 sive states or co-existent circumstances ; but time 
 and space are the ideas of the relation of beings 
 to the external circumstances in which they are 
 placed, by which imaginative representations of them 
 are conditioned. The ideas of number, proportion, 
 symmetry, and harmony seem to me to arise en- 
 tirely out of the contemplation of human bodies and 
 personalities. Perceiving ourselves, we say one ; see- 
 ing another, we say two or diio or deux, and so on. 
 Accustomed to a symmetrical arrangement of arms 
 and legs in our own bodies, we formulate the law 
 of symmetry or proportion as the order of nature. 
 Finding accordant sounds pleasant, we generalise the 
 concept and say harmony is beautiful, ''sweet as 
 the oil that ran down Aaron's beard." 
 
 *' Behold how good and how pleasant it is for 
 brethren to dwell together in unity ! It is like the 
 precious ointment upon the head that ran down 
 upon the beard, even Aaron's beard." And this 
 to allow comparison of the harmonies of one sense 
 wdth those of another. 
 
 And as it is the symmetry of the human organism 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 65 
 
 wliicli seems to furuish us directly with the idea of 
 harmonious proportion, so disproportion, as a seeming 
 contradiction of this, appears in consequence an 
 error, a departure from the ideal, the ideal which is 
 furnished to us by our own personality, spiritual and 
 moral. History and biography, which are them- 
 selves only intelligible through the personal history 
 of the Ego, are of use to the individual by enabling 
 him to compare his own idiosyncrasies with the 
 typical attributes of the race arrived at by such 
 comparison. 
 
 Thus all notions or ideas are seen to be relative,'"* 
 to the one being directly known to us, i.e., the Ego, 
 these subjective concepts of relations between our 
 own and other spirits and between our bodies and 
 spirits becoming, when re-represented in reflective 
 reason, generalised with regard to all Being and all 
 organisms as such. Thus the body of doctrines or 
 axioms of reason w^hicli we call metaphysics is 
 arrived at, which proceeds upon the principle of 
 non-contradiction of subjective Being. 
 
 § 8. Professor Flint in his '^ Anti-Tlieistic Theories " 
 has given a brief sketch denoting the salient points 
 of Comte's Philosophy. I quote the passage, p. 1 80, 
 
 * " It is according to analogy to suppose the cognitions of time and 
 space coeval with the conscious life, because the nervous matter in 
 which it arises occupies time and space ; objects appear in the con- 
 scious life of the empirical Ego as extended spatial, not only be- 
 cause they have extension themselves, but partly because the nervous 
 matter as well as the object has extension." — "Time and Space," 
 p. 218. 
 
66 . PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 as it will tliS better enable me to show in what 
 respects I dijSer from the Positive School as to what 
 is the intent (inhalt), product, and purport, report 
 or outcome, of thought ; as to what is the informa- 
 tion attainable through ideation. 
 
 " What then is the attitude of the Positive philo- 
 sophy towards religion ? As represented by Comte 
 it may be thus described : AVe know and can know 
 nothing but physical phenomena and their laws. 
 The senses are the sources of all true thinking, and 
 we can know nothing except the phenomena which 
 they apprehend, and the relations of sequence and 
 resemblance in which these phenomena stand to one- 
 another. Mental phenomena can all be resolved into 
 material phenomena, and there is no such thing dis- 
 coverable as either efficient ^'^ or final causation, as 
 either an origin or purpose, in the world, as, conse- 
 quently, either a creative or providential intelligence. 
 The mind in its progress necessarily finds out pheno- 
 mena cannot be reasonably referred to supernatural 
 agents, as, at a later period, that they cannot be 
 referred to occult causes, but that they must be 
 accepted as they present themselves to the senses, 
 and arranged according to their relationships of 
 sequence or co-existence, similarity or dissimilarity. 
 Wherever theological speculation is found, there 
 thought is in its infancy." 
 
 Now what I maintain, in distinct opposition to the 
 Positivist doctrine, that we can only know pheno- 
 
 * Comte uses tlie term "efficient" for creative cause. 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, 67 
 
 mena, and that there is no such thing discoverable as 
 either Sufficient or Final Cause, is — that we do know, 
 because we experience in our own being, both Suffi- 
 cient and Final Cause ; and more than this, that the 
 principle of Sufficient Causation, i.e., Being, neces- 
 sarily precedes relations of Being, and that it is 
 the principle of Sufficient Reason or Final Cause 
 which is the very life of thought, material relations 
 being only means to the end of noumenal Being. 
 Logic is noumenal, and the noumenal is the con- 
 dition of the phenomenal. 
 
 Professor Flint says, " The term Positivism has been 
 objected to both on philological and logical grounds." 
 I certainly consider it a misnomer. True Positivism 
 is surely the result of actual personal experience, 
 whilst " the self-termed Positivist is, in fact, a most 
 fantastic idealist ; " and when the evidential value of 
 experience in self-consciousness is denied, the appeal 
 to reason ceases, self-contradiction being the irra- 
 tional. 
 
 It has been said, " Physical science now claims 
 dominion over the whole field of the * Knowable ; * 
 this pretension surely ought not to be allowed to pass 
 without criticism." Much more than this might be 
 said, for the claim could only be founded on the 
 denial of the noblest part of our nature. But to take 
 even the lowest ground : physical science itself rests 
 on metapliysical. Belief is a metaphysical pheno- 
 menon ; for the very good reason that belief itself is 
 the operation of a spiritual agent. The sense of the 
 
68 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 true as of the beautiful is spiritual, so also is tlie 
 sense of the good. 
 
 As M. Kenouvier says, " sensibility and the emotion 
 are not terms in the series of the centripetal and 
 centrifugal modifications given in the field of natural 
 science." Ontology, indeed, deals only with spiritual 
 consciousness, whilst psychology includes physical and 
 spiritual consciousness. Materialistic theories are so 
 mixed up with Positivism that one constantly feels 
 one may be stating arguments that refer rather to 
 the former theory than to the latter. But it is 
 not my purpose to disentangle the argument ; in- 
 deed, this has already been done so thoroughly, 
 that it would be quite needless for me to attempt it. 
 Division of labour certainly holds good in philosophy 
 as much as in other departments of human labour, 
 and there are so many distinct fields of work, that 
 every one who is conscious of his own appointed part 
 in the vast whole is thankful to avail himself of the 
 labours of the others. And with Comte and his fol- 
 lowers, as with all true thinkers, however erroneous 
 part of their theory may be, there is always very 
 much which excites our admiration and gratitude. 
 Men are always better than their theories. " Nature," 
 as some one has said, " is too strong for them," 
 and therefore it is that we never do find a truly 
 consistent Positivist, materialistic, or atheistic argu- 
 ment. What I especially wish to establish is, that 
 every theory which denies any one of the three prin- 
 ciples of causation is essentially illogical, and that 
 
SELF- CON SCI O USNESS, 69 
 
 therefore the doctrine of agnosticism is abnormal 
 and unnatural, invalidating as it does human intel- 
 ligence, and involving us in self-contradiction, by 
 refusing the title of positive experience to our 
 intensest spiritual consciousness or life of emotion, 
 intelligence, and volition, limiting it entirely to the 
 consciousness of sensation, and altogether suppress- 
 ing self-consciousness or the consciousness proper of 
 reflection, and the ratiocination which is grounded 
 upon it. 
 
 Lewes says, '' The moral repugnance we feel at 
 psychical phenomena being explained under mechani- 
 cal principles is supported by intellectual repugnance 
 at the attempt to explain biological phenomena in 
 principles derived from phenomena of a simpler 
 order." Memory of past individual experiences, ac- 
 companied by comparison with history and biography, 
 and the abiding power of personal verification, are 
 the conditions of psychical science, which, far from 
 being what Comte condemns as " efl'ete metaphysics," 
 is no less real than physical science, being indeed 
 the source of it, though no doubt psychology has 
 made great advances in late years through the more 
 accurate knowledge of physiology, which has shown 
 us the modifications of the neural processes and their 
 reaction. Comte's formula for science, "observation 
 of phenomena aided by experiment and tested by 
 verification," as the true rule of all science, can be 
 carried out, and is of course of equal stringency, in 
 
70 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 metaphysics as in physics ; emotion, intelligence, and 
 volition being the phenomena of consciousness. 
 
 § 9. There is a fitness of means to ends in emo- 
 tional aspirations or yearnings as well as in sensual 
 appetites. Not to believe in the certain satisfaction 
 of the former is as much a contradiction of the laws 
 of thought, i.e. J of the necessary mental representation 
 of the spiritual consciousness of noumenal as dis- 
 criminated from empirical Being, as the refusal to eat 
 would be an infraction of the laws or conditions 
 of physical Being. 
 
 Man in all his works aims at duration or perma- 
 nence, and in proportion as the work is valuable we 
 select materials for it that will last. For our statues 
 we choose marble ; for our paintings, oil, which lasts 
 for centuries ; for our cathedrals, massive blocks of 
 stone. The one thing man dislikes is to have his 
 work destroyed, to i'eel he has wrought in vain ; 
 he wants the purpose for which he has intended 
 anything to be fulfilled. Therefore to suppose that 
 God formed creatures capable of lasting happiness, 
 and kindled in them the light of hope only to 
 destroy them and crush out the hope in despair, 
 would be the height of self-contradiction, the utterly 
 illogical. 
 
 Our happiness, like our being, is conditioned. The 
 conditions failing, life and joy fail ; for just as the 
 body fails if the bread and wine which are necessary 
 to sustain vital force fail, so the spiritual energy 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 71 
 
 fails if the spiritual communion of intellectual and 
 emotional sympathy be wanting. Christ himself 
 said, *' Man cannot live by bread alone, but by the 
 word," or rational communion. Life and love, which 
 is joy, are alike conditioned, made dependent by the 
 Lord of all on certain conditions, especially that of 
 the social iustinct being cultivated ; and the power of 
 fulfilling these conditions is in a large manner placed 
 in our own hands ; and we must rationally, i.e., in the 
 ratio of our own experience, suppose it to be pleasing 
 to Him when He sees these conditions fulfilled. The 
 accomplishment of His own idea or end in design 
 must surely be good in His sight : conformity to His 
 design being, in fact, obedience to the Divine will. 
 Thus do faith in the intrinsic or essential power of 
 Being, the love of similars, and the hope in good, 
 which together constitute the typical phenomena of 
 our spiritual life, alike testify that joy for each indi- 
 vidual is the law of man's will, and not the renun- 
 ciation of egoistic joy; for by experienced joy sym- 
 pathy is itself conditioned, whilst sympathy in the 
 joy of others is an important factor in our own 
 happiness, the joy we feel in love being the greatest 
 of all our joys, and is the divinely appointed ideal 
 of human action, and the sympathetically recognised 
 universal aspiration ; for through it not only are 
 we comprehensible to each other, but we are also 
 rendered capable of the comprehension of the Divine 
 Providence or government of the universe. " If we, 
 being imperfect, give good gifts to our children, 
 
72 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 shall not tlie heavenly or infinitely perfect and 
 powerful Father do so unto us ? " So runs our 
 reasoning as necessarily as rivers flow to the sea. 
 He who ''to himself is true," i.e., is true to natural 
 emotion regulated by reason, and to the moral law 
 of action — for the good for Being — is best fitted, most 
 able, to be true to others, to do them justice in 
 thought and to act kindly to them ; whilst the hard- 
 ness of ascetics to others as well as to themselves is 
 as notable and as much a matter of history as it is 
 logically to be expected. 
 
 However little developed some may have been by 
 their life on earth, however distorted even their 
 growth may have been, if good was the purpose of 
 their creation, this end will assuredly be realised, 
 and their happiness or perfection of being will be 
 at length attained, i.e., in some future state ; for 
 surely this must have been what Christ meant when 
 He said, '' In my Father's house are many mansions," 
 — that each soul would find a place for each stage 
 of its development. This is the Spiritual Gospel of 
 thought as thought, though the Divine event may 
 be far ofi", scarcely as yet giving any sign. All being 
 alike '' the children of the resurrection," with the 
 infinite possibilities of infinite time and space stretch- 
 ing out before them, the principle of Final Cause 
 forbids despair, whilst it no doubt requires the exer- 
 cise of rational patience. This patience is, however, 
 rendered natural and easy to us by the objective law 
 of development being the reflection of the subjective 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 73 
 
 law of tlioiight, the necessary conception of Final 
 Cause, which is practically and spontaneously exhibited 
 by us in our own instinctively adopted educational 
 practice towards our children, training them as w^e 
 do through effort, and even punishment, to the end 
 that all their physical, intellectual, and moral powers 
 may be developed : our constant aim is their highest 
 possible development, the perfection of their entire 
 be in or. It is because we thus resemble or are made 
 
 o 
 
 in the image of God that we ourselves are able to 
 bear, as well as strengthen our children to bear, 
 intelligently and uncomplainingly, the discipline or 
 education through suffering that He imposes upon 
 us, development towards perfection being recognised 
 by us as the one subjective condition of happiness, 
 w^hilst through the relativity of our nature certain 
 objective conditions are required, or the presence of 
 objects fitted to develop our emotional, intellectual, 
 and moral nature. Life education, in its hio^hest 
 sense, does, in fact, consist in these being furnished 
 us. We have already spoken of suffering as consti- 
 tuting one very powerful means of spiritual develop- 
 ment ; joy is another, and both of these depend, in 
 a high degree, on well-arranged social intercourse or 
 spiritual communion, verification of individual integ- 
 rity being only possible tlirough comparison with the 
 type of kind inductively arrived at. 
 
 As I intend entering more fully, in separate essays, 
 on several subjects but slightly touched on in this 
 more general one, I will only say here wdth regard 
 
74 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 to social intercourse, that the imperative requirement 
 for intellectual and moral progress is the substitution 
 of natural or real, i,e., essential, and therefore joy- 
 giving or satisfactory relations, for the factitious, 
 fictitious, and arbitrarily conventional ones which 
 constitute the present social system, which is really 
 one of organised disorder, rather impeding than fur- 
 tliering the divinely ordained spiritual evolution of 
 humanity, which should be the aim and object of 
 all social institutions, for in that alone lies the hap- 
 piness of man. 
 
 We know not, indeed, how far the evolution of 
 the race may be possible on this planet, but the nou- 
 menal evolution of the individual is certainly not 
 completed here ; hence we necessarily postulate " fresh 
 fields and pastures new" elsewhere. Of course, the 
 first steps towards establishing satisfactory social 
 relations is the abstract recognition of the physical, 
 metaphysical, and moral relations which constitute 
 the real or actual order of the universe, these rela- 
 tions answering, as they do, to the threefold division 
 of man's spiritual nature into feeling, intelligence, 
 and will : the right conditions for their being carried 
 out must be needful for the harmonious develop- 
 ment of man's nature. Mr. Herbert Spencer makes 
 physical well-being depend on the correspondence of 
 the organism with the external medium. Spiritual 
 well-being or happiness is equally conditioned by 
 felt harmony with other spirits ; above all, with the 
 Divine Spirit or Creator, He being the principle not 
 
SELF- CONSCIO USNESS, 75 
 
 only of life, but of the all-compreliensive and ever- 
 ruling unity instinctively sought for in nature. 
 
 Mr. Mill and Professor Huxley have both elo- 
 quently described the far greater importance as 
 bearing upon happiness of the emotional than of 
 the sensational element in life ; and Fichte says, 
 '' Heaven or happiness does not merely lie beyond 
 the grave ; its pure light is already diffused here. 
 In the relations of reciprocal influence the moral or 
 practical powers of man find their sphere ; '^ and 
 first in order of importance amongst these spiritual 
 relations stands our relation to the Father of Spirits, 
 to the fons et origo of spiritual Being and of all 
 existence, to whom, as the supreme type of per- 
 sonality, adoration, obedience, and most unwavering 
 faith are naturally or rationally due. So generally is 
 this recognised, that we reprobate as sin any attempt 
 to frustrate the Divine idea in creation. If this be 
 the natural theory of right feeling and right action 
 or virtue, the ignoring aud contempt of any natural 
 and consequently divinely devised relation, instead 
 of being meritorious (as, when it is an agreeable one, 
 it is generally supposed to be by the ascetics of all 
 denominations), is in the eye of reason, or according 
 to the principle of the substitution of similars, i.e., 
 judging from what our own feeling would be were we 
 a creator ; for this, be it remembered, is the only cri- 
 terion of rational judgment, or judging from our own 
 knowledge of the parental relation, a grieving through 
 contradiction of the Creative Spirit, who, from having 
 
76 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 so constituted U3 that we naturally desire tlie good 
 tilings which He has prepared for us, must neces- 
 sarily be conceived to intend that we should actually 
 enjoy, and not that we should refuse or despise them. 
 In some future essays I hope to treat separately of 
 the ideals of the affections of the imaginative intellect, 
 and of the transcendental intelligence or moral sense, 
 answering to the three modes of personal Being ; the 
 complete satisfaction of these constituting the one 
 comprehensive rapturous ideal of the perfect or hapj)y 
 life to which reason aspires or which reason expects. 
 It is by faith in the ultimate realisation or fulfilment 
 of this emotively and rationally postulated ideal that 
 the just live and hopefully struggle. Vexatio dat 
 intellectum. It is the having to struggle against 
 causes of suffering that gives us intelligence ; i.e.y 
 ideal realisation both of the conditions of evil and of 
 the causes of good or perfection of Being ; and thus 
 we are enabled to be victorious over the seen and 
 temporal — the present suffering — because of the ex- 
 ceeding glory of the prophetic vision of a here- 
 after, in which we and all men shall have become 
 perfected through that very suffering, when the 
 knowledge of God will also be perfected through 
 the fulness of joy which alone can fully reveal to us 
 the perfection of His power, wisdom, and goodness. 
 Then also we shall stand upon a new earth wherein 
 dwelleth righteousness, for the existence and immor- 
 tality of the spirit will have been indisputably 
 demonstrated by its triumph over the death of the 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 77 
 
 body, which will at last be inevitably recognised, as 
 it should rationally or ideally be now, as the mere 
 changeable vesture of the spirit, or rather as a transi- 
 tory, perishable medium of communication between 
 the Ego and the Non-Ego. 
 
 A Persian poet has said, " Heaven is the vision of 
 fulfilled desire ; '' and in the Kig-Veda it is written, 
 " Where the desire of our desires is attained there 
 make me immortal/' Objective declarations that have 
 their basis in subjective declarations are no mere rav- 
 ings of the enthusiast or the madman, but necessary 
 postulates of reason, the opposite of which is, as the 
 self- contradictory, the utterly inconceivable. As per- 
 fection is only predicable of known attributes or con- 
 ditions of Being, so goodness is only conceivable as 
 the satisfaction of natural desire or the realisation 
 of divinely imposed desire : only by the combination 
 of subjective perfection and objective satisfaction is 
 the meaning of either completed. Heaven is the 
 name we give to this naturally anticipated con- 
 summation, heaven being the state in which all 
 estrano'ement must cease between the Creator and 
 the rational creature, where love will indeed be 
 "lord of all," faith and hope having, passed into 
 sight, whilst love endureth for ever and for ever ; 
 for spiritual love is the most patent exhibition of 
 the order of the universe, i.e., of the mutual relativity 
 of Being, of created beings to each other, and of all 
 beings to the great Creator. The relativity of earth 
 and sun and moon is " what the wild waves say." 
 
78 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 Kelativity is tlie cause of tlie music of the spheres ; 
 and above all, relativity is the watchword of the 
 moral or spiritual universe. It is this sense of spiri- 
 tual relativity, rooted deeper than consciousness, this 
 deep-seated instinct of relativity, which, though it may 
 not have been reflectively realised, is yet the explana- 
 tion of the sorrowful yearning of the solitary soul ; 
 and the first and last lesson of the moral sense and 
 of the religious instinct is the recognition of spiri- 
 tual relations and the prompting to action in accord- 
 ance with those essential relations. As " the heavens 
 are telliog the glory of God," so the Divine joy of 
 spiritual relations bears the witness of reason to the 
 goodness of Providence, as well as to the being of 
 an all-wise Creator and certain ultimate Eedeemer, 
 who will amply provide ultimate satisfaction for all 
 the needs of His own implanting. As Tennyson says, 
 ** Nothing treads the earth with aimless feet, sub- 
 servient only to another's gain." ** My fellow-man, 
 sent hither for his joy, an end — a self witbin thy 
 world — a world." And as each concrete relation is 
 but an instance of a universal law, we may rest 
 assured of the fulfilment of the Divine design in 
 each particular case. 
 
 § 10. It remains for me to say a few words on the 
 fallacy of the doctrine of Altruism, although all I 
 have written is in reality a refutation of that teach- 
 ing. If it be true that all our reasoning has its basis 
 in experience, it follows that unless we desire happi- 
 
SELF- CONSCIO USNESS. 79 
 
 ness for ourselves we have no standard of measure- 
 ment by which to guide our conduct towards others, 
 nothiug to give us a clue as to what others will 
 desire. And more than this^ as Mr. H. Spencer has 
 shown in his " Data of Ethics," those who, through 
 neglect of due self-regard, have failed to maintain 
 bodily well-being, end by becoming a burden instead 
 of a help to others. Not that he is arguing in defence 
 of egoism; on the contrary, he says, p. 315, " From 
 the dawn of life, then, egoism has been dependent 
 upon altruism, as altruism has been dependent upon 
 egoism, and in the course of evolution the reciprocal 
 services of the two have been increasing." 
 
 The sacrifice of things not absolutely essential to 
 our happiness for the sake of love or being beloved, 
 which is essential to it, is not self-sacrifice, but the 
 exercise of reflective reason in the choice of the best 
 for Being. The proper or natural check of rational 
 self-interest, or consideration for self, is as necessary 
 to prevent extravagant generosity, or irrational self- 
 sacrifice for our kind, as social love or sympathy is to 
 prevent egotism or selfishness. The love of God, or 
 reverence for the order of the universe, is the proper 
 measure of both. 
 
 Love of God and of our kind is thus seen not to 
 be self-sacrifice, but the only true self-realisation. 
 What I deem so hurtful is that doctrine of altruism, 
 which is, in fact, nothing but a new form of the old 
 doctrine of asceticism, which Kiugsley so strongly 
 deprecated in himself and in others. Either I am 
 
8o PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 utterly mistaken in all I have stated concerning self- 
 consciousness being, in its three forms of feeling, in- 
 telligence, and will for good, the basis of ideation or 
 ratiocination, and the many are right who hold it to 
 be an aberration from virtue to recognise or allow self 
 to be in any way considered, or the constant exclusion 
 of our own happiness from the idea of what is good or 
 right to be done is a dangerous fallacy, because, under 
 the guise of transcendent virtue, it undermines natural 
 virtue, which requires of us only that we should do 
 unto others as we would be done by — that we should 
 love our neighbour as ourself, seeking his good as well 
 as, not regardless of, our own. 
 
 The rational egoism of Descartes, the egoity of 
 Dean Swift — in other words, self-consciousness — and 
 the consequent act of egoising spoken of by Stirling 
 in his " Secret of Hegel," is not to be confounded 
 with vulgar, unfeeling, and emphatically irrational 
 egotism. Still apropos of egotism, it has often been 
 remarked lately that the want of consideration for 
 others so commonly exhibited springs more fre- 
 quently from want of imagination than from sheer 
 selfishness ; but I believe that it is rather rational 
 reflection on the laws or order of self-conciousness 
 that is wanting, both for benevolence and for bene- 
 ficence towards others,'" the Ego presenting the type 
 for mental representation or ideation. The is of 
 real Being is the must he of duty, and the study 
 of history or sociology enables us to eliminate 
 
 * Morality is allowed to be the product of reflective reason. 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, 8i 
 
 idiosyncratic aberrations from our idea of what 
 is typical of humanity. What we call a " need " of 
 human nature is the impulse to the exercise of faculty; 
 needs and faculties are strengthened by exercise : once 
 a need has been ideally realised in introspective reflec- 
 tion, it can never again be absent from thought. 
 Moreover, we feel the need to carry out our ideas into 
 action. From needs therefore spring functions. Scep- 
 ticism regarding the holiness of natural feelings and 
 tendencies undermines the conditions or principles of 
 thought, just as the scepticism w^hich denies the in- 
 telligence of causation in its three forms takes from 
 the comprehension of motive in an action. 
 
 *' Ideas are modes of reflective consciousness or rea- 
 son ; the ideal being to the ideas which it embodies 
 as the concrete to the abstract ; or ideals may be said 
 to be to ideas what the remote object is to the imme- 
 diate object in perception." " The ideas belonging to 
 the three great functions of consciousness furnish 
 'the God concept,' which is the synthetic idea of 
 reflective or ]}UYe reason — an induction from self- 
 consciousness." It is in the fact of our own Being 
 that we find a sufficient reason or ground of inference 
 of a Supreme Creative Being. 
 
 Destroy our self-consciousness, and I confidently 
 ask what measure have we of the feelings and require- 
 ments of others ? The ladder by w^hich the angels 
 descended from heaven to hold converse with Jacob 
 of old rested upon the known solidly felt earth ; and 
 it is from the actual facts of self-consciousness alone 
 
82 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 that we can ascend even now to the otherwise un- 
 known empyrean of the principles of the must, and 
 will, and ought to he. Above all, we take our stand 
 upon the principle of Final Cause, which requires 
 perfection of Being as the only conceivable object of 
 the creation of rational beings. In the attempt of 
 Comtism or altruism to surpass the moral teaching 
 of Christ, I see nothing but a jumping over the saddle 
 instead of into it, and a sad descent into the mud 
 of the unreal, where natural emotions, rational 
 conclusions therefrom, and natural purpose in action 
 are chaotically confused or illogically denied, whilst 
 being in fact {niente di meno) steadily acted upon. 
 Epictetus wisely held that " whilst men think their 
 happiness and their duty are not one or not at one, 
 they will serve the first and neglect the last ; " not 
 untrue at least in this to the natural constitution of 
 their hearts, the imperative of personal feeling being 
 unmistakably well-being or happiness, just as the 
 imperative of duty is well-doing or goodness to 
 others, helping on their perfection of being or hap- 
 piness as well as our own. According to reason, the 
 typical "is" or the ''is" of creative design is the 
 '* ought to be " or ideal of conscience, which in no way 
 exacts improvement on the creative idea, but reverence 
 for it. The human ideal being the reflex of the Divine 
 idea, moral action is action in accordance with the 
 nature of things or with their design ; but emphati- 
 cally is it consideration for the nature of persons, not 
 even leaving personal idiosyncrasies out of account. 
 
SELF- CON SCI USNESS. 83 
 
 Eeverence for the constructor is always exhibited 
 by respect for the construction, as I have before shown 
 to be evident from our indignation at the destruction 
 of anything we have ourselves constructed ; and it 
 is equally true that reverence for the Lawgiver is 
 properly exhibited by obedience to the law, and not 
 either by merely saying, " Lord ! Lord ! " or by re- 
 fusing to seek the joy which He has constituted the 
 lodestar of our being. Zoroaster's resume of duty is 
 '* obedience to the law in thought, word, and deed ; " 
 and that this obedience be shown in the spiritual 
 life, the life of faith, love, and hope, is the doctrine 
 of Christianity, Christ Himself having asserted that 
 love of God and man is in itself the perfect and 
 sufficient fulfilment of the whole law, for love brings 
 with it faith and hope. 
 
 But those who do not believe in God cannot be 
 accused of irreverence in thinkiog and acting as if it 
 were possible to improve nature off the earth. " I 
 will have obedience and not sacrifice," saith the Lord. 
 This is the ever-present witness of reason. **I come, 
 and my reward is with me." *' Unto him that over- 
 cometh shall all things be given." These are still the 
 promises of hope to him who is true to his real self 
 and obeys the laws of his spiritual being, using, and 
 not abusing, the good gifts of the Joy-giver, and not 
 foro^ettino^ to share them as best he can with others 
 by whom they are equally desired. 
 
 The commandments of reflective reason are — Seek 
 to know facts of Being, and truths of relation; as 
 
84 PHILOSOPHY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 Solomon says, " Wisdom is the principal thing, and 
 with all thy getting, get understanding." As you 
 want joy of life, seek to love and be loved by your 
 kind (for love alone and love only is enough for joy), 
 so that you may have a standpoint for reflective conclu- 
 sions. Adhere to the normal rule of action for the 
 best for Being, your own and that of others ; and 
 thus, as thought and Being are identical, you will 
 have hope in the good as rational end of action. 
 Kational concepts are of what is actually seen or 
 experienced ; thus the relation of obedience in which 
 the most intelligent of the lower animals actually 
 stand to man enables us to apprehend in some degree 
 the relation in which God stands to us of a nielior 
 natura. 
 
 The Buddhagossa speaks of him " who has entered 
 into the beatitude of those who know the law." The 
 organised triplicity of thought as a process of internal 
 dialectic must never be lost sight of; only in dreams 
 or insanity is thought actually decomposed, never in 
 reflective reason, which always has Being in its unity 
 and modifications for its foundation. 
 
 "We come to the universe to learn what is." This 
 is only directly revealed to us in our own nature or 
 being. Our rational concepts are the results of our 
 modes of consciousness. To omit any one of these 
 in our mental representations of what is present in 
 our own being, is to misrepresent the data for our 
 logical conclusions. The triform unity of Being 
 rationally compels the trinity of thought. 
 
part II. 
 
 RATIONALE OF LOVE. 
 
 RELATIVITY OF BEING THE SOURCE OF LOVE OR 
 ATTRACTION— THE BEAUTIFUL OR HARMONIOUS. 
 
part 11. 
 
 RELATIVITY OF BEING THE SOURCE OF LOVE OR 
 ATTRACTION— THE BEAUTIFUL OR HARMONIOUS. 
 
 § 1. PosiTiviTY and negativity of Being are the 
 ground of reciprocal attraction between things. Com- 
 plement arin ess or mutual correlativitj of being is 
 of the essence of the order of the universe. Begin- 
 ning very low in the scale, as low as we can go, we 
 find this law in force — "Chemical compounds are 
 freely decomposed by electricity ; when so decom- 
 posed, those elements which appear at the positive 
 pole are called electro-negative, while those which 
 appear at the negative pole are called electro-positive. 
 . . . Yet the difierence between the two classes, the 
 electro-positive and the electro-negative, is one of 
 degree only. Mercury, for instance, is negative to 
 sodium and positive to iodine.'^ It is to this latter 
 fact that I especially wish to draw attention, — that 
 here, at the beginning of the series, *^the difference 
 is only one of degree," because when we get to the 
 other end of the series, and treat of man {homo) as 
 a complementary being, we shall find that this fact, 
 which still holds good, is one of great importance. 
 As we gradually rise in the scale and pass in review 
 the plant and animal worlds, it is still to the mutual 
 
88 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 attraction of individuals possessing like and yet 
 unlike (opposite) qualities that the life and beauty 
 that clothe our earth are to be ascribed. Truly it 
 is " le mot d'ordre de Tunivers ; " everywhere we find 
 it in operation — in the ebb and flow of the tide, in 
 the great cycles of the solar system, in seed-time 
 and harvest, summer and winter, life and death, 
 sleeping and waking. Mr. Herbert Spencer has a de- 
 lightful chapter on these rhythmic movements in his 
 *' First Principles" (chap, xi.), in which he shows how 
 universal is its application ; and I think we have here 
 an illustration of that blending of opposites which 
 Professor Caird affirms to be needful to the concep- 
 tion of a spiritual organism. When we come to man, 
 we find the highest exemplification of this law. In 
 nothing is the wisdom and goodness or benevolence 
 of the Creator more remarkably shown than in the 
 beautiful order of the spiritual creation, in which the 
 very imperfection of the individual becomes a cause 
 of joy to it through the delightful sense of dependence 
 upon another being which we call love. Spinoza's 
 definition of love is '^ joy from an external object." 
 I am myself disposed to think that goodwill towards 
 one's self, the sense of the duty of acting for the best 
 for one's own being, is a more logical term than self- 
 love. We can only Jearn this dependence at first in 
 our earthly relations, and gradually ascend to the 
 heavenly, till trust in God is perfected. St. John said, 
 " If ye love not the brother whom ye have seen, how 
 can ye love God, whom ye have not seen ? " Not 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 89 
 
 that tlie two kinds are really separable, but rather 
 that in the one we learn the other, the many-blencled 
 ra3's being needed for the perfect whole. The de- 
 pendence of the child on the parent, the sister on the 
 brother, for sympathy and aid in sport and study, 
 and, finally, in the climax of our life and power, in 
 the absolutely reciprocal relation of love ; for only 
 when it is absolutely reciprocal can the feeling par 
 excellence called love be said to be felt. Not that 
 they both lean on each other in the same way or for 
 the same things ; on the contrary, as in physical 
 nature, action and reaction are equal and opposite. 
 Their need of each other is complementary and sup- 
 plementary, the one exhibiting and affording to the 
 other the support and accompanying sense of com- 
 pleteness of Being, by supplying those very qualities 
 in individual excess in which the opposite sex or 
 individual is deficient or most failing in. 
 
 Complementariness, which is the ground of rela- 
 tivity, is the one thing that is always required for 
 real union in order to constitute perfection of Being. 
 Thus, taking the mere complementariness of sex, in the 
 woman gentleness, sweetness, and patience are required 
 and typically exhibited ; whilst in man, courage, 
 strength, firmness in resolve are the qualities which 
 are reciprocally presented and required. Still the 
 human personality being modified as it is by here- 
 dity or family qualities, by the immediate circum- 
 stances that have surrounded the individual in 
 childhood, perhaps even in gestation as regards the 
 
90 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 nervous system, makes the sexual complementariness 
 but a very vague rule in deciding on the mutual 
 suitability of any given pair : this is rather matter 
 for serious individual observation, helped out by the 
 ideal theory which I have offered to the public. For 
 every feeling there ought to be a truly efficient, not 
 an imagined or supposed cause. Our yearning for the 
 perfection of Being in ourselves and others appears 
 to arise out of a requirement of wholeness — that all 
 should be there that constitutes personality. The 
 Scotch have an expression for a daft person, " He is 
 not all there;" there is not even the " all " of one of the 
 complementaries, and, as I have shown, the two are 
 always needed in order that the sense of perfected 
 Being may be realised. 
 
 I have spoken of the relativity of the comple- 
 mentary colours and of certain musical notes. As 
 in a musical duet two voices of different kinds are 
 required — as, for example, a soprano and a bass ; so 
 for, or in, a life duet the development of the two 
 souls must be opposite (in different directions) to be 
 harmonious or make a perfect whole ; as of sound 
 so of colour, co-ordination of complementaries. 
 
 And I might go on adding endless examples. I 
 will mention but one other — the relativity of soul 
 and body. 
 
 The idea of duty or rational moral obligation 
 arising out of the contemplation of the action and 
 reaction of soul and body is what the Greeks called 
 gymnastic, and what we moderns call hygiene — the 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 91 
 
 oLservation of the laws or conditions of bodily health, 
 so that the body may not be a distorted medium for 
 receiving and conveying impressions to the mind. 
 Eegarding this relation it is especially needful that 
 the subsidiary position of the body to the mind be 
 continuously kept in view — its caducity, it being like 
 the skin of a snake, something to be cast off — instead 
 of reducing the soul to a mere caterer for the 
 physiological needs of the body, and what is still 
 w^orse, regarding the body, beauty of form, and 
 symmetry of limb as the important point in the 
 contraction of the conjugal relation. This dreadful 
 aberration of emotion through sensation, or rather 
 through a false idea concerning the relation of spirits 
 to each other, may be distinctly traced to the want 
 of the ideal realisation of the spiritual nature of 
 man, and of his consequently postulated eternal 
 destiny. As without holiness no man shall see 
 God, so without the spiritual integrity which can 
 only be attained through the divinely appointed 
 natural means of development (qui vent la fin 
 vent les moyens), no souls can experience in each 
 other the Divine joy of perfect love consequent 
 upon perfect spiritual union. Broad and pleasant 
 seeming may be the ways of sense, but they lead 
 literally to destruction ; while as the narrow and 
 difficult path of spiritual development shines more 
 and more unto the perfect day, so through the 
 subdued but complete light of the joy of the har- 
 mony of congenial spirits shall they, as Plato showed, 
 
92 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 best reacli together the last rung of the ladder of 
 Being which leads up the world's great altar-stair 
 to the presence of the Father of spirits. Love is 
 the path and love the goal ; in this one case the 
 means is the end,* so that instead of, as Pope wrote, 
 *'Man never is, but always to be blessed," in the 
 case of true love the ideal is really realised here. 
 
 Hegel shows how Being is complementary and 
 relative ; he speaks of ^' the generai^^egion of other- 
 ness, where the other also finds its other. By the 
 other-wise-being only is it capable of discrimination." 
 " It is there, where its being is for another." " Your 
 naturalness is your bping for other." "The same 
 thing that thus goes over into another yet retains in 
 this going over and in this other distinct reference 
 to its own self" (Secret of Hegel). ''It is there 
 where the something is, by, with, and for its own 
 other ; both are mutually complementary and essential 
 constituents in the all of things " (Hegel). 
 
 Thus human character is complete only in the 
 union of complementary dual idiosyncrasies. Love is 
 the supreme exhibition of the law of polarity, of the 
 mutual attraction of positive and negative ; the one 
 human being is thus the complement of the other, 
 the check or counterpart. Mutual and equivalent 
 action and reaction is the law of emotional or 
 spiritual life, just as it is the cause of motion in 
 the physical world. As we see in the voltaic pile 
 
 * Aristotle defines the B>ummum Bonum as tliat which is sought for 
 its own sake, and not as means to an ulterior object. 
 
SELF- CONSCIO USNESS, 93 
 
 the action of Uyo different chemicals upon each 
 other, so in a perfect conjugal union all the highest 
 force of our nature is seen to be elicited. 
 
 § 2. "To enjoy the bliss of Being, we must realise 
 actually all our powers of feeling, thought, and will." 
 " Enjoyment arises from the fitness of things to our 
 nature/' from the '* correlated modifications of Being.'' 
 The spiritual life is as strictly relative to suitable 
 spiritual communion as the health of our body or its 
 life is to suitable diet. The term " good " or " best "* 
 has no meaning except in relation to the welfare of 
 some individual ; it is the desired satisfaction of the 
 hunger for joy, of the sense of the divine or perfect in 
 life. And this sense of fulness of life or perfection 
 of Being can only be realised in presence of the one 
 complementary being, still the joy it causes is the 
 source of rapturous gratitude to the Giver of all 
 good gifts, for the reign of Divine ideas as accom- 
 plished facts will constitute the long-desired " king- 
 dom of God" come. Induction of destiny is from 
 principles of Being, from fidelity of feeling or desire — 
 Grifiith's " rational expectation of recovery of beloved 
 object." " For to give means, with God, not to 
 tempt and deceive with a cup thrust in Benjamin's 
 sack. He resumes nothing. Be sure of this ; and if 
 it seems that He draw back a gift, comprehend that 
 
 * When we say, " This is the best knife I ever had," we mean this is 
 the knife that best fulfils our purpose. Kobert Browning compares man 
 to a cup for his Maker's use. 
 
94 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 it is ratlier to amend it and finish it up to your 
 dream, or to keep as a mother will toys too costly 
 till the children are fit for such joys " (Mrs. Browning). 
 • " That such gains could ever be estranged — gains 
 which could not be, except a special soul had gained 
 them, or that they could do aught but appertain to 
 immortality — is inconceivable to reason.'* 
 
 But although this joy can only be attained through 
 the union of two complementary beings, it is far 
 from being exclusive of general spiritual communion. 
 In the first place, as I have already said, it is the 
 cause of the deepest gratitude to God, of loving, 
 reverent adoration — " life in God together led," not 
 exclusive of God. Then, as M. Guizot shows in speak- 
 ing of his wife, it seems to unseal the fountain of good- 
 ness and loving-kindness towards all men — " herself 
 having reached the goal, she seemed only to think 
 of the happiness of others," We can trace its bene- 
 ficent workinsc throucrhout the whole ranofe of 
 social intercourse. Spiritual union is the true 
 ground of families holding together, a union founded 
 on the complementariness of the elders is repro- 
 duced in the children, and so they are harmoni- 
 ous. It greatly increases the circle of our friends, 
 because all those people to whom, as being our 
 analogues, we should not as individuals be drawn, 
 our deeper, fuller joint life gives us the power of 
 universally appreciating. We understand our oppo- 
 sites only through the beloved opposite, just as 
 through the fifth we can make a harmony with the 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. ' 95 
 
 seventh. Then, again, in suitable marriages the 
 children and relations on each side find pleasure in 
 each other's society, as the members of the family are 
 also complementaries, and the homes thus formed 
 become centres of wide social influence ; for every 
 one delights to visit those families in which harmo- 
 nious relations prevail. 
 
 And the force generated in this bright, refreshing 
 atmosphere is available for all kinds of helpful work 
 — of course in varying degrees, according as the 
 profession, trade, or duties of the members of these 
 families demand more or less of their time and 
 strength. And all this is quite independent of rank, 
 wealth, or position, except in so far as these are 
 aids to personal development. The helpfulness that 
 emanates from the labourer's cottage, though different 
 in kind, is as deep a blessing and as great a comfort 
 to those in the higher ranks as that which these are 
 enabled to bestow in return. 
 
 Now since the categories of reason are unaffected 
 by time or space, holding under all circumstances, 
 so that one person likes another as much when they 
 are in Madrid as in London, in 1829 as in 1850 — 
 2.6., at all distances of time and space— can we help 
 believing that this complementariness, which we find 
 to be such a deep source of joy on earth, even amid 
 all the imperfection that prevents the conditions of 
 relativity from being but partially fulfilled here, 
 will, in worlds better adapted for fulfilling the 
 conditions, and where the individuals will them- 
 
96 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 selves be more developed — at length cause joy to be 
 universal ? 
 
 Thus in the plan of creation this most ideal or 
 perfect form of love is at once the source of physical 
 life and the nucleus from which all the other and 
 lesser social affections radiate. The requirement of 
 love in the noumenal or spiritual Ego is the result 
 of its intuitive recognition of the relativity of its 
 own being to that of another and complementary 
 being. This is described in the Book of Genesis as 
 the divinely acknowledged necessity or requirement 
 of a help-mee^ unto Adam, the fitting, abiding com- 
 panion, who lives in your life and in whose life you 
 live. The existence of this instinctive yearning for 
 '* the joy of mingled being," for the sense of rest and 
 peace, which this supreme affection alone can give, 
 is practically demonstrated in the base counterfeits 
 of it that, like the homage which vice pays to virtue 
 in hypocrisy, are so common — in the making love 
 where no love is ; also most touchingly in the too 
 frequently mistaken joy when the ideal object is only 
 supposed to be found. Instead of choosing a poet, I 
 quote the testimony of a philosopher (Schopenhauer) 
 to the sense of the eternal in love. He says, '^ This 
 yearning of love cannot take its substance from 
 the needs of an ephemeral individual : the yearning 
 which connects with the possession of a particular 
 woman the ideal of eternal bliss, and the inexpres- 
 sible pain that attends on the thought that it is 
 not to be attained; this all-pervading presentiment of 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 97 
 
 endless joy or sorrow, which furnishes material for 
 all the finest erotic poetry ; this yearning of the 
 spirit, which in its particular object sees a never-to- 
 be-recovered means of gaining or losing its end." I 
 have made this extract from Schopenhauer's " Life 
 and Philosophy" by Helen Zimmern, but I must 
 admit that, whilst making this admission of the 
 sense of the eternal in love, Schopenhauer makes it 
 the ground of a distorted argument. ** That it must, 
 therefore, be the yearning and sighing of the spirit 
 of species." Now, if th^re is such a thing as the 
 spirit of species, and it be a rational spirit, what it 
 really must be groaning about, with groans not to 
 be uttered, is the illogical unkindness of beings of 
 the same kind towards each other, which is so gene- 
 rally prevalent amongst mankind. But if kindness 
 or mere humanity be confounded with love, what 
 meaning at all has " love " by which it may 
 henceforth be distinguished ? So great is the 
 necessity of vivifying our personal affections, that 
 we must forbear all tampering with and confound- 
 ing together of the signs that ought to hold the 
 respective departments asunder. Intellectual power 
 is shown in the appreciation of natures method 
 of difierentiation. Mrs. Brownino: has said, ** Go 
 from me ! Yet I feel I shall stand hencefor- 
 ward in thy shadow, never more alone without the 
 sense of that which I have known, thy touch upon 
 my palm. The widest land doom takes to part us 
 leaves thy heart in mine, with pulses that beat 
 
98 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 double. What I do and what I dream includes thee, 
 as the wine must taste of its own grapes ; and when 
 I sue God for myself, He hears that name of thine, 
 and sees within my eyes the tears of two." Such love 
 alone is perfect joy. Whatever good- will any one 
 person may have towards any other, if there exists not 
 suitability, correlativity of spiritual nature between 
 the two, no amount of good works performed for each 
 other will avail for conjugal love, and the perfect 
 sense of joy and fulness of Being arising out of it, 
 it alone being by the terms the only form of love 
 in which sympathy is perfect. Equivalential attrac- 
 tion, which alone is perfect harmony of spiritual 
 Being, is the requirement for perfect spiritual joy 
 of life. " Thus do the lives of united souls make 
 music." 
 
 Theodore Parker has said that as one thing is not 
 another, so it will not do in the place of another ; 
 that the love of man does not dispense with the love 
 of God, nor does the love of God dispense with that 
 of man. 
 
 Monks and nuns are signal departures from the 
 Divine order. " I will have obedience and not sac- 
 rifice, saith the Lord." 
 
 When Moses asked to see God's face, God is repre- 
 sented as replying, " I will make my goodness pass 
 before thee;" and Mr. Mallock has expressed this 
 principle of the Divine manifestation with singular 
 force in this remarkable passage : — " God Himself 
 seems to stand aside," as it were, not to disturb the 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 99 
 
 joy-giving effect of perfect mutual sympathy, which, 
 by the terms, even an Infinite Being cannot give to a 
 finite being. It is through His goodness in designing 
 this absolutely joy-giving relation that God is Himself 
 especially manifested to us as a God of love. 
 
 § 3. We have seen that throughout the vast realms 
 of nature this law of complementariness everywhere 
 prevails, and we find that the result is always har- 
 mony. This God Himself has taught us. He has made 
 the law of human happiness, and shown us how alone 
 we can be happy, on what the perfection of Being 
 depends, so that man may be led to fulfil the con- 
 ditions as far as in him lies ; for here again we find 
 the two — God's part and man's ; for man alone can- 
 not secure his own highest good, but neither can 
 he be the passive recipient of it : we are '^ workers 
 together with God." Wherever we begin, we shall 
 find that the conditions must be fulfilled if harmony 
 is to result — harmony, which is always joy-inspiring, 
 though in very different degrees, according as it 
 depends on physical correspondence — as the blended 
 colours that delight the eye — or on the spiritual union 
 of mental and moral qualities. In nature this is done 
 for us ; but as Mr. Martineau has shown in the moral 
 sphere that in order to attain the well-balanced char- 
 acter in which the instincts are restrained within 
 their normal limits and scope left for t^he free play of 
 the higher powers, toe must bring about by conscious 
 effort what nature does unconsciously, so we shall 
 
loo PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 find it ever is. " Struve records that at least one 
 hundred and four binary systems exhibit the com- 
 plementary colours — that is, the colour of one con- 
 stituent belongs to the red or least refrangible end of 
 the spectrum, while that of the other belongs to the 
 violet or most refrangible extremity ; " and Principal 
 Tulloch himself says, " If we add to these considera- 
 tions the well-ascertained fact of the diversity of 
 colour which distinguishes not a few of the double 
 stars, we shall derive a still more striking impression 
 of the peculiarities of existence to be found in the 
 stellar spaces — peculiarities doubtless increasing in 
 novelty and intricacy with the ascending complexity 
 of the starry groups.""^ I have quoted this latter 
 passage, not because of its bearing on the immediate 
 subject, but because of the exemplification I feel it 
 afibrds of my hypothesis, that there are worlds adapted 
 to every varying stage of spiritual development, and 
 that as we ascend the scale of Being the physical 
 conditions will ever harmonise with the spiritual. 
 
 But to return. Just as we find these complemen- 
 tary colours in the stars, so we are told that in 
 decorating our rooms, if we would avoid the efi'ect 
 of heaviness or dinginess, the colours must be 
 so combined that on retiring to a little distance it 
 should appear white. A single colour always requires 
 to be sustained by its complementary, as green by 
 red ; then the whole rainbow is actually present, and 
 the eye is satisfied because that which it gazes on is 
 
 * " Theism," Rev. Principal Tulloch, p. 2>y. 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. loi 
 
 a completed whole. Mr. Lewes delighted in giving 
 himself credit for having discovered the psychological 
 spectrum constituted by the three primary elements 
 of character — feeling, thought, and will ; and it is the 
 same in the aesthetics of sound ; a single note gives 
 no satisfaction to the ear, but if the fifth or comple- 
 mentary sound is played with (as in harmony), or after 
 (as in melody), the keynote, the harmonics of the 
 whole octave are sustained and made present to the 
 ear, which is thus delighted with the whole diapason 
 of musical sound. 
 
 And it is the same with the sense of spiritual 
 completeness. In order that this may be realised, we 
 require the presence ever with us of a complementary 
 spirit, which, in union with our own, jointly furnish 
 in balanced order and fulness the three attributes of 
 personality — feeling, intelligence, and will ; these two 
 together, like red and green, produce a soft stone- 
 coloured white, the pure dazzling white being alone 
 presented by the supreme and perfect Being ; only 
 the uncreated Light shines with the full splendour 
 of that unapproachable white which we use as the 
 symbol for holiness. 
 
 Each man naturally gravitates towards what he 
 believes to be best for his own being, but this 
 beneficent arrangement of the Creator is fatally 
 thwarted in the case of each individual who is 
 ignorant of what really "makes for his peace." 
 What each person requires for the sense of the 
 equilibrium of the attributes of personality, ^.e., the 
 
102 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 sense of fulness of Being, which is the secret of 
 the perfect joy of the perfect suitability of com- 
 plementary souls, is a helpmeet unto him or her. 
 *' What care I how fair she be, if she be not kind 
 to me?" If her or his good points are such as 
 clash with mine, rather than harmonise with my 
 own idiosyncrasies. 
 
 F in music harmonises with A or C, but not with 
 G or B, each keynote having its own dominant 
 (chord of fifth), and spiritual harmonics equally re- 
 present laws of nature. 
 
 Then let us not, when seeking joy or happiness, 
 join the general throng of promiscuous admirers of 
 beauty, talent, or power, but let each one look for his 
 or her own soul's delight. Of course, as finer difier- 
 entiation marks progressive development in the scale 
 of Being, the most highly discriminating will be the 
 choice of the most highly developed. Thus many may 
 vaguely suit the uncertainly or indeterminately de- 
 veloped, so that we may hear of a man having been 
 happy with one wife after another ; but even, in these 
 cases, if we could cross- question such a man, we 
 should certainly find either that neither were per- 
 fectly suited to him, by the token that that utter 
 joy, which looks neither before nor after, and 
 which characterises a perfectly happy present, has 
 been wanting, or that he did certainly prefer one 
 to the other ; for, quantitatively or qualitatively 
 speaking, i.e., with mathematical or logical exact- 
 ness, if one person perfectly suited another, no 
 
SELF- CONSCIO USNESS. 103 
 
 two being exactly alike, no other could suit him or 
 her equally well. The cestus of Yenus, that made 
 her irresistible both to gods and men, was said to 
 be the power of making her lover feel that it was 
 him, and him alone, she loved ; and only when this 
 natural feeling is mutually felf or reciprocal can it 
 produce a perfect mutual devotion, since none of 
 the principles of reason admit of any variation or 
 shadow of change. Hence what we predicate of the 
 nature of the perfect, absolute Being, God, applies 
 also to essential true relations between persons 
 which are as unchangeable as individual personality 
 itself. 
 
 Love is indeed God's present witness to the truth 
 an(J attainability of the ideal of feeling, so that from 
 this one present and actual realisation we may con- 
 fidently expect the same satisfaction of the ideals of 
 the intellect and of the moral sense, or desire for 
 the universal perfection of Being in another and per- 
 fect state of being. In the ** ^dipus Tyrannus" 
 of Sophocles are these w^ords — " Zeus ! if thou art 
 rightly na'med the All-seeing and All-directing, let it 
 not be hidden from thee and thy everlasting rule that 
 men are disregarding oracles and that religion is pass- 
 ing away." To this it might now be added that the 
 belief in love seems also waning ; but as the categories 
 of thought will resume their influence over human 
 judgments when the present passing fashion of in- 
 fidelity to man's spiritual nature or being has joined 
 so many other passing fashions in the waters of Lethe, 
 
104 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 SO not only does '' hope spring perennial in the human 
 breast," but with the restoration of faith in God 
 and man love will finally show itself lord of all, both 
 here and hereafter. 
 
 That it is possible for this one ideal to be realised 
 on earth, a crowd of witnesses from among the 
 noblest and most honoured among men have borne 
 testimony. They belong to all ages and almost 
 every nation. I have chosen the following pas- 
 sages as illustrative of the truth of this state- 
 ment : — 
 
 " Oh, my soul's joy ! If after every tempest come such calms, 
 may the winds blow till they waken death, and let the labouring 
 bark climb hills of seas Olympus high, and duck again as low 
 as hell from heaven. If it were now to die, 'twere now to be 
 most happy, for I fear my soul hath her content so absolute 
 that not another comfort like to this succeeds in unknown fate." 
 — Shakespeare. 
 
 M. Guizot remarks in a letter to his beloved wife 
 on the commonly received idea that " Man never 
 is, but always to be blessed," that this can only be 
 said by those who do not know deep, true, and pas- 
 sionate love. 
 
 " Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods 
 drown it. If a man would give all the substance of his house for 
 love, it would be utterly condemned." — Song of Solomon, viii. 7. 
 
 " Love gives itself, but is not bought ; 
 It comes, — the beautiful, the free, 
 The crown of all humanity, 
 In silence and alone, 
 To seek the elected one. . . . 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. V^^ »<**■ t' - 
 
 No one is so accursed by fate, ^ .^r ^^^ 
 
 No one so utterly desolate, 
 
 But some heart, though unknown, 
 
 Eesponds unto his own — 
 
 Responds as if with unseen wings. 
 
 An angel touched its quivering strings, 
 
 And whispers in its song, 
 
 * Why hast thou stayed so long 1 ' " 
 
 — Longfellovfs " Eiidymion.^* 
 
 *' And hearts, dear love, such seedlings are that need so little, 
 even less than little on the earth, to bear the sunbeam blossom 
 Happiness. A touch, a tender tone, a face that lingers near 
 the door — no more — and yet hearts go uncomforted. A turn, 
 a smile, a fond word said, a kiss — these things make heaven, 
 and yet kind sad hearts go uncomforted." 
 
 *' Each man, Hke the Roman emperor, stamps his own effigy 
 on all he does. Each path has a separate experience — but 
 thought-coin (i.e., the ideas of feeling, thought, and will) goes 
 current over the wide world." 
 
 " Desire is the spur to prayers ; hence the value of the writer 
 who gives currency to ideals for men to strive to realise." 
 
 A RIDDLE — MARI-AGE. 
 "Mon premier est un tyran, mon second est un monstre, 
 mon tout c'est le diable meme. Si vous aimez mon premier 
 vous ue crainderez pas mon second, et vous aurez le bonheur 
 supreme." 
 
 " But there, where I have garnered up my heart, 
 AVhere either I must live or bear no life. 
 The fountain from the which my current runs or else 
 dries up." — Othello (Shakespeare). 
 
 " * Where the treasure is there will also the heart be.' * Mio 
 tesoro — Mein schatz,' these are the expressions that love chooses." 
 
 "Thus the true lover, though alone, is not lonely; his thoughts 
 are ever with the beloved." 
 
io6 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 " Let then thought hold sweet communion, 
 Let us breathe the mutual prayer, 
 Till in heaven's eternal union 
 Spirit shall with spirit blend." 
 
 " Oft as memory's glance is ranging 
 
 Over scenes that cannot die, 
 When I see that all is changing, 
 
 Then I weep for days gone by. 
 Cease, fond heart ! to thee is given 
 
 Hope of better things on high ; 
 There is still a coming heaven. 
 
 Better than the days gone by." 
 
 Shakespeare thus describes a happy marriage — 
 ** He is the half part of a blessed man. 
 Left to be finished by such as she, — 
 And she is a fair divided excellence, 
 Whose fulness of perfection lies in him. 
 Oh, two such silver currents, when they join, 
 Do glorify the banks that bind them in." 
 
 " Yivre k deux, c'est vivre aux cieux." 
 
 " What is this cold world to me ? Robin's not near. 
 What was it I wished to see 1 what wished to hear 1 
 Where's all the joy and all the mirth 
 Made this town heaven on earth 1 
 Oh, they're all fled with thee, Robin Adair ! " 
 
 " As the chord is to the bow, 
 So the woman to the man. 
 Useless each without the other. 
 Though she draws him, she obeys him ; 
 Though she bends him, yet she follows " 
 
 — " Iliawatha." 
 
 '* And heaven itself descends in love. 
 For love is heaven and heaven is love." — JFalter Scott. 
 
 " Heaven is the eternity of perpetually increasing capability 
 of giving and receiving happiness." — Hindoo, 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 107 
 
 " Love is the guardian angel o'er our life presiding, 
 Doubling the pleasures and the cares dividing." 
 
 " What then can be more blessed than love ? " — Hindoo. 
 
 "For this reason it is that it has been able to bear the many- 
 thousand volumes which paint it." — Idem. 
 
 " Thy presence makes December June." 
 
 *'Mon esperance a moi, mon Dieu, c'est ma m^moire." — 
 Lamaiiine. 
 
 " Je m'oublierais moi-meme, Laurence ! avant toi, Renaitre 
 sans se revoir, sans se reconnoitre ce serait remourir, Seigneur ! 
 et non renaitre. A ta magnificence, P^re ! je me fie, tu rends 
 cent milles Ibis ce qu'on te sacrifie, d'autres reveut leur ciel, mais 
 moi j'ai vu le mien. Tout ^me est soeur d'une ^me et quand ces 
 soeurs du ciel ici has se reucontrent d'invincible instincts Tun a 
 Tautre les montrent. L'oeil ne cherche plus rien. L'^me n'a 
 plus de vide. Par Tinfaillible instinct le coeur soudain frapp^, 
 ne craint pas de retour ni de s'^tre tromp6. Que I'alouette 
 chante ou non, h mon reveil, mon coeur ne depend plus d'un 
 rayon du soleil, de la saison qui fuit, du nuage qui passe, son 
 bonheur est en lui, toute heure, toute place, toute saison, tout ciel 
 sont bons quand on est deux." — Lamartine. 
 
 *' Leur coeur intarissable, et Tun h, Tautre ouvert, 
 Leur est un firmament qui n'est jamais convert, 
 lis y plongent sans ombre, ils y lisent sans voile, 
 Un horizon nouveau sans cesse s'y devoile 
 L'ame coule toujours et n'a plus de langueur 
 Dans cet autre soi-meme ou tout va retentir 
 Oil se regarde vivre, oil s'ecoute sentir." — Lamartine. 
 
 " L'eclair qui revele k chacun I'etre qui le compile, et de deux 
 n'en fait qu'un, mon coeur me I'avait dit." 
 
 "Genius had seen it in her passionate dreams." — Shdley. 
 
 The word "bon" is used in French as in Enoflish, 
 meaning good as means to the naturally desired end 
 of happiness, or perfection of being. 
 
jo8 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 " En entendant le mot que I'un clierchait en soi on se comprend 
 soi m^me, on dit, C'est moi. Ou admire le monde a travers 
 ce qu'on aime." 
 
 " Et la vie appuy^e, appuyant h, son tour, 
 Est un fardeau sacre qu'on porte avec amour." 
 
 — Lamartine. 
 
 As Hegel says, if we lose ourselves, we also find ourselves in 
 the beloved other. 
 
 " I who looked for only God found thee. I find thee I am safe 
 and strong and glad." — Mrs. Browning. 
 
 "And God the Elohim said in Paradise, It is not good for man 
 to be alone; he shall have a help meet unto him." — Genesis. 
 
 " God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame." 
 
 Nothing, says Sir John Lubbock, is more false and ungrateful 
 than the saying, " It is too good to be true." " God's gifts 
 surpass man's utmost imaginings." "And still my heart goes 
 out to thee, not as to a single good, but all my good." 
 
 " There I sit with love in the sun. 
 And we two never have done, > 
 
 Singing sweeter songs than are guessed at by one." 
 
 — Mrs. Browning. 
 
 A German song has — "Das war die Liebe nicht der geschah," — 
 the love that passes away was no love. 
 
 Let us live, let us love, for the acts correspond (in the spiri- 
 tual life) ; thus alone is the yearning to completeness fulfilled. 
 " Man desecrates the eternal God- word love by his rio morey 
 and once." 
 
 " Et je doutais de I'amour et du bonheur, et cette affreuse 
 doute faisait le mal de tons mes jours, Dieu vous a envoys vers 
 moi etj'e crois au bonheur et a I'esperance." 
 
 French Song, *' Esperance." 
 
 " Life's promises, like sheep-bells, die off from us on the desert 
 hills, cloud crossed, yet through the silence shall pierce the death 
 angel's call — 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 109 
 
 *' Come up hither, recover all ! 
 Heart, wilt thou go ] 
 I go — broken hearts triumph so." 
 " Till the spirit enfold those manifest joys which it foretold.'* 
 
 — ^schylus. 
 
 " Oh, you earth's tender impassioned few, take courage to 
 intrust your love to Him, so named, who guards above its ends, 
 and shall fulfil." " The Lord watch between thee and me when 
 we are absent one from another." — Mizpah. 
 
 ** Think — the shadow on the dial, 
 For the nature most undone, 
 Marks the passing of the trial. 
 Proves the presence of the sun." 
 
 " Trust the blessed deathly angel's whisper, 
 Sabbath hours at hand. 
 So behold in sudden glory 
 
 Thy transfigured smiles on thee." 
 
 " Irks care the crop-full bird. 
 Frets doubt the man-crammed beast." 
 
 — Robert Browning. 
 
 *' Trust God — the future I may face, now 
 I have proved the past." — Idem. 
 
 " An age so blest, that by its side, 
 Youth seems the waste instead. 
 My own ! see where the years conduct. 
 At first 'twas something our two souls 
 Should mix as mist do — each is sucked in each. 
 Now on the new stream rolls, whatever rocks obstruct. 
 Think when our one soul understands 
 The great word which makes all things new. 
 When earth breaks up and heaven expands. 
 How will the change strike me and you 
 In the house not made with hands ? " 
 
 *' And join thee, all the fitter for the pause, 
 'Neath the low doorway's lintel." 
 
 " That were cause for lingering, though thou calledst." 
 
no PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 " Leave Now for dogs and asses — man has /or ever.^* 
 
 " No artist lives and loves that longs not once, and for one only, 
 Putting to proof art alien (God's art) to the artist's once, and 
 
 for one only. 
 So to he the man and leave the artist." — Rohert Browning. 
 
 " Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained — 
 The reward of it all. 
 
 But sudden the worse turns the best to the brave, 
 The black minute's at end, and the elements rage ; 
 The fiend voices that rave shall dwindle and change, 
 Shall become first a peace out of pain, then a light ! 
 Then thy breast, thou soul of my soul, 
 1 shall clasp thee again, and with God be the rest." 
 
 — Rohert Browning on Death. 
 
 " Du bist der Himmel mir verstimmt — 
 Du bist der Friede — du bist die Euh." 
 
 " Why else was the pause prolonged, but that singing might 
 issue thence ? " — Rohert Browning. 
 
 " The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky is 
 music sent up to God. Enough that He heard it once ; we shall 
 hear it by and by, when eternity affirms the conception of an 
 hour." — Idem. 
 
 " Psyche approached to Jove's right hand, 
 To Psyche's lips he approached the ambrosial bowl : 
 Drink, my daughter ! and acquaint thy soul with 
 Deathless uses, and be glad the while. 
 No more shall Cupid leave thy lovely side, 
 Thy marriage joy begins, for never ending." 
 
 — Apuleius, Metamo7-phoses. 
 
 " Happy thou defended from entering thy Theseus' earthly hall, 
 a heavenly house ! Kronion's self for kin — nor death nor age 
 can find thee more." — Fivm Homer. 
 
 " Je vis descendre du ciel un image brillant, qui s'approchait 
 de moi, et qui recouvrait comme d'un voile transparent une 
 femme. Son regard, son sourire, tons ses traits, en fin, realisaient 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. iii 
 
 a mes yeux I'etre ideal que cherchait mon coeur dementi si long 
 temps, et que j'avais d^sesp^r^ de rencontrer jamais. Tandis que 
 je la contemplais avec extase, ces paroles se firent entendre : Ta 
 confiance en moi ne sera point tromp^e. Regarde, voici la com- 
 pagne que je t'ai reservee. Voici le bien (ou le bonheur), auquel 
 aspirent vainement les hommes qui pensent que le bonheur est 
 un calcul (au lieu d'un don divin), et qui demandent de la terre 
 ce qu'on ne pent obtenir que du ciel. H^las ! le doute rentra 
 bientot dans mon coeur, encore tout meurtri des mecomptes de la 
 vie. Injuste et coupable defiance ! Oh, si j'avais pu pr^voir 
 alors que toutes ces promesses seraient accomplies et que je 
 retrouverai un jour sur la terre T^tre ador6 dont je n'avais fait 
 qu'entrevoir I'image dans le ciel. Si j'avais su que mon bonheur 
 surpasserait toutes mes esperances." — " Voyage Autour de ma 
 Chamhre,'^ Xavier Le Maistre. 
 
 " 'Tis sense, unbridled will, and not true love which kills the soul ! 
 Love betters what is best, even here below, but more in 
 
 heaven above. 
 No mortal object did these eyes behold 
 When first they met the placid light of thine. 
 And my soul felt her destiny divine, 
 And hope of endless peace in me grew bold. 
 Heaven-born, the soul a heavenward course must hold ! 
 The wise man, I affirm, can find no rest in that which perishes, 
 Nor will he lend his heart to aught which doth on time depend. 
 Yet hope may with my strong desire keep pace, 
 And I be undeluded, unbetrayed ; for if 
 Of our affections none find grace in sight of Heaven, 
 Then wherefore hath God made the world which we inhabit ? 
 
 (Why is the objective provided for the subject 1) 
 Better plea love cannot have than that in loving thee 
 Glory to that eternal peace is paid who such divinity to thee 
 
 imparts as hallows and makes pure all gentle hearts. 
 His hope is treacherous only whose love dies with beauty, 
 
 which is varying every hour. 
 But in chaste hearts, uninfluenced by the power of outward 
 
 change, there blooms a deathless power that breathes on 
 
 earth the air of Paradise." — Michael Angela, Sonnets. 
 
112 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 " Of happiest hope fulfilled shall nought remain 1 
 Shall not desire of meeting warm (keep) the heart 1 " 
 
 " Shall the torch of joy be lit only to dash it out in darkness 1 
 Forbid it, Heaven ! " — Dante Rosetti. 
 
 " Reason rather waits to see the debt to hope quite liquidated 
 without deduction by decrease or separation, God's peace in 
 ultimate possession." 
 
 " I heavily from woe to woe tell o'er the sad account of fore- 
 bemoaned moan, which I now pay as if not paid before. But still 
 the while I think on thee, dear friend, again thou art restored 
 and sorrows end." — Shakespeare^ s Sonnets. 
 
 " Earthly happiness is like early spring flowers, at once mani- 
 festation of forces at work in man and prophecies of what is to 
 come." 
 
 "The like seeks the like."— Big-Feda. 
 
 " That the relations of things to each other are invariable is 
 the most fundamental of our intuitions." 
 
 '' Men love their fellows, says science, ultimately and originally 
 from the same instinct that teaches animals, and, for that matter, 
 the vegetable world also, to seek that in which they find com- 
 fort, pleasure, and support." 
 
 " Thou art my life ! my love ! my heart ! the very eyes of me, 
 and hast command of every part to live and die for thee." — 
 Bobert Herrick. 
 
 ** Memory and hope alike repose in smiles upon the bosom of 
 enjoyment." 
 
 " Circumstances require severe exercise of intellect, and con- 
 strain the spirit to seek its rest." 
 
 *' The converse of soul with soul in love and truth alone 
 imparts to each of us the consciousness of our own worth." 
 
 " Du machts mich selber werth." 
 
 " The subjective faculties and affections of the soul meet their 
 corresponding objective occasions and fulfilments. Thus shall it 
 ever be (by degrees) accommodated with fit conditions to dwell 
 in any of the heavenly worlds to which it shall be destined by 
 its moral affinities and mental development." 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 113 
 
 " Intelligence is truly sight, wanting which, into what abysses 
 may we not fall ! " 
 
 " The one person whose return you can confidently count upon 
 is the one who returns to you as to the home of their own heart." 
 *' Ne jamais la voir ni I'entendre, 
 Ne jamais tout haut la nommer, 
 Mais fidele toujours I'attendre, 
 Tou jours I'aimer. 
 
 " Ouvrir les bras et la d'attendre, 
 Sur le n^ant les refermer, 
 Mais encore toujours les lui tendre, 
 Toujours I'aimer. 
 
 ** Ne jamais la voir ni I'entendre, 
 Mais dans les pleurs se consumer, 
 Mais ces larmes toujours les repandre, 
 Toujours I'aimer. 
 
 " Ne jamais la voir ni I'etendre 
 Ne jamais tout haut la nommer, 
 Mais d'un amour toujours plus tendre, 
 Toujours I'aimer." — Sully Frudlwmme. 
 
 " Friendship is like love ; there are invariable laws of life that 
 forbid it between some, though we can feel kindness or the 
 general attraction of creatures for their own kind for all." 
 
 " Love has sooner or later to come to an understanding with 
 thought. In order to live, it must essay to know something about 
 its object, until it stands out before love in clearer and clearer 
 outlines." — Canon Liddon. 
 
 ** The study of harmony is useful for the investigation of the 
 beautiful and the good." — Flccto. 
 
 " Order is rational ; the good (for Being) is the end of order." 
 — Idem. 
 
 " One in heart and one in love, 
 We below and they above, 
 One in all we seek or shun, 
 One because our Lord is one." 
 (Unity of Being j as the parent so the child.) 
 
114 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 *' The gloom by winter cast 
 
 How soon the heart forgets 
 When summer brings at last 
 
 The sun that never sets ! 
 So dawned my love for you, 
 
 Chasing every pain ^ 
 Than summer sun more true, 
 
 'Twill never set again." — Lapland Love Song. 
 
 " Breath freezes on my lips to moan, 
 As one alone, once not alone. 
 I sit and knock at Nature's door, 
 
 • Heart bare, heart hungry, very poor, 
 Whose desolated days go on. 
 And fallen too low for special fear. 
 And here with hope no longer here. 
 While the tears drop my days go on." 
 
 — 3Irs. Browning. 
 
 " But the darker the cloud of the present, the more brilliant 
 gleams the rainbow of the promised future." 
 
 " God sits upon the great white throne 
 And listens for the creatures' praise. 
 I hear Him charge His saints that none 
 Among His creatures anywhere 
 Blaspheme against Him with despair, 
 However darkly days go on." — Mi^s. Browning. 
 
 " Perhaps the cup was broken here 
 That heaven's new wine might show more clear. 
 Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost, 
 With emptied arms and treasure lost, 
 I praise Thee whilst the days go on." 
 
 — Idem. 
 
 ''It is the soul's pervading presentiment of endless joy or 
 sorrow that accompanies love that makes it so transcendent a 
 joy, transcendent a suffering, surpassing everything merely 
 earthly." — Idem. 
 
SELF- CONSCIO USNESS. 1 1 5 
 
 "The Semitic myth," says Professor Hackel, "of Adam and Eve, 
 and the old Greek legend of Helen and Paris, are only poetical 
 exi3ressions of the immeasurable influence of love. All other 
 passions that agitate the human breast are far less powerful in 
 the progress of the world's history. It is the basis of family life, 
 and consequently of the development of the state. It is the 
 most powerful factor in civilisation, prompting the production of 
 poetry, music, and the plastic arts. On the other hand, we fear 
 in it the devouring flame which drives the unfortunate to ruin, 
 and which has caused more vice, misery, and crime than all the 
 other evils of the human race taken together. So wonderful is 
 love, so immensely important its influence on mental life." 
 
 " Paradise is represented by one man and one woman." 
 
 Surely all social institutions ought to be based on the intelli- 
 gent recognition of such a force. Herbert Spencer has given an 
 equally eleborate Lob Gesang, or praise of love, in his " Principles 
 of Psychology." 
 
 " All thoughts, all feelings, all delights, all are but ministers 
 of love to feed his sacred flame." — Coleridge. 
 
 " Yulcan one day seeing two lovers looking so tenderly and 
 enchantingly happy, asked them if he could do anything to 
 oblige them. " Forger of the Gods !" they replied, " only, we 
 pray thee, weld us together so that we can never be parted." 
 (See the charming unique legend quoted in Burton's " Anatomy 
 of Melancholy.") 
 
 And if there be any who doubt the power of love for giving 
 perfect joy, let him meditate the words of Hafiz, the great 
 Persian poet, who says : — " ' Who art thou that thou hast not 
 known love?' said one unto me. *Eather,' replied I, 'what 
 manner of man art thou that knowest it ? ' " Let him, I say, ask 
 himself if he is not one of the many who, not having felt it, 
 cannot know it. 
 
 Of whom are the most touching love-stories tolcj? — Of Petrarch 
 and Laura, of Abelard and Heloise, of the sage Alcuin, who loved 
 the daughter of Charlemagne, of Michael Angelo and the Princess 
 Colonna; and of men of our own time, such as Sir Samuel 
 
ii6 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 Romilly, the great reformer of the civil law, of Stuart Mill, of 
 Auguste Comte, of Charles Kingsley, &c. Such is the stuff of 
 which true loVers are made. 
 
 "In love Providence is justified even here." 
 
 " The face of all the world is changed, I think, since first I 
 heard the footsteps of thy soul. I, who thought to sink, was 
 caught up unto love, and taught the whole of life on a new 
 rhythm. The names of country, heaven, are changed away ; for 
 where thou art, or shall be, there or here, are only dear." — Mrs. 
 Browning. 
 
 " Thou canst prevail against my fears, and fling thy purple 
 round me till my heart shall grow too close against thy heart 
 henceforth to know how it shook alone." — Pmiuguese Sonnets, 
 Mrs. Browning. 
 
 " A shallow love is an apprenticeship for learning a true and 
 deep one." 
 
 "There are sounds where the soul's delight takes fire, face to 
 face with its own desire." 
 
 " The simoom of separation doeth its work. 
 She turned her face to the wall of sorrow, 
 She stooped her back like a crooked lyre, 
 Attuned in concord with her heart's sadness." 
 
 — Persian Poet. 
 
 " Day when my crowned estate began to pine in that reverse 
 of doom which sickened every living bloom and blurred the 
 splendour of the sun." — {Death of the Beloved.) 
 
 *'Day marked as with some hideous crime, when the dark 
 hand struck down through time and cancelled nature's best." 
 — Tennyson. 
 
 *' The Sphinx of life stood pallid with her worst secret told." 
 
 *' The shade by which my life was crossed. 
 Which makes a desert in the mind. 
 Has made me kindly with my kind, 
 And like to him whose siglit is lost." — Tennyson. 
 
 "My night of loss is always there." 
 
SELF- CONSCIO USNESS. 1 1 7 
 
 "And thou, as one that once reclined on some unworthy- 
 heart with joy, but lived to wed an equal mind — Abide. Thy 
 wealth is gathered in when time hath sundered shell from pearl." 
 — Tennyson, 
 
 *' Behold the man that loved and lost" 
 
 " Is this the end 1 is this the end ] The dust of him I shall 
 not see; for all is dark where thou art not, the chambers 
 emptied of delight." 
 
 " Du bist die ruh, der friede mild, 
 Die sehnsucht du, und was sie stillt." 
 
 "Love is path and goal — means to, and end." The means are 
 of the nature of the end. 
 
 " A quell' amor, ch' h palpito delP universo intero — Misterioso 
 altero, croc* e delizia al cor. Che quiero piu di te nell' universo 
 intero, come nella terrena stanza." — Leojpardi. 
 
 "Were there nothing else for which to praise the Heavens 
 but only love, that only love were cause enough for praise." — 
 Te7myson. 
 
 " How can I show the happiness — how paint the depth of 
 pain 1 " 
 
 " If my heart be silent, what sign will speak of his worth ? " 
 
 " I have no home by sea or shore, 
 I have no place nor part 
 For ever and for evermore ; 
 But only in thy heart." — Jean Ingelow, 
 
 " And oh, dear heart, in thy still rest, 
 Eesign this earth of woes. 
 Forget the ardours of the west 
 Neglect the morning's glows. 
 Sleep and forget all things but one, 
 Heard in each wave of sea. 
 How lonely all the years will run 
 Until I rest by thee." 
 
ii8 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 " And I see all clear, new earth, new heaven, 
 New bodies redeemed from pain. 
 New souls ! — Oh, not so ! with the soul that I know 
 Let me find, let me find it again. 
 Let me walk with him under any sky. 
 Beside any land or sea. 
 
 In what shape or make Thou will'st him to take, 
 If like unto Thee — near unto Thee." 
 
 *' Hark what I tell to thee, nor sorrow o'er the tomb — 
 My spirit waits till thine shall come." — HaydvJs Canzonet. 
 
 " Trocknet sie nicht, die Thranen der unendliche Liebe." — 
 Beethoven; see also Ms '^ Adelaida." 
 
 " Das Herz ist gestorben, die Welt ist leer, 
 Und weiter giebt sich dem Wunschen nichts mehr, 
 Du Heiliger rufe dein Kind zuriick, 
 Ich habe genossen das irdische Gliick, 
 Ich habe gelebt und geliebt, 
 Es rinnet der Thranen vergeblicher Lauf, 
 Die Klage sie wecket die Todten nicht auf, 
 Doch nenne was trostet und heilet die Brust 
 Nach die siissen Liebe verschwundener Lust, 
 Sind der Liebe Schmerzen und Klagen." — Schiller. 
 
 " If we desire to recall past feelings, we must think of the objects 
 of them." 
 
 " Al core, al sguardo estatico la terra un ciel sembro." 
 
 "A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart." 
 
 " The day drags through, the storms keep out the sun, and 
 thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on, even as a broken 
 mirror, which the glass in every fragment multiplies, and makes 
 a thousand images of one that was the same, and still the more 
 the more it breaks. And thus the heart will do which not for- 
 sakes, living in shattered guise, and still, and cold, and blood- 
 less, with its sleepless sorrow-aches, till all without is old. 
 Showing no visible sign, for such things are untold." — Byron. 
 
SELF- CONSCIO USNESS. 119 
 
 " He who hath loved not here will learn that love and make 
 his heart a spirit. He who knows that tender mystery will love 
 the more ; for 'tis love's nature to advance or die. He stays not 
 still, or decays or grows into a boundless blessing." — Idem. 
 
 The principle of Final Cause, the third law of thought or 
 action for good always, indicates that this painful fidelity points 
 to the intended reunion of spirits. Such is the order of thought, 
 and such we necessarily believe to be the Divine order. Fidelity 
 would otherwise be a cruel gift and a meaningless quality of the 
 soul. 
 
 "Surely God, who made all, forgets not love's rewarding, 
 forgets not the faithful." 
 
 " Love is enough ! though the world be a-waning. 
 And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining. 
 Though the hills be held shadows and the sea a dark wonder, 
 And this day draw a veil over all deeds past over. 
 Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter, 
 The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter 
 These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover. 
 
 " Love is enough ! have no thought for to-morrow. 
 If ye lie down this evening in rest from your pain, 
 Ye who have paid for your bliss with great sorrow, 
 For as it was once so it shall be again. 
 And the world ye thought waning is glorious and good." 
 
 " Love is Enough" Poem by JVilliam Morris, 
 
 Love is no sacrifice. "Le sentiment placide et sublime de 
 r^ternelle possession." — Geoi'ge Sand. 
 
 " The name of love is longing." " Love is the desire of near- 
 ness." 
 
 " A good world it is, since we twain are together." 
 
 "Still fresh desired, still strange and new, though known, 
 needing no change my cup of joy to fill." 
 
 "True love wakes sympathy with all humanity." 
 
 " And are thy feet wandering on the ways ever empty of what 
 thou desireth 1 " 
 
I20 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 " And the cold cloud of death rolled onward to hide me, and, 
 with joy and fear blended, leapt the heart in my bosom, and I 
 cried, * The last land, Love ! Oh, hast thou abided? ' For I 
 waked 'mid a story wherein Love is the light and the lord." 
 
 " Love is enough ! cherish life that abideth. 
 Lest ye die ere ye know him, and curse and misname him ; 
 For who knows in what ruin of all hope he hideth. 
 Or what wings of the terror of darkness he rideth ? " 
 
 — W, Mmris. 
 
 " Live on ! for Love liveth, and earth shall be shaken 
 By the wind of his wings on the triumphing morning, 
 When the dead and their deeds, that die not, shall waken." 
 
 ** The death of all doubt and beginning of gladness." 
 
 " And how should thy love change howe'er the world changeth? 
 Yet meanwhile, had I dreamed of the bliss of this minute, 
 How might I have borne to live weary and waiting ! 
 How might I have lived had I known what I longed for ! " 
 
 " Love begets faith and hope." 
 
 " Love is enough ! Ho ! ye who seek saving, 
 Go no further, come hither ; 
 There have been who have found it, 
 And these know the house of fulfilment of craving, 
 These know the world's wound, and the balm that hath 
 bound it." — William Morris. 
 
 " Be of good cheer, poor heart ! 
 For though on a distant shore, 
 Yet thou and thy love shall walk hand in hand 
 For ever and evermore." 
 
 — Sullivan's Song, ^^ On a Distant Shore" 
 
 "The ideals of a people are represented in their songs." 
 
 " As hypocrisy is the homage paid by vice to virtue, so make- 
 
 helieve, to themselves as well as to others, is the homage paid by 
 
 the profane vulgar to the ideal." 
 
 Carlyle seems to have passed his whole life not only in writ- 
 
SELF- CONSCIO USNE SS. 121 
 
 ing about this make-believe, but in protesting against it at every 
 step in real life. 
 
 " NelP ordine cb' io dico sono accline 
 Tutte nature per diverse sorti 
 Piit at principio loro, e men vicine 
 Oude si muovono, a diversi porti, 
 Per il gran mar dell' essere, e ciascuno 
 Con istinto a lui dato che la porti.'* 
 
 — Dante^ ^^Paradiso" 
 
 " Cry out, for be beedeth, Love, lead its home ! " 
 
 "That so at last in bliss ye may believe." 
 
 " Tbe rugged fields we needs must stumble o'er. 
 Till the grain ripens that shall change no more." 
 
 " In many a lesson of sweet love to learn love's meaning more 
 and more. Love, who beyond all worlds shall dure." — W. Morris. 
 
 *' L'amour vrai ne se blase point. Etant tout ^me il ne pent 
 s'attiedir; autour d'elle on n'^tait que joyeux, elle, elle Itait 
 beureuse." 
 
 ** Avoir son necessaire tout est la Gwynplaine avait le sien 
 Dea avait le sien. L'abjection du defigur^, allegee et comme 
 sublim^e se dilatait en ravissement en croyance et une main 
 venait au-devant de la sombre h63itatione de I'aveugle dans la 
 nuit." 
 
 " Gwynplaine n'^tait plus difforme 6tant aim^, une rose de- 
 mandait la chenille en mariage sentant dans cette chenille le 
 papillon divin." — Victor Hugo. 
 
 " The greatest miracle which man is capable of understanding 
 is that of the infinite simplicity of the means by the co-operation 
 of which order is preserved in the universe." — Liebig. 
 
 " Love is the true, the beautiful, the good. Love is life, love is 
 joy, love is duty. Is not the principle of gravity the desire of 
 nearness, attraction of similars 1 " 
 
 " Duality and polarity are the same power j the principle of 
 duality appears to pervade the entire universe." 
 
122 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 The contradiction of the principles of Being is inconceivable. 
 Understanding is of substance or Being. All reasoning is from the 
 constituted principles of man's being. The science of all sciences is 
 Logic, which is the science of thought or of consciousness as such. 
 " Sintesi ultima del sapere e deir essere." 
 
 That which is essential, beautiful, or joy-giving, and good for 
 man, is that which makes life worth living. And if we like 
 to call love, most illogically, self-sacrifice, what is there in a 
 name'? Never to sacrifice others is what duty requires of us, 
 love forbidding. 
 
 In the Life and Letters of the Eev. Frederick Eobertson of 
 Brighton occurs this extract from Helps (Sir A. Helps) : — " A 
 firm belief that at some brighter period, when the world should 
 have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would 
 be revealed in order to establish the whole relation between 
 man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. The 
 angel and apostle of this coming revelation must be a woman 
 indeed, but lofty, and pure, and wise, and, moreover, not through 
 dusky grief, but through the ethereal medium of joy, and show- 
 ing how sacred love should make us happy by the truest test 
 of a love successful to that end." 
 
 On this Eobertson himself remarks, " I think it would set a 
 kind of setting light and glory upon the death-beds of those 
 whose aspirations have been high, and whose work is done in 
 this world, if, as they go out of it, they could see some hope for 
 the race coming in, as at the dawn of a former salvation hearts 
 old and worn with hopeless expectation cried, 'Lord, now lettest 
 Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen,' &c. 
 Meanwhile the flash of illumination coming suddenly, though 
 gathered like summer electricity from a woman's heart, is a very 
 precious thing, and one which harmonises with my own dim 
 anticipations, that I mean to let my mind dwell on much, for it 
 is to occupy one's self with a noble hope." 
 
 Mr. Mill in his last and posthumous work recommended this 
 hope as rational because joy-giving (or good for Being). 
 
 Intuition of reason from experience. — Eobertson says again, " To 
 speak decidedly is not necessarily to speak presumptuously. 
 There are questions the decision of which has become an intui- 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 123 
 
 Hon, the result of years of feeling and thought which has been 
 the day-star to a man's darkness, the fountain light of all his 
 seeing, which has interpreted him to himself, made all clear 
 where all was perplexed before, been the key to the riddle of 
 truths which before seemed contradictory, become part of his 
 very being, and for which he holds himself cheerfully prepared 
 to sacrifice all that is commonly held dear. With respect to 
 such convictions as these, to speak with hesitation or uncertainty 
 would not be modesty but affectation." 
 
 " The eternal moon of love, under whose motions life's dull 
 billows move." 
 
 " My life was a stagnant pool till the gentle Eulalie," &c. — 
 Edgar Poe, 
 
 *' La raison triomphe de la mort et travailler pour elle, c'est 
 travailler pour I'eternit^." — Benan, 
 
 " Oh, too late beloved, too soon adored by me ! 
 For in the fields of immortality 
 My spirit should at first have worshipped thine, 
 A divine presence in a place divine. 
 Or should have moved beside it on this earth, 
 A shadow of that substance from its birth ; 
 But not as now. I love thee ; yes, I feel 
 That on the fountain of my heart a seal 
 Is set to keep its waters pure and bright 
 For thee, since in these tears true hearts delight. 
 AVe — are we not formed as notes of music are, 
 For one another though dissimilar, 
 Such difference without discord as can make 
 Those sweetest sounds in which all spirits shake 
 As trembling leaves in a continuous air ? 
 Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare 
 Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wrecked. 
 
 And towards the lodestar of my one desire 
 I flitted like a dizzy moth, whose flight 
 Is as a dead leaf in the owlet light, 
 
124 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 When it would seek in Hesper's setting sphere 
 
 A radiant death, a fiery sepulchre. 
 
 I would have followed though the grave between 
 
 Yawned like a gulf whose spectres are unseen, 
 
 And in that silence and in my despair 
 
 I questioned every tongueless wind that blew 
 
 Over my tower of mourning, as if it knew 
 
 Whither 'twas fled, this soul out of my soul. 
 
 No name could paint how beyond refuge I am thine. 
 
 Ah me ! I am not thine j I am a part of thee 1 
 
 One hope within two wills, one will beneath 
 
 Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death, 
 
 One heaven, one hell, one immortality, 
 
 Like flames too pure and light and unimbued 
 
 To nourish their bright lives with baser prey, 
 
 Which point to heaven and cannot pass away." 
 
 — Shelley, ' * Epipsychidion. " 
 
 "I loved, I love, and when I love no more 
 Let joys and griefs perish and leave despair 
 To ring the knell of hope. He stood beside me, 
 The embodied vision of the brightest dream, 
 Which like a dawn heralds the day of life. 
 The shadow of his presence made my world 
 A paradise. All familiar things he touched, 
 All common words he spoke, became to me 
 Like forms and sounds of a diviner world. 
 Calming me as the loveliness of heaven 
 Soothes the unquiet sea. And yet not so, 
 For he seemed stormy, and would often seem 
 A quenchless sun masked in portentous clouds ; 
 But he was not of them, nor they of him. 
 But as they hid his splendour from the earth. 
 He came and went, and left me what I am, alas ! " — Idem, 
 
 " Your words are 
 The echoes of a voice which on my heart 
 Sleeps like a melody of early days." 
 
 — Fragment of an Unfinished Drama, 
 
SELF-COmNSCIOUSNESS. 125 
 
 " The breath of peace we drew j 
 We felt the holy hush of love, 
 Still felt the centre of the magic circle ; 
 There was one fair form that filled 
 With love the loveless atmosphere." — Idem. 
 
 " Devrais-je dire que j'ai exists avant aujourd'hui. Non certes, 
 car j'aime pour la premiere fois, et je sens que dusse-je payer 
 ce jour Ik de ma vie ou ce qui est pire, des souffrances d'une 
 longue vie, je remercierais Dieu avec enthousiasme de me I'avoir 
 donn^. Oh, vivre de toute la puissance de son ^tre, toutes les 
 situations, toutes les sensations, toutes les forces morales et phy- 
 siques se r^velant avec une intensity, une clart^, et une pleni- 
 tude supreme. Cast done la I'amour ! Ah ! j'avais bien raison 
 d'y aspirer comme au souverain bien (summum bonum), dans 
 mes premieres heures de jeunesse ! Mais que j'etais loin de 
 savoir ce qu'un pareil sentiment quand il se reveille tout entier ren- 
 ferme de joies et de puissance. II me semble que d'aujourd'hui 
 je suis un homme. Hier, je n'6tais qu'un fantome. Uu voile 
 est tomb6 de devant mes yeux. J'attribuais a la solitude et k 
 la liberty une valeur qu'elles n'ont pas. Toutes choses m'apparais- 
 saient troubles et fantastiques, C'est tout simple ; j'etais seul dans 
 la vie, quiconque est seul est fou, et cette sagesse qui se preserve et 
 se defend de la vie complete (mariage) est un veritable 4tat 
 d'alienation. Mais vivre a deux, sentir qu'il y a sous le ciel un 
 ^tre qui vous pr^fere k lui meme et qui vous foi'ce a lui rendre tout 
 ce qu'il se retire paur vous le donner ; sortir absolument de ce triste 
 moi pour vivre dans une autre ^me, pour s'isoler avec elle de tout 
 ce qui n'est pas V amour. Mon Dieu, quelle Strange et mysterieuse 
 f^licit^, et pour quoi est-ce ainsi ? Autre myst^re ! 
 
 "La raison cette vision du vrai absolu r^pond que la seule 
 femme qu'on puisse adorer est celle que vous a jet^ dans I'^tat 
 surnatural ou me voici. Je suis ^veilee ; je ne rive plus ; 
 j'aime, et je suis aime. Je vis dans cette region que je prenais 
 pour un id^al imageux, pour une creation de ma fantasie, et que 
 je touche, respire et poss^de comme une reality. Je vis par tout 
 mes organes, et surtout par ce sixieme sens (reflective reason), qui 
 resume et depasse tons les autres, ce sens intellectuel qui voit, 
 entend et comprend un ordre de choses immuable, qui coop^re 
 
126 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 h Teuvre sans fins, sans limites de la vie superieure de la vie en 
 Dieu ! Ah ! le positivisme, le convenu, le pretendu r^alisme de 
 la vie humane dans la soci^t^. Oh, mon Dieu, laissez moi dans 
 r^ternit^ le seul souvenir de I'heure ou je suis." — Geoo'ge Sand. 
 
 **Live for life past death and doubt." 
 
 ** Not to suffer is to want the conscience of the jubilant." 
 
 — 3Irs. Broiuning, 
 
 "Where there is no ideal there is no discontent." "The 
 shadow on the dial proves the presence of the sun." 
 
 "God be praised for anguish which has tried, for delight 
 which has satisfied." 
 
 " Desire was absent, that provides great deeds from out the 
 greatness of prevenient thoughts." 
 
 *' Behold, who blames a crooked course when not a goal is there 
 to round the fervid striving of the games ] " — Mrs. Browning. 
 
 " An ignorance of means may minister to greatness, but igno- 
 rance of aims makes it impossible to be great at all." 
 
 "Living and loving, they cannot slacken their firm essential 
 hold upon each other." 
 
 " The best is yet to be ; 
 The best of life, for which the first was made. 
 Trust God — see all — nor be afraid." 
 
 " The universal includes the particular, as the particular is an 
 instance of the universal law or order. The beginning includes the 
 end in reason. The nature of a thing involves its destination." 
 
 " I see the whole design ; 
 I who saw power, now see love. 
 Maker, remake complete ; 
 I trust what Thou shalt do. " 
 
 " For us and love, failure only when God fails " (fails in truth, 
 fails in goodness, fails in wisdom or knowledge of means to 
 ends). "This world's use will have been ended." 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 127 
 
 " The evil is null — is nought — is silence (felt as painful), but 
 implying sound." 
 
 *'The reward is of the nature of the being, so is the punish- 
 ment." 
 
 " Intuitions realised exhibit the idea that lay at the heart of 
 all their tentatives, and crystallise into neural representation of 
 formal or universal laws of being " (logical grouping). 
 
 " We are in no danger from other personalities than our own 
 if we have possession of truth in respect to natural and spiritual, 
 i.€., moral and religious, things." 
 
 " The need that exists and is not felt is want indeed." 
 
 " Keason is the eyesight of the soul." 
 
 "Man guides himself by his past as well as by his present 
 impressions, which, reacted on by thought, become experience." 
 
 " Reason — the fountain light of all man's seeing." 
 
 " Nous sommes incapables de ne pas souhaiter la connaissance 
 de la v^rit^ et du bonheur." — Pascal. 
 
 The wise virgins of the parable were " zweck massig ; " the 
 foolish virgins, " zweck lossig." 
 
 "Ce qui est vraiment ou r^element ndcessaire (pour le bonheur) 
 ne peut etre un mal." 
 
 " Tous les hommes d^sirent d'etres heureux, c'est le motif de 
 toutes les actions." — Pascal. 
 
 " Toutes nos actions et toutes nos pens^es doivent prendre 
 des routes si differentes selon qu'il y aura des biens ^ternels k 
 esperer ou non, qu'il est impossible de faire une demarche avec 
 sens et jugement qu'en la r^glant par la vue de ce point qui 
 doit ^tre notre dernier objet." — Pascal. 
 
 " Les effets sont connus sensible tandis que les raisons ne sont 
 visible qu'a I'esprit — I'esprit voit les causes " (or the principle of 
 sufficient reason, which is the good for Being). — Pascal. 
 
128 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 " 'Tis a base abandonment of reason to resign our right of 
 thought, our last and only place of refuge." — Loi'd Byron. 
 
 " Chaque chose a sa voie, 
 L'aigle vole au ceil, 
 Le vautour k la tombe, 
 Et la priere au ciel." 
 
 As chemistry is the science of the reciprocal relations of mole- 
 cules, morality is the science of the reciprocal relations of spirits, 
 metaphysics is the science of the relation between thought and 
 Being. This relation being one of utter correspondence. 
 
 Self-love, prudence, and also social sympathy, are kept in 
 balance or harmony by the love of God or sense of duty to Him, 
 which requires the rational maintenance of each of these two 
 principles as equally essential to Being ; to glorify God is to fulfil 
 His design in creation. As the means cannot be contradictory of 
 the end, Love being joy ^ hate or discord can never be the means to 
 the end of joy. 
 
 My object in accumulating and presenting to the 
 reader the above quotations '''' has been to show that 
 the subjective sense of completeness or *' fulness of 
 Being " corresponds with the objective ideal of per- 
 fection of Being ; but before bidding adieu to a public 
 to which this work may not appeal, I feel it necessary 
 to contradict a popular fallacy on the subject of con- 
 jugal love. It has not only been thought by indivi- 
 duals, but the theory is exhibited in the monastic 
 institutions of all times and places, that in the dual 
 life the satisfied heart closes itself against it kind, 
 and even against the Merciful Ordainer of its joys ; 
 but this, like many other widespread doctrines, is an 
 
 * It was Burton's " Anatomy of Melancholy " that suggested this plan 
 to me of enforcing my argument by quotations. 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 129 
 
 altogether illogical view of the supreme relation of love. 
 Yes, I will call it the supreme, because the only equi- 
 valent or absolutely mutual relation of love, though not 
 the supreme form of love, which, of course, is divine 
 love, or rather adoration of the Father of spirits. 
 
 But what relation can be so close, so intimate, so 
 near and dear by the terms (a finite being cannot also 
 by the terms be the equivalent of the Infinite Being) 
 as that of complemental union between two spirits thus 
 made perfect through union, according to the divine 
 constitution of their nature ? But so far from this 
 union rendering the heart callous towards other beings, 
 least of all to the Joy-giver, it is the well-known 
 peculiarity of love that the more it gives the more it 
 has to give. And for this, as for everything else, 
 there is a cause or sufiicient reason in the nature of 
 Being. The more a faculty is exercised the stronger 
 it becomes ; the more unbroken is a habit of feeling — 
 say that of benevolence, and we may, alas, say also 
 that of malevolence — the. more triumphant is its em- 
 pire over us. 
 
 Of course, I am quite aware that when marriage is 
 a mere partnership of worldly interests, the selfish- 
 ness a deux may be harder, more impermeable than 
 it could perhaps grow to be in the case of an isolated, 
 and therefore more generally dependent, being. But 
 real, because spiritual,"^* love, from feeling neither the 
 weakness of fear nor the grudgings of envy, has 
 
 * "Cette victoire de I'esprit sur la matiere aboutissant a la joie de 
 rhoinme." — Victor Hugo. 
 
 I 
 
I30 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 not the causes for malevoleuce in itself which accom- 
 pany the sense of depressed vitality, of loneliness, and 
 desertion. To feel one's self " strong, beautiful, and 
 free," is surely a trumpet-call, as to the knights of 
 old, to break the prison bars of others, whether they 
 be physical or mental. Still to fall back on the 
 scientific analogy of complementary colours, though 
 red and green together do really combine in some 
 faint degree all the colours of the rainbow, and thus 
 constitute a grey (French white), yet it is the One 
 only good and absolutely perfect Being, the un- 
 created Light, that shines in the full splendour of 
 the pure white ray. So imperfect, finite, halting are 
 even each pair of us, as a sample or type of per- 
 sonality, that we can never dispense with Divine love 
 as the crowning condition of human joy. 
 
 This is the universal communion of souls for which 
 we are sighing and meanwhile preparing here. Love 
 is no Moloch sacrifice to be ofiered to the God of love, 
 no hideous toll of mutilated members, crushed hearts, 
 suppressed intellectual faculties, and disappointed 
 hopes, but the aloe flower of developed spirituality, 
 the wedding garment in which we must be clad to 
 enter into the rest prepared for us from the begin- 
 ning. For the Lord of that high feast of souls will 
 not have it said to Him, " Lord, I knew Thee to be 
 a hard man, reaping where Thou hadst not sowed," 
 nor like Mr. Browning's Calibans Setebos, who in the 
 horror of the tempest exclaims, " Lo ! lieth flat and 
 loveth Setebos ! Maketh his teeth meet through his 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 131 
 
 upper lip, will let those quails fly, will not eat this 
 month one little mess of whelks, so he may scape." 
 
 Years ago I read this awful picture of E. Browning s 
 of a savage's faith with a shivering sense of tradi- 
 tionary sympathy. But since I have learned that 
 the King of glory is the God of love, I have thought 
 it right and fitting to strive to point out to others 
 the way to joy, it being certain that only in perfect 
 joy can the soul of man find rest. 
 
 " Where the desire of our desire is attained, there 
 make me immortal." 
 
 I have produced this, "the great crowd of witnesses" 
 to my principles, to show I am not a mere dreamer of 
 dreams. 
 
 ^ 
 
part HI. 
 
 TENDENCY OR DESIRE FOR THE GOOD FOR BEING 
 THE SOURCE OF MORALITY, OR THE DESIRE FOR 
 THE UNIVERSALLY GOOD. 
 
part III. 
 
 TENDENCY OR DESIRE FOR THE GOOD FOR BEING 
 THE SOURCE OF MORALITY, OR THE DESIRE FOR 
 THE UNIVERSALLY GOOD. 
 
 Having now, I trust, shown that all reasoning is from 
 our own being, the one thing positively known by 
 us, and which is the only key to the knowledge of 
 other beings, those who agree to the analysis of 
 reason which I have given must, I thiuk, grant that 
 just as food is the one thing necessary for bodily 
 growth, so the one thing necessary for spiritual 
 development is the loving communion of souls. And 
 having, as I consider, proved that the highest, most 
 perfect realisation of this communion is in the union 
 of two mutually related complementary spirits, I think 
 the truth that this is the rationale of love is placed 
 beyond question, that it is a necessity of reason to 
 believe it as well as a moral duty to act in accord- 
 ance with it. 
 
 That it is the relations of similarity, identity, 
 equality, or analogy in which other beings stand to 
 our own being that reveals to us the universality of 
 the principles of Sufficient Cause (Being or actual ex- 
 istence). Efficient Cause, i.e., the action and reaction of 
 beings upon each other, which produces effects, i.e., 
 
136 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 immediate changes in states of Being leaving Being, 
 and the natural tendency of Being untouched, and 
 Final Cause, or tendency to the good for Being, I 
 have endeavoured in the first part of my essay to 
 show; but my chief aim in this painfully, perhaps 
 tediously, worked -out demonstration has been to 
 show that the one spiritual mean to the end of 
 spiritual satisfaction or perfection of Being or hap- 
 piness is love, as it is felt by persons in all its 
 various degrees, according to the analogy or to the 
 harmony of nature existing between them, in pro- 
 portion as their various idiosyncrasies harmonise 
 or are similar. Love alone answers Aristotle's 
 definition of the requirement of the siimmum 
 honum. It is an end in itself, i.e., blessedness in it- 
 self, and not merely a mean to some further end.'" 
 Confucius and some of the Jewish prophets insisted 
 upon justice, mercy, and uprightness. Buddha 
 preached love or charity in the form of self-abnega- 
 tion and renunciation ; but it was reserved for the 
 followers of Christ to realise the rational concep- 
 tion of self-love as well as that of social and of divine 
 love. *' Love thy neighbour as thyself, and the 
 Lord thy God with all thine heart." Next came 
 Swedenborg and Fourrier, the former of whom saw in 
 part the greater perfection of the happiness of united 
 pairs, the latter made this highest happiness to con- 
 
 * The syllogistic movement of thouglit is seen in the tendency of 
 Being as the outcome of individuality and relativity— general benevo- 
 lence — Be 11 eficence. 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 137 
 
 sist in class attractions, dividing men into phalanxes. 
 / have endeavoured to show in full that such a 
 naturally ordained union of two complementary spirits 
 is ontologically necessary for mutual perfection of 
 Being, leaving the resultant happiness out of con- 
 sideration. Only the Father in heaven is perfect, i.e., 
 possesses in absolute perfection all the attributes of 
 Being, or personality. What Hegel calls the so-being 
 of each creature implies limitation, deficiency in some 
 point of Being or in development of Being, therefore 
 the sexual union has been devised so that man and 
 woman may each be the supplement of the other. 
 When we speak of man or human nature, we mean 
 man and woman ; thus each individual idiosyncrasy 
 requires to be complemented for perfection of Being 
 by another individuality in union with which the too 
 much of one quality is balanced by the too little of it 
 in the other, the result being the equilibrium of feeling 
 and intelligence which we vainly seek for in one imper- 
 fect human being. All the members of the race are, in 
 fact, mutually dependent upon social communion for 
 every accession to knowledge, and the added well-being 
 which comes with it ; but the conjugal union is, as it 
 has been truly said, not even altruistic — it is the con- 
 dition of the sense of fulness of Being and joy in Being 
 in the Ego or subject, and cannot, therefore, be treated 
 as an accidental relation, so as to leave it open for 
 books to be written and institutions to be founded 
 upon the theory of the superiority of non-marriage to 
 marriage. 
 
138 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 If the means to the end of joy and sense of perfec- 
 tion of Being devised by the Creator be neglected, of 
 course the penalty in this case, as in every other, 
 is that the end, happiness or perfection of Being, is 
 not attained. Although this subject of conjugal 
 love is so important, not only as a means of happi- 
 ness, but because of the powerful influence it exerts 
 over the morals of the people, yet it is frequently 
 considered subordinate to the frivolities of dress and 
 fashion, and spoken of as a ''fluke" or a lottery, 
 laughed at as sentimentality, or even regarded as rather 
 a demoralising agent in character. If the whole order 
 of the physical world depends on suitable physical 
 relations, we may be quite sure that in the moral 
 world right relations are of even greater importance, 
 the relations, viz., of spirits to each other and to the 
 Father of spirits, because here the relations are 
 between conscious beings. In the Greville Memoirs 
 this admirable remark occurs — " In this age of scien- 
 tific induction surely instances ought to be accumu- 
 lated and experiments made so as to arrive at the 
 knowledge of what constitutes happiness." That 
 there is only one relation '"'' in which it is to be found 
 in the highest degree, the poetry of all ages, of all 
 times and places, bears witness, namely, that of 
 reciprocal and perfect mutual love. This has been 
 confirmed by the biographies of many of the noblest 
 
 * Victor Hugo, in " L'homme qui rit," says : " Deux lacunes se com- 
 binaient pour se completer. lis se tenaient pour ce qui leur manquait : 
 uu prodigieux besoin. Tun de I'autre etait au fond de leur amour. lis 
 se suffisaient." 
 
SELF -C0N3CI0 USNESS. 1 39 
 
 of the race ; of course, only amongst them could one 
 rationally look for the perfection of a relation which 
 involves the high spiritual development of both factors 
 in it. 
 
 The essential relativity of being makes love to 
 be both means and end ; we are happy in perfect 
 love, and the realisation of the ideal is the end. 
 Herbert Spencer in his "Social Statics" says, "We 
 predict good or evil of this or the other scheme 
 because of its accordance or discordance with cer- 
 tain preconceived laws of life. * Obey or suffer ; * 
 no exception from the penalty of disobedience is 
 to be expected." Now although I have as much 
 as possible limited myself to a constructive doc- 
 trine, leaving to others the destruction of other 
 and opposing doctrines, still there is one exception 
 I must make to the general rule of composition 
 I have adopted. As it has been remarked in a late 
 contemporary review, "people have taken to be 
 ashamed of desiring to be happy." Carlyle indeed 
 scouted such an aim with contempt, yet, as Herbert 
 Spencer says, " Do not the Brahmin, the Buddhist, 
 the Mohammedan, and the Christian codes of morality 
 alike say, 'You shall not do this and this because 
 they produce evil, and you shall do that and that 
 because they will produce good ' ? " Surely of all forms 
 of asceticism the denial of the desire of well-beinor is 
 the most preposterous. All other self-abnegation and 
 mutiLation had as its professed object states of superior 
 well-being, but now the very principle on which our 
 
I40 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 physical organism or nervous system is constituted, 
 the shrinking from lesion and the stretching out to- 
 wards beneficent external influences, is made a mock of, 
 or absurdity of all absurdities ; the desire for spiritual 
 happiness or well-being is pronounced immoral. But 
 the particular point of view which I must call atten- 
 tion to from its being the pivot of my whole analysis 
 of reason is this — that as all reasoning is from the 
 known or experienced in Being, whilst every father 
 and mother in this and every fairly civilised country 
 both strive to produce physical well-being or health, 
 which has been called the happiness of the body, and 
 above all spiritual satisfaction or joy of life in their 
 own offspring, however sublime they may think them- 
 selves in pretending that they do not require happiness 
 for themselves, they are violating the principle of 
 contradiction in such a way that they are bound to 
 show cause for supposing happiness, well-being, or 
 the sense of perfection of Being, a desirable thing for 
 others, as, if their own nervous system were so consti- 
 tuted that they could take delight in pain or physical 
 suffering and mental or spiritual distress, they ought 
 equally to prick, pinch, and shove their children all 
 day and every day, and above all to endeavour in every 
 way to frustrate them in their attempts to attain the 
 desires of their hearts. 
 
 If, on the other hand, they admit that they desire 
 to feel delight in Being, they are necessarily bound 
 by reason, as the substitution or recognition of 
 similars, to endeavour to give heart's ease to others, 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 141 
 
 and to produce in them the good health, physical and 
 moral, which leads to exhilaration of feeling or cheer- 
 fulness. And as I have, as I hold, demonstrated that 
 the end is only to be attained by the use of or 
 through the means — namely, the putting ourselves 
 en rapport with the objects that are conducive to 
 our well-being — as we must procure food for our 
 bodies, for their well-being, so for the well-being of 
 our souls, spiritual union with one who possesses those 
 attributes which form the complement to our own 
 imperfect being, and spiritual harmony with all 
 souls, above all, with that of the Father of spirits, is 
 the indispensable requirement. 
 
 Love is self-realisation, not self-sacrifice. In 
 remorse we have the pangs of outraged self-esteem. 
 The absence of love is the ennui of the heart. 
 
 Love is the good for spiritual Being ; we are 
 happy in loving, miserable in hating. Christ unhesi- 
 tatingly pronounced that love was enough for duty 
 — for duty as well as for joy. Love thy neighbour 
 as thyself ; or, as the Italian word for love is, " voter 
 hene,' desire and seek what is good for others as for 
 thyself ; have regard for or consideration for the well- 
 being of others as for your own, and love the Lord thy 
 God with thy whole soul. But here, as opposed to the 
 complementary union of souls, it has been said, it is 
 selfishness to want to be happy oneself; surely conjugal 
 love is a selfish kind of altruism, and therefore not 
 admirable. Here we see a survival of the old devil- 
 worship, in which the groans of the self-mutilated. 
 
142 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 self-immolated virtue are alone supposed to be accept- 
 able to the Creator. Oh, hideous departure from 
 reason I Why should He have created if only partly 
 or wholly to destroy ? But until we revive the wicker 
 baskets for our babes to be held in the scorching 
 arms of Moloch, whilst still, on the contrary, we 
 do everything to alleviate their slightest pains, and 
 to give them every pleasure consonant with reason, 
 and consequently with abstract well-being, we shall 
 show how inconsequent, inconsistent we are with 
 our own pretension of liking suffering and not 
 liking to be happy ourselves. The order of thought 
 has been shown to be the order of feeliog, of intelli- 
 gence, of causation, and of will or natural self-deter- 
 mination. The order of feeling is attraction for 
 similars; the order of intelligence or knowledge is 
 recognition of similarity in causes. The natural 
 order of willing is to have the good for Being as 
 motive ; feeling together with intelligence of causation 
 help us to the knowledge of what is for the good for 
 Being. "This is the age of inquiry into origins." 
 I have endeavoured to show the genesis of all the 
 great axioms of reason in the primary fundamental 
 subjective concepts or understanding of the causes 
 of the feelings, intelligence, and natural motivation 
 of the Ego. " Neural excitation, grouping or logical 
 classification, and determination to action according 
 to these," when reflected on through memory, lead to 
 generalisations of concrete instances, which, being 
 endorsed by the experience of the race, become 
 
SELF- CONSCIO USNESS, 143 
 
 accepted as explanations of the cosmos and guides 
 to action ; these form the groundwork of public 
 education as well as of philosophy. All rational 
 conduct must be in relation to the three principles 
 of reason — the principle of Sufficient Cause (Being), 
 the principle of Efficient Cause (relativity of Being), 
 and that of Final Cause or tendency of Being. 
 
 Out necessary ideal of the good for Being is the 
 satisfaction of essential needs. " Our intellectual 
 need is to know objects in their true nature." The 
 need of our heart is companionship ; the need or 
 requirement of our will is action in conformity with 
 the imperative, emotional, intellectual, and moral 
 needs of our nature. In reflective consciousness 
 (observation of the subject-object) the mind proceeds 
 in exactly the same way as in direct consciousness 
 (according to the categories of the understanding). 
 " Objects are the correlate of consciousness, as con- 
 sciousness is the correlate of objects." The necessary 
 inferences of reflective reason can no more be ignored 
 or regarded as invalid than can the categories of the 
 understanding accompanying existence. The stability 
 and uniformity of nature obtain between remote and 
 immediate objects of rational consciousness, and the 
 sameness between the sequences of immediate and 
 remote objects is equal. " Eeason," says Mr. Shad- 
 w^orth Hodgson, " constitutes the subjective aspect 
 alone its own object." "Keason works by means of 
 voluntary redintegration s of consciousness. " " Keason 
 compares one state of consciousness with another, in 
 
144 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 order to see which of them is most true and which of 
 them is most good." '* When states of consciousness 
 are rejected as bad, we are said to repent — to turn 
 away from them ; " hence progress towards truth. 
 Truth is thus seen to be purely rational, or related to 
 Being and the consequent concepts of the understand- 
 ing. In the system of Eapila, the first Hindoo writer 
 on metaphysics, all things are made to minister to the 
 soul ; and in the words of Hegel, everything in heaven 
 and earth aims only at this, that the soul may know 
 itself, may make itself its object, i.e., may work at its 
 own development — w^ork out its own salvation. 
 
 To these principles every rational being can ra- 
 tionally and should conscientiously bear testimony, 
 upon penalty of self-contradiction, which is the incon- 
 ceivable to reason and the shocking to morality. To 
 strive for self-reliance we must feel sure of our 
 principles of action. Self-restraint according to prin- 
 ciples of reason for the preservation of integrity, of 
 physical and spiritual Being, is our duty to ourselves 
 and to our Maker ; and in order to this, it is our duty 
 to seek to ascertain what are the relations in which 
 we stand to other beings and other existences, as it is 
 only through the maintenance of favourable healthy 
 or vital relations, and by the avoidance of depressing, 
 deteriorating, and degrading relations, that we can 
 effect the perfection of Being, or attain to the hap- 
 piness which we are constituted so as to desire 
 for ourselves and for those we love, and conse- 
 quently to regard as the Final Cause or rational 
 
SELF- CONSCIO USNESS. 145 
 
 purpose of action. No relations that are destructive 
 of moral Being can be held with impunity, rela- 
 tions being good or bad according as they are or 
 are not supporting to the integrity of Being, or the 
 perfection of being, which is the Final Cause of 
 endeavour. In the rationale of love which I have 
 offered to the public, it has been my object to show 
 that just as the body requires daily bread, so the 
 spirit of man requires daily communion with a com- 
 plementary spirit, one which supplements his indivi- 
 dual deficiencies of intelligence or character, for him 
 to have the sense of fulness or completeness of Being, 
 which is joy or health of spiritual Being, just as only a 
 properly supported or nourished body can be a healthy 
 one. Not that such union would tend to isolate such 
 a pair from their kind, for each human being has his 
 or her special gifts and faculties which make each 
 or both of them in some degree dependent on all other 
 rational beings, but it is no longer the hankering, dis- 
 satisfied yearning of the solitary soul for its mate, but 
 only a cheerful and friendly, but not too intimate, 
 dependence upon the outer world, so that each one, or 
 rather each pair, may go their way without breaking 
 th e heart-strings of the other. Thus the mother can see 
 with joy her best-beloved child in the arms of another 
 with delight instead of with jealousy or regret ; and 
 let it never be lost sight of that the conjugal relation 
 is the ouly one that, in the nature of things, can be 
 enduringly counted on for providing this support to 
 the soul, not only because friend drifts away from 
 
146 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 friend, brother from sister, and child from parent, but 
 because of the essential and unapproachable harmony 
 of the complementary spiritual relation. Where the 
 source or cause of joy of life is, there will a person 
 voluntarily be. Neither of them is happy in the 
 absence of the other. 
 
 It has been remarked by philosophers that nothing 
 is more striking in the order of nature than the 
 simplicity of the means by which great effects are 
 produced. The aspiration after perfection in every- 
 thing, and most of all in our own being, the sense 
 of perfection of Being or blessedness^ is only attained 
 through love — the love of kind in all its degrees, 
 proportionate to the affinities of the beings concerned, 
 and through this love of the brother we have seen, 
 as both Christ and Plato taught, the adoration of the 
 invisible Father. These are the conditions of happi- 
 ness or blessedness, these bringing with them the har- 
 mony of all rational wills with the will of the Supreme 
 Being, and the passing away of all grudges and 
 envyings, each one having his own heart's desire. 
 And if I am asked, why then is not this union now and 
 always found upon this earth ? I reply that w^hat it 
 is the object of spiritual development to attain and 
 be fitted for cannot precede the educational process 
 of development, which chiefly consists in ideal realisa- 
 tion of the proper objects of rational desire, just as 
 blessedness consists in the actual fulfilment of it. 
 Through loneliness we learn our own insufficiency to 
 ourselves for happiness, and learn to appreciate the 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 147 
 
 rest prepared for us from the beginning in perfect 
 love, human and divine. 
 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his " Social Statics," says, 
 " Just as the attractions and affinities which are latent 
 in separate atoms become visible when those atoms are 
 approximated, so the forces that are dormant in the 
 isolated man are rendered active by juxtaposition 
 with his fellows." 
 
 And he goes on to say, " Answering to each of 
 the actions which it is requisite for us to per- 
 form, we find in ourselves some prompter called 
 a desire, and the more essential the action, the more 
 powerful is the impulse to its performance, and the 
 more intense the gratification derived therefrom." 
 The sufficient reason or properly Final Cause of action 
 is the good for our spiritual or real Being, but special 
 desires become often so irresistible to us, like that 
 of the miser to accumulate wealth, that they are 
 gratified to the neglect of the end which all should 
 subserve. 
 
 Also, in his " Social Statics," Mr. Herbert Spencer 
 says, " It is desirable that there should be a segrega- 
 tion of those best fitted for each other's society; hence 
 the sentiment of friendship." Otherwise we have the 
 " lowering of society and wedlock to animal gregari- 
 ousness.'' Now, as I have endeavoured to demon- 
 strate that in the necessary recognition of similars, 
 which constitutes reason, from contemplating in in- 
 trospective reflection the subject- object or Ego, we 
 are obliged to "substitute a similar" to ourselves, 
 
148 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 as Sufficient Cause, however superior to us in 
 strength and perfection of attributes, to account for 
 the existence of the Ego ; so when we see fidelity 
 or unchangeableness of nature or purpose to be the 
 distinctive characteristic of the noblest of the race, 
 we cannot help inferring, arguing, or reasoning from 
 analogy, that when the Supreme Being or Creator 
 implants such fidelity to feeling in us. He Himself 
 must have a benevolent purpose in so doing. We 
 thus take this very subjective fidelity as a hostage of 
 objective fulfilment of desire ; otherwise the truer, 
 the tenderer, the nobler the nature of a human being, 
 the more certainly and eternally would he be doomed 
 to that damnation eternal or sufi'ering which even 
 those who most support the doctrine have thought to 
 be the lot of the faithless and frivolous. " Vandyke 
 will be of the company," said the dying Gainsborough, 
 and Victor Cousin remarks that in David's great 
 picture of the death of Socrates, Plato is not repre- 
 sented as looking at the face of Socrates, that he was 
 so soon to see no more, but with raptured gaze 
 upturned to the promised ideal life beyond ; for the 
 promised land of reason is the fulfilment of the ideal 
 in the human breast. Being, though under every 
 variety of condition, still only Being, is the object 
 of conception, as its perfection is the object of faith, 
 love, and hope. 
 
 Herbert Spencer says, " Were the expediency theory 
 otherwise satisfactory, it would be still useless, since 
 it requires nothing less than Omniscience to carry it 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 149 
 
 into practice." Whereas throiigli natural and rational 
 desire the soul instinctively discerns the condition of 
 happiness, so long as it never loses sight of the main- 
 tenance of the integrity of all the personal attributes 
 of feeling, intelligence of causation, and will for the 
 good for spiritual Being. Herbert Spencer defines the 
 moral sense as a natural impulse (tendency) towards 
 upright conduct. As we receive gratification from 
 honest and fair dealing, the sentiment of justice 
 arises in us. All the important requirements of our 
 being are fulfilled at the solicitations of desire. "As 
 we are guided to our bodily welfare by instincts, and 
 as also from instincts spring the domestic relationships, 
 by which other important objects are compassed, it is 
 highly probable tliat the same mental mechanism is 
 employed in all cases." Even Bentham, after deriding 
 a supposed moral sense, has to fall back upon the 
 intuition ''that all men have equal claims to happiness," 
 which is the satisfaction, not the renunciation of desire. 
 " Amongst the Hindoos, sacrifice became a sort of 
 magic ; their views of the power of sacrificial and other 
 rites, and the efficacy of the work done, resembled the 
 ojnts operatum of the middle ages." — Sir E. Colebrooke. 
 My new doctrine of love consists in showing that love 
 is its own reward, i.e., that it alone is joy, and there- 
 fore no sacrifice of self. Love is the originator of 
 the sense of responsibility or obligation ; from the 
 strong desire of aiding others the idea of social duty 
 is evolved, and where love is, there also are faith and 
 hope. Self-consciousness or Egoism reflects its own 
 
ISO PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 felt internal unity of Being on externally recognised 
 attributes of Being ; hence it is the Revealer of the 
 Supreme Being or type of Personality. This is the 
 rationale of the God-concept or necessary inference 
 of Deity from reflection on the Ego and the rational 
 order of the universe. 
 
 Now with our bodies constituted as they are, for 
 this planet and this planet only, all the particular phy- 
 sical needs and the this-worldly advantages, generally 
 so much coveted, do and will gradually fall ofi" from 
 our scale of essential needs, but as long as our spiritual 
 being lasts, spiritual afiinities and our essential need 
 of spiritual sympathy must endure; therefore the 
 instinct has existed in all ages and amongst all races 
 of men that they will find their dead again, those 
 that they have loved, and so must ever seek for in 
 the land of the hereafter, in the kingdom of the 
 blessed ; for " where thou art is heaven to me, and 
 heaven without thee cannot be." This testimony 
 of the heart, ascending like incense hour after hour 
 to the throne of the Father who implanted in our 
 hearts such love and such fidelity, is the witness, the 
 comforter, the harbinger of the great salvation to 
 come — salvation from sufi'ering worse than death — 
 salvation from the death of the soul through sin, and 
 broken-ofi* relationship with the Father of spirits and 
 with His spiritual ofispring. 
 
 As heaven is spiritual harmony, so hell is spiritual 
 discord, and so the raison d'etre of love is for the end 
 
SELF- CONSCIO USNESS. 1 5 1 
 
 or Final Cause of creation to be accomplished, 
 namely, perfection of spiritual Being, happiness 
 eternal. 
 
 The only ground of equality conceivable amongst 
 persons is moral equality in benevolence, many gifts 
 to one spirit. 
 
 Virtue (from r?V, man) consists in being such a 
 person as God created us to be. God, not ourselves, 
 provides the objective relations necessary to this, but 
 we must be true to these relations or the end will not 
 be accomplished. 
 
 " The sense of iornorance is the secret of his wish to 
 know " (Argyll, Moral Sense) to escape from the pain 
 of it. 
 
 Association of ideas or neural grouping precedes 
 action, but grouping may be accidental through 
 habit, instead of normal or rational. 
 
 The sense of distress in or through not understand- 
 ing argues the destiny of understanding the universe 
 and the relation in which we stand to it and its Author. 
 What we feel that we ouo^lit to do is to act accordinor to 
 the nature God has given us, to be true to ourselves, to 
 natural feeling, rationalised by intelligence of causa- 
 tion ; this is what our conception of obligation resolves 
 itself into — the natural, normal, therefore commanded, 
 association of ideas with action, instead of a pig- 
 headed or tiger-like action without reflection. One 
 of the simple forms of obligation is gratitude, which 
 involves the association of ideas. Moral judgment 
 is an exercise of the moral sense, as intellectual judg- 
 
152 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 mentis an exercise of the intellectual sense, as aesthetic 
 judgment is the judgment of the emotional sense. 
 The sense of the true, the good, and the beautiful 
 are psychological senses ; the senses of smell and taste 
 are physiological. 
 
 Judgment is always reflective. '^ In the analysis 
 of mind we are dealing with one organic whole. 
 Not one of its faculties " (of feeling, intelligence, or 
 will) "can exist alone, or can exert its special function, 
 without the help of the others." Keason apprehends 
 one truth as the necessary consequence of another 
 through the principle of identity or analogy. " Ee- 
 flection passes in review the previous apprehensions 
 of the intellect or the suggestions of desire." The 
 supreme faculty of will determines the subject of 
 investigation, or the direction of thought, or the course 
 of conduct. " But all these faculties more or less 
 involve each other ; memory is the indispensable 
 servant of them all." Without memory there could 
 be no conscience. We are always measuring our 
 own conduct and that of others by the standard of 
 the moral sense which upon reflection we have adopted, 
 or which has been handed down to us by tradition, 
 or imposed on us as by authority, social or political. 
 The moral sense cannot work without the help of 
 feeling and reason ; moral judgments are of approval 
 or condemnation, according to whether purpose or 
 action is for the good or conservative of the integrity 
 of being, or deleterious or degrading to it. ^' The 
 moral perceptions can only be felt by a moral agent. 
 
SELF- CONSCIO USNESS, 1 53 
 
 and its judgments formed in respect to the activities 
 of a mind like its own." 
 
 " The only moral element in conduct is motive." 
 
 Freedom is necessarily assumed as a condition of 
 moral action. '*A man's action is right or wrong 
 according to his own knowledge." We may think 
 people always responsible to a certain extent for failure 
 of knowledge concerning the good. The absence of pur- 
 pose of good, and so of ascertaining the means to the 
 end, is itself immoral. A rational being knows that 
 for the end to be attained the means must be studied. 
 " There is no faculty of the mind," says Argyll, ''which 
 is independent of the processes of development which 
 result from its contact with the outer world," i.e., 
 from being placed under appropriate relations, rela- 
 tions being always the means provided in the Divine 
 wisdom for the accomplishment of an end. 
 
 '' Every exercise of the mind involves perception 
 of some rudimentary truth." '' As men know in- 
 stinctively what gives pleasure to themselves, there- 
 fore they know what gives pleasure to others" 
 (Argyll). " The things which give us pleasure are 
 the satisfaction of the needs of life," and " the acquisi- 
 tion of these is essential to well-being." 
 
 **Man is naturally asocial" (i.e., idiosyncratically 
 sympathetic) ''being; the desire of communicating plea- 
 sure and knowledge to others is natural to him." " It 
 is universally recognised as good that we ought to judge 
 of what is due to and is desired by others according to 
 our own estimate of the good or iesirable." " The in- 
 
154 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 stinctive feelinfy of moral oblio^ation is that we must 
 judge of our duty to others by what we hold to 
 be good for ourselves." '' The usefulness of a thing 
 means its conduciveness to some purpose ; a good 
 torture may mean a torture well calculated to gratify 
 some sentiment of revenge." " It is right to strive 
 for results that are beneficent, because it is being 
 true to our own nature, which is of God's ordin- 
 ance." *'The beneficent must be for the whole of 
 Being.'' 
 
 We may trust the Giver of the moral law that what 
 is right for us to do is also best for us, " at last 
 far ofi", at last to all." " The unity of our nature with 
 that of our kind makes our recognition of goodness 
 in the conduct of others towards ourselves inseparable 
 from our own consciousness of the needs and wants 
 of our own minds and bodies." What is wanted is 
 " a higlier understanding of the enjoyments and aims 
 of life." "Man is conscious of his own reason, and 
 of the relation in which it stands to the measure- 
 less intelligence of which the universe is full." 
 " With the beasts," says Argyll, ** as regards all 
 the enjoyments as well as all the work of life, 
 equality is the universal rule ; the females are 
 treated with a strange mixture of love, of loyalty, and 
 of devotion." " Throughout nature every creature 
 does handle the gifts which have been given to it 
 for the highest purposes of its being," *' whilst man 
 is prone to set up and invent standards of obligation 
 which are low, false, mischievous, even ruinous." 
 
SELF'CONSCIOUSNESS. 155 
 
 " The love of one from which there does not spring 
 the love of all is but a worthless thing." 
 
 Whilst the love of God has been mistakenly opposed 
 to the love of man, and God has been supposed only 
 to delight in a broken heart, instead of His own 
 assurance " that He doth not willingly, malignantly? 
 but only for our own good, afflict us," being relied on, 
 man's religion has been a corrupting instead of an 
 elevating or moralising sentiment. 
 
 Amongst the human senses there is one which 
 is of the greatest importance for the happiness of 
 man — the " individual sense," by which each estimates 
 each. It is the emphatic form of the sense of rela- 
 tivity. George Sand says, " Chaque organisation suit 
 sa logique personelle," the instinctive recognition of 
 similars or suitables, which accounts for true love at 
 first sight, when we are more struck by idiosyncrasies 
 than w^hen habitual intercourse has dulled our keen 
 surprised sensibility to them. The rationale of this 
 feeling, or rather the term that best defines it, is 
 the sense of one's own Being finding its complement 
 or completion in that of another. The less intense 
 and vivid forms of the individual sense or judgment 
 are seen in spontaneous liking or friendship. There 
 are normal forms of judgment, and the forms ** of 
 thought being self-identical, self-proven," there are 
 also idiosyncratic estimates. 
 
 Marriage is more than a partnership — it is a union, 
 the most efiective in raising the nature of man. 
 Marriage has its source in the highest capacities of 
 
156 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 our nature — love and faith. '* Every social movement 
 crediting the authority of women would tend to 
 develop in man the virtue he has always required 
 of women — fidelity." " The women," says Emily 
 Pfeiflfer, **are the moulds in which the souls of its 
 men are set." It is essential that all forces which 
 afiect human action should be duly accredited and 
 openly applied. It is good for the sanity of intellect 
 that feeling and action should sufier no divorce. 
 
 Of what inner facts and principles, asks Plato, 
 are the obvious facts and principles, without which 
 society would not go on, the exponents ? The ex- 
 planation of the growth of the state is, according 
 to Plato, not historical, but psychological and logical. 
 So it is with the chief social institutions, -such as 
 marriage. ^' The maternal functions, which tend to 
 tenderness of heart," and the consequent relation of 
 the temporarily invalided and incapacitated member 
 to the bread-winner and protector, both of mother 
 and child, establishes an irreducible type of the 
 relation between the sexes. 
 
 Some author of reputation has remarked that 
 Nature has committed the care of the feeble infant 
 and ignorant child to the most timorous sex, and 
 with good reason, pour cause, as the French say, 
 that she may better watch over them. 
 
 Plato held that if men could once realise what their 
 true interests required them to do, they would do it. 
 " No soul is willingly deprived of truth." 
 
 Shelley has this line, *' These verses are too sad to 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 157 
 
 send to you, but that I know, happy yourself, you 
 feel another's woe : " because the person who has 
 not positively realised happiness himself cannot feel 
 the awful negation of it ; hence they cannot be 
 pitiful. 
 
 Let not my reader confound worldly success with 
 the happiness that makes life " worth living." The 
 former, bringing no real joy, brings no gratitude to 
 the Joy-giver nor pity for the bereaved. God created 
 in man a being conscious, or capable of being con- 
 scious, that His work is good, thus taking the created 
 spirit into communion with Him. 
 
 While all men need others, all are needed by 
 others. *' Education should be a system for adjust- 
 ing a person's surroundings to their higher needs." 
 Abbott says, Plato's idea of the essence of educa- 
 tion is most simply and comprehensively " nurture." 
 To him the human soul is emphatically and before 
 all else something living, something which in the 
 strict sense \ve can neither create nor destroy, but 
 which we can feed or starve, nourish or poison. 
 
 It is the feeling of the assimilative power of the 
 soul which leads Plato to attach such immense 
 importance to the environment of life, and makes 
 him more disposed to attribute moral evil to bad 
 nurture than to inherent vice. " Against the all- 
 powerful teaching of society he thinks no private 
 teaching can hold its ground. The real agent that 
 demoralises youth, the real educator is public 
 opinion. Everybody admits in theory that the 
 
158 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 human self is a living being, requiring a certain 
 environment to grow properly ; but we are liable to 
 forget this when we have to do with the mental 
 atmosphere. The power of vision of the eye of the 
 soul, or the mind's eye, can neither be originally 
 produced by education nor entirely destroyed by 
 the want of it. The inherent vitality of the soul 
 makes the question of its nourishment all-important, 
 and precludes a merely mechanical treatment of it. 
 The eye of the soul must be turned to the light, for 
 which it has an intrinsic capacity. As in the case 
 of other living things, such as plants and animals, 
 the stronger and better the nature of the soul, the 
 more important is it what nourishment it gets ; and 
 a gifted soul in a corrupt society is like a good seed 
 sown in a strange soil. It grows crooked and unlike 
 itself, loses its proper virtue, and sinks at last to 
 the level of its surroundings." Perhaps even lower, 
 as not being protected by conventionality, which is 
 a great support to the merely superficial and imita- 
 tive, spiritual or affectional. 
 
 Such relations are thus seen to be of as vital 
 importance to the soul as sensuous or physiological 
 ones are to the body; these it is therefore the primary 
 function of the social state to provide in perfection. 
 
 There are not only groans of the spirit not to be 
 uttered, but also "pantings of hope" not to be uttered. 
 As the groans are for perfection of Being, so the 
 pantings of hope are for the perfection of Being ; for 
 that is the only rationally postulated or intuited 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 159 
 
 conception of tlie purpose of God in creating a self- 
 conscious rational spirit. That the desire for '' fulness 
 of being and joy for evermore" which the Creator Him- 
 self has implanted within us be fulfilled, this simply 
 is the object, and no less than this, of our rational 
 expectation at the hand of a necessarily affirmed, i.e., 
 according to the laws of thought assumed, benevo- 
 lent Creator — the eternal-damnation theory beiug a 
 direct contradiction of the principle of Final Cause — 
 as action for the good for Being is the only rationally 
 conceivable motive in design. Cato says, " We must 
 let go eyes and other senses, and make our way to 
 the real truth,'* i.e., ontological truth, "abstracting 
 ourselves from the immediate imaginative presenta- 
 tions of time and space." Gazing only on the neces- 
 sary concepts of pure reason, each principle of reason 
 standing in equally strict relation to the principles of 
 Being. Whenever we mentally interpret a thing, or, 
 in other words, understand it, we give it the only 
 sufficient reason for existing, namely, for the good 
 for Being, for well-being, for happiness, which is per- 
 fection of conscious Being ; but though this is sub- 
 jective, yet it is objectively produced through its 
 standing in relation to the appropriate objects for 
 the development of personality. " Good is the ruling 
 principle or end" (Plato), i.e. of the creation of anything. 
 In the ^^Phsedo" the choice of the good and the 
 best is represented as the essential characteristic of in- 
 telligence, for it alone is truly and fully Being. The 
 imperfection resulting in unhappiness is failure of 
 
i6o PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 Being, is palsy or withering of faculty, of life, and 
 joy. " Human life suggests though it does not realise " 
 perfection of Being. How could we necessarily pos- 
 tulate another state of being if unconditional perfec- 
 tion were realised here ? This sense of imperfection 
 is the hostage of God's purpose to be fulfilled here- 
 after, and the goad to the exercise of our faculties, 
 which is the path of progress — development according 
 to the end proposed by the Creator in creating us. 
 
 " The self-contradictory maxims of popular morality" 
 are illogical, and consequently absurd instead of elevat- 
 ing. *' When the mental grasp of a principle is con- 
 ventional and unintelligible, it is liable to be loosened 
 by every objection.'' When we can give no rational 
 account of a thing, resemblance is confounded with 
 reality, a fragment with the whole, and, to quote 
 Plato again, " Such a man is only half awake ; the 
 good things which he supposes himself to secure are 
 only images and shadows of the truth. What are 
 the principles," he asks, " of justice and honour good 
 for," if not for Being ? That it is which gives them 
 their value. " Ideal truth is our only guide," i.e., 
 the truths forced upon us by reason, which is the 
 ratio of Being. Homo Mensura (Protagoras). 
 
 Now things are not only good for Being, but also 
 for the fostering of or maintenance of relations be- 
 tween beings. In the Bible the principle of evil is 
 called '*the Divider, the Accuser." Love is the spiri- 
 tual relation between rational beings, supremely 
 good for them ; therefore he who sows dissension, 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. ^^2i ^^ 
 
 like the awful pagan goddess Discord, with snakes for 
 whips, is on the side of the principle of evil — the 
 Divider. In the Arabian myths we find the form 
 in which death is regarded as most woful is as ** the 
 separator of companions." 
 
 Only the science of ontology, arrived at in reflec- 
 tion on the nature and attributes of the Ego, enables 
 us to look upon death as " Celui qui separe et 
 rassemhle" Only through this transcendental science 
 of pure reason is the cypress wreath for the brows 
 of death exchanged for the orange blossom of the 
 golden and eternal marriage of souls. '' Im Leben 
 fern, in Todte dein." Yes, only when in heaven 
 we strike that "lost chord" again will the great 
 Amen of souls be fully and truly spoken. '' To under- 
 stand it here is the nearest approach to Heaven on 
 earth." 
 
 Faith in the ideas of reason is a sure ground of 
 confidence. Intelligible reasons must be given for 
 actions. Now the intelligible reason for the awful 
 sufi'ering of bereavement by death can be clearly 
 apprehended ; indeed no conceivable plan could more 
 e]ffectually bring home to our reason the fact that 
 " only love is enough " for happiness than when once 
 we have known its vivifying, reviving power, to be 
 deprived of it and plunged back into the isolation 
 which the spirit hates as Nature abhors a vacuum. 
 
 Thus in a future state of being we shall be fur- 
 nished with the necessary experience to make it a 
 happy one; whereas, if, like babes crying at not 
 
i62 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 being able to reacli the moon, we were always as 
 here in our ignorance seeking after things that profit 
 not for real joy, there could be no more happiness 
 hereafter than here. 
 
 The highest type of personal affection is that of 
 love emphatically so called, combining congeniality 
 of character, mutual benevolence, and identity of 
 interests, and this last is only found in the single 
 relation of conjugal love : here affection and interest 
 are on one and the same side. " Human complete- 
 ness is happiness." A good sword is a sword that 
 completely answers its purpose, justifies its raison 
 d'etre. One of the senses in which the word good 
 is used is as completeness (Plato). 
 
 It is surely a rational inference that there should 
 be correspondence between rational expectation or 
 hope and the end. " What is rational is right ; " so 
 we must needs expect the rational in the character 
 and motive of the Supreme Being ; and as the con- 
 crete subjective concepts of the spontaneous reason- 
 ing process are necessarily generalised in reflective 
 reasoning as abstract concepts of the universal laws 
 of Being, to these generalisations the same absolute 
 belief attaches as to the directly known facts of our 
 own experience in being ; therefore there is no more 
 uncertainty of the postulates of ontological science 
 than of those of the physical sciences, which are 
 indeed ultimately resolvable into metaphysical con- 
 cepts of causation, of which the physical sciences are 
 postulates or inferences. The metaphysician is thus 
 
SELF- CONSCIO USNESS. 1 6s 
 
 not a mere dreamer of dreams, but tlie true positive 
 philosopher, whose subject is not hypothesis but 
 " what is " (Plato). 
 
 Renan says, " La raisdn triomphe de la mort, et 
 travailler pour elle est travailler pour Teternite." 
 
 Freedom is for self-realisation. " The chief good," 
 says Aristotle, ** must lie in a life which leaves no 
 want of man unsatisfied, whether these wants be 
 external or spiritual, — a life in which man's self is 
 fully realised, and which therefore attains his final 
 end." " That alone which' gives a value to the sub- 
 ordinate bonds of union between the members of a 
 state is the final end of human life." 
 
 What, then, is this final end or chief good, the pur- 
 suit of which, and a common share in which, is the 
 essence of the state ? Aristotle has answered this 
 question thus — " A state is a community in good 
 living, not in mere living." The state aims at 
 nothinor short of moral character or well-beinor • the 
 real law of the state aims at making the citizens 
 good and just men. " Good living, noble actions, 
 well-being or happiness, these are all various names 
 for the chief good of man." 
 
 " The end at which the state is said by Aristotle 
 to aim is the full and harmonious development of 
 human nature in the citizen ; or, in other words, the 
 unimpeded activity of his moral and intellectual 
 excellence or virtue." '' He is to be a man indeed," 
 i.e., to have that virtue or virility which is to be really 
 a man. *^ One of the ideas connected with the word 
 
1 64 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 good is completeness ; " and thus to be a complete 
 man is his duty both to his Maker and to his fellow- 
 citizens. 
 
 But what I have undertaken to impress upon the 
 minds of my readers is, that by the natural law of 
 polarity or duality, completeness of nature is not 
 attainable by any solitary human being, nor will 
 mere occasional and transient meetings in business 
 or pleasure with others not intimately connected with 
 him produce the development of his emotional nature 
 necessary for morality. There are three tests or 
 criteria of a man's excellence — the emotional, the 
 intellectual, and the moral : the question is, are faith, 
 love, and hope all highly developed in him ? " The 
 brain cannot think unless the heart beats," for this is 
 what God requires of man towards Himself, and for 
 this birth again into the spirit nothing short of a deep 
 and tender love, such as the Maker has constituted 
 to exist between the sexes in the holy union of the 
 marriage of souls, will be found adequate. This is 
 possibly the result of the physiological complemen- 
 tariness which evidently affects our psychological 
 nature, for unity results from complementary diver- 
 sity. A community in the functions of a good life. 
 " Are we not made as notes of music are, for one 
 another though dissimilar ? " 
 
 But the condition of a spiritual event is not the 
 essence of it, so that the divine joy of spiritual love 
 need never be expected to attend upon mere physical 
 complementariness. Even the imperfect spiritual 
 
SELF- CONSCIO USNESS. 1 65 
 
 complementariness of mere friendship is a degree 
 nearer to the perfect union of souls than any merely 
 material union, or than one based on a merely 
 material community of interests. To my mind, there- 
 fore, and I believe according to the primary laws of 
 thought, and to the principle of reflection, i.e., the 
 principle of sufficient reason, the paramount duty 
 of the state and of society in general is to provide 
 as favourable conditions for the spiritual communion 
 and marriage of adults as for the education of 
 childhood and youth, regarding in the light of 
 social sins the disintegrating unsocial qualities of 
 pride, pomp, personal ambition, and extreme luxury 
 in dress or the general appurtenances of the life of 
 this world, remembering always its transitory nature 
 and the naturally subordinate part it should play in 
 the eternal life of a responsible and moral agent. 
 
 Ambition is not the stuff of which the real bene- 
 factors of mankind are made, though industry of any 
 rational kind, however self-seeking it may be, is 
 rendered, by the wisdom of Providence, helpful in- 
 directly to mankind in general, whether we will it 
 so or not. Nor are combative, antagonistic, insolent 
 habits any more really conducive to the individual 
 happiness of their possessor than to that of their 
 f .'Hows. Love alone and love only is enough for joy 
 of life, as it is also the fulfilling of the law of duty. 
 " If ye give all your goods to the poor and your 
 body to be burned, it profiteth you nothing if ye 
 have not love." Love being the subjective condition 
 
i66 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 of happiness wliich no formal fulfilment of rational 
 obligation can supply. 
 
 Both Aristotle and Plato make the existence of 
 virtue to depend on the conditions being provided for 
 it in the education of youth and in the institutions 
 of the state. To give people freedom to develop in 
 a vacuum is a farce. The proper social conditions 
 failing for emotional development, frivolity, or the 
 attaching importance to things that are unimportant, 
 will characterise the women of a country, immoral 
 sensuality being the perverted outlet of feeling in the 
 men ; whilst in the lower classes the same want of 
 proper channels being provided for the exercise and 
 development of the affections results in acts of 
 violence and crime. Mr. Abbott remarks in his 
 "Hellenica," "that our theory of marriage" — I do 
 not, of course, mean the manage de convenance theory 
 - — " is the one respect in which we have made a clear 
 advance in the science of life over the ancients." 
 Our horror of slavery may also be counted another ; 
 but just as it has been shown that slavery was not 
 altogether an illogical institution in the dawn of 
 civilisation, so the doctrine of might constituting 
 right, upheld even lately by such a man as Mr. 
 Carlyle, renders the past subjection of women by the 
 stronger sex comprehensible. 
 
 But when once the real definition of right has 
 been arrived at, namely, that a rational being ^' has 
 
 * " Transcendental reflection has nothing to do with objects (ex- 
 ternal), nor is its aim directly to acquire conceptions of them. It is 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 167 
 
 the right to realise or develop its rational, i.e., 
 emotional, intellectual, and moral i^ature, the com- 
 plementariness of the sexes, their equal and reciprocal 
 need of each other, entitling each to an equal con- 
 sideration and respect, will be fully revealed, and 
 woman will recognise the duty of cultivating her 
 intellect as man does, and man will see the necessity 
 of himself obeying the moral law in every respect, 
 as much as he has hitherto insisted on its being 
 obeyed by woman ; and thus the ideal life, instead of 
 being only exhibited in a few rare instances, will no 
 longer be the object of vain endeavours to the many. 
 
 The soul in Plato's view is a triple being. One 
 of its constituents is appetite, a craving for, will for 
 satisfaction, sense of the good for being, desire ; the 
 second, self-assertiveness ; the third, a capacity of 
 attraction developing into love, sociableness. These 
 elements form an harmoniously related whole. Of the 
 constituent elements, feeling, thought, and will, Plato 
 begins with tendency of Being to the good, then self- 
 realisation or assertion of Being, and lastly, feeling 
 of relativity, attraction for similars. 
 
 With regard to self-assertion, self-respect, he says — 
 '* A healthy physical life being the necessary ground- 
 work of the higher psychical activities, there must be 
 
 the state of mind in which we set ourselves to find out the subjective 
 conditions under which we can acquire such conceptions of them. For 
 it is only by the consciousness of tlie relations of given representations 
 to our different sources of knowledge that we can determine aright their 
 relations to each other." — Kant. 
 
 " The comparison of conceptions is in reference to every one of the 
 categories." — Idem. 
 
1 68 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 such an education as will regulate the appetites to 
 contribute to the good of the whole soul. If we are 
 convinced that in refusing to satisfy an appetite we 
 are acting reasonably, i.e., ' according to the rational 
 or better self/ we may feel dissatisfaction, but not the 
 indignation which a man feels when he has let his 
 appetites get the better of his reason. It is the con- 
 sciousness of a self which deserves respect that makes 
 us angry when we have disgraced ourselves. It is 
 this in the form of honourable pride which makes us 
 measure ourselves against others. It is this, in the 
 form of not choosing * to be put upon,' which makes 
 us resist what we think injustice, this it is that makes 
 us face danger without flinching, and it is the feeling 
 that there is no such self to fall back upon which 
 weakens us when we know we are in the wrong" 
 ("Hellenica"). 
 
 " The main object of education is to predispose the 
 soul intellectually and morally to the perception and 
 execution of ideas and principles of which it does not 
 as yet understand the full bearing, but upon which 
 it will afterwards find that the welfare of itself and 
 society depends " (Plato). 
 
 " Allow, and if necessary compel, human nature to 
 develop normally, i.e., provide it with the nurture 
 its development demands." 
 
 The chief cause of the ills of mankind is ignorance 
 of their true good and neglect of their nobler nature. 
 " Train their natures rightly and they will see what 
 is the true good of mankind " (Plato). The summum 
 
SELF- CON SCI O USNESS. 1 69 
 
 honum does not lie in animal satisfaction of appetite, 
 but in spiritual perfection of Being. 
 
 Plato divides mankind into three primary kinds, 
 according as one or other of the three psychical ele- 
 ments predominates in the character. The inward 
 man he asserts to be that which is most divine in 
 man ; the philosophic element (or rational element 
 in the soul) is what constitutes the real personality 
 in man ; the philosophic form of the soul is the type 
 of character, that has the love of knowing the nature 
 of the truth, or, to use a Platonic phrase — " the nature 
 of what is," i.e., of Being. 
 
 " To Plato there is a revelation of God in the human 
 soul, as there is in the physical world ; his celestial 
 city, like * the kingdom of heaven,' is within us. And 
 as it is this divine humanity which is in the truest 
 nature the self, the other parts of human nature are 
 conceived by Plato to find their highest activity and 
 most real satisfaction in following and serving it as 
 far as they are able. To become as human as possible 
 is the highest (and therefore the most satisfactory) 
 end of the half-animal nature which forms a part of 
 man." 
 
 "It is the nature of the philosopher to be ever 
 struggling up to Being and not to abide in opinion." 
 " Being is akin to being ; '^ it is through entering into 
 relations with other beings, through that in our 
 nature ivhich is akin to theirs, that we get hold of 
 the nature of Being, and find nourishment and true 
 life. The mingling of being with being begets intelli- 
 
I70 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 gence ; and finding the knowledge of truth, he will 
 cease from his travail, and not until then. 
 
 "The practical man who believes in 'results' is 
 disposed to regard psychological considerations as 
 fanciful or far-fetched, and yet the most fatally 
 unpractical thing in tlie world is to go on testing 
 methods by results, which take every factor into 
 account except the one upon which the whole result 
 ultimately depends ; that factor in man is the 
 human mind, and to discuss what kinds of educa- 
 tion are in themselves the best, without considering 
 mental organisation, is as idle as to discuss what is 
 the best kind of food in the abstract without regard 
 to the stomach which has to digest it." 
 
 The philosopher or lover of truth, according to 
 Plato, living in fellowship with what is orderly and 
 divine, grows himself orderly and divine as far as he 
 is able ; for it surely cannot be that a man can live 
 in fellowship with what he admires without imita- 
 ting it. 
 
 " In the unchangeable order and beauty of the 
 universe Plato saw the image on a vaster scale of 
 the same reason which is imperfectly reflected in 
 man. Such was the human nature for which, as 
 Plato conceived, it was the function of education to 
 provide nurture." 
 
 Plato made the earliest lessons in education appeal 
 to that element in the soul (sense of relativity) in 
 virtue of which man is not a mere isolated atom and 
 centre of resistance, but capable of attraction (love). 
 
SELF- CON SCI USNESS. 1 7 1 
 
 both to \Yliat is liioiier thau himself aud to what is 
 like himself." 
 
 The sense of beauty is the seuse of harmony or 
 proportion, of symmetry of correspondence, or of 
 fitness, as of dress to climate, or of propriety, as 
 of conduct to express emotion. Mind speaks to 
 mind in art, adaptation, or design ; to pretend to 
 ignore this is Jesuitical, for it is as positive a fact 
 of consciousness as a sensation of heat or cold. *^ It 
 is the abeyance of healthy and inspiring emotions 
 that drags so many men down." 
 
 ^' Plato, in his *Eepublic,' gives a powerful picture 
 of the consequences of neglecting the education of 
 the reason through the imagination and the emotions, 
 showing that the evil in life is quite as much due 
 to negative as to positive conditions." (E. Abbotts 
 "Hellenica"). 
 
 The summum honum, spiritual harmony in all its 
 different degrees, with other spiiits, and emphati- 
 cally with the Father of spirits, is the end to which 
 the soul aspires. The means to the end of perfec- 
 tion of Being or happiness are one with the end. 
 Love is the efficient cause of joy or sense of fulness or 
 perfection of Being. Love is the fulfilling of the law 
 or condition of happiness, and is itself the crowning 
 bliss of Being. Development is through relativity 
 of Being ; social government, proper adjustment of 
 relations, and the relation of things to each other, 
 is only revealed to us through their relativity to 
 ourselves. The goal of all pursuit of truth is the 
 
172 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 kuowleclore of the relations in wliicli thin^js stand to 
 us, and of the relations in which we stand to our 
 fellow- creatures and to the Maker of all. 
 
 We find in Hellenica this passage — " The question 
 which remains to be asked is, what is the ultimate 
 lesson which the human mind has to learn ? what, in 
 Plato's techuical phraseology, is that unhypothetical 
 First Principle upon which the whole structure of truth 
 depends, and to grasp which is the crowning act of 
 knowledge ? What is the ultimate principle to which 
 all the ' hypotheses ' of knowledge are to be referred?'' 
 My own answer to this question is — The principle 
 of Sufficient Keason. What reason have you for the 
 faith that is in you regarding anything ? What is 
 your *^ sufiicient reason " (which in reflective reasoning 
 takes the place of adequate causation in direct percep- 
 tion) for believing, say, that it will rain to-morrow, 
 or that calamity will certainly overtake such a man ? 
 The one or only sufiicient reason, i.e., the only reason 
 satisfactory to the mind, that we can give for any 
 conviction is that in the presentations of our own 
 being or experience efi'ects are the processions or 
 manifestations of the activities of certain causes ; and 
 when such causes are manifestly existing, apparently 
 unbalanced and not outweighted in force by other 
 causes, we naturally or rationally expect such or 
 such efi'ects to follow ; or when we perceive such or 
 such efi'ects, we necessarily or rationally attribute 
 them to causes which we know to act after such or 
 such a manner. The relations between beings or things 
 
SEL F- CO NSC 10 USNESS. 1 73 
 
 once apprehended through experience, the contra- 
 dictory of them or the denial of them is the incon- 
 ceivable. Truth is a system of belief derived from 
 the understanding of being as a whole, therefore no 
 part or principle can be fully known until its connec- 
 tion with other parts and principles has been appre- 
 hended. In proportion as any man can take or give 
 account of any system or part of a subject he must have 
 the entire system of belief before his mind. " Plato " 
 (Hellenica) "regarded the study of dialectic as an 
 educational study of the true method or logic of think- 
 ing, which he regarded as the universal science or 
 system of universal knowledge, in which not only the 
 hypothetical principles of the mathematical and phy- 
 sical sciences, but those of all other branches of 
 human inquiry, found their place and justification, and 
 were seen to depend upon a single unhypothetical prin- 
 ciple " {i.e.. Sufficient Reason). " Science points to 
 universal logical principles in which its problems find 
 solution." * Plato insisted upon the theoretical neces- 
 sity of such a universal science, " on the equal neces- 
 sity of keeping the outlines of it before the mind." 
 
 Abbott goes on to say that ** Plato was as con- 
 scious as we are that no such universal science is in 
 existence." Whether or no this demand has been 
 met or suggested in some slight but true fashion in 
 the present work, I leave to the public to decide. 
 
 * " Principles of Causation, Sufficient, Efficient, and Final — the first 
 is the principle of Metaphysics, the second tliat of Physics, and the 
 third of Moral Science. 
 
174 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 Plato's system of education applies to the three 
 forms or modes of our being — gymnastics answering 
 to realisation or development of personal being, or 
 egoity — music or harmony ausweriDg to sense of 
 relativity, altruity, attraction, or correspondence, and 
 desire or tendency to act for the best for oneself, 
 becoming in reflective generalisation morality, or the 
 will to act for the best for Being in the abstract. 
 
 " The conception of Being leads us to look every- 
 where for unity in multiplicity and diff"erentiation in 
 unity, so that while no piece or principle of truth 
 can be confounded with any other, no principle can 
 be isolated from any other. As the morality of an 
 action is strictly or logically relative to the motive 
 of the subject in performing it, so the loveliness or 
 lovableness or attractiveness of a person or thing is 
 strictly relative to the nature or taste of the person or 
 subject who is attracted by the object. Impressions 
 made upon us are only real when thus estimated. 
 A preconception or prejudice concerning a person 
 or thing is not really an impression made upon us, 
 or a real judgment made by us, consequently we can- 
 not really form a conception of objects in this way, 
 conception being of the causes of impression or feel- 
 ing, of intuition or intelligence, and of purpose or 
 motive, so that conception does not really arise but 
 upon an impression really received. 
 
 Plato regarded introspective reflection as so rare a 
 gift that he called it the philosophical element, as 
 if it did not make a part of the life of the ordinary 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 175 
 
 person. But it is certain that all science properly 
 so called is the outcome of reflection. The one 
 Being given or found in introspective analysis of 
 consciousness, i.e., of reflective perception, appre- 
 hension, and comprehension, is the unit multiplied 
 or reflected in other existences. Our own ex- 
 tended organism furnishes us with the ideas of the 
 three dimensions of space, and the metaphysical ideas 
 of causation are mere mental representations of the 
 elementary principles present in our own Being or 
 the Ego. Being, existence, essential normal relations, 
 together with local and temporal relations, and relations 
 of succession and of co-existence — and tendency in 
 action to supply essential needs and satisfy natural 
 desire for the good for Being — these are the a priori 
 fundamental concepts of the understanding, out of 
 which all the sciences, physical and moral, ontology, 
 psychology, physiology, &c., arise, through ratiocina- 
 tion or reasoning from them. All notions circle about 
 Being, all relations are between beings or existences, 
 and all purpose has the satisfaction of conscious Being 
 for its aim and end. 
 
 Thought, though tripartite, is as indivisible a pro- 
 cess as the one being whose modes it represents. 
 It is through the harmonious action of feeling, 
 thought, and will (the whole man), that we appre- 
 hend the nature of God. 
 
 Whatever is a contradiction of the facts or con- 
 stitutional elements of our consciousness cannot be 
 considered verified or verifiable. 
 
176 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 The new birth is birth unto love human and Divine. 
 The second death is separation from love. 
 
 Education of feeling is through social life ; the effi- 
 cient causes of subjective development are external 
 influences. 
 
 A collection of homogeneous units is not a unity in 
 diversity. 
 
 Love is the life of the soul — the sense of lovelessness, 
 of neither being loved nor loving, is Death to the soul. 
 
 Action ought to stand in definite relation to ideas 
 of reason concerning the nature of Being, which is 
 known only in reflective introspection. Duty is to 
 act according to the rational or abstract human con- 
 science derived from concrete personal consciousness. 
 
 The reflective element or philosophic comes last. 
 
 The sixth sense is reflective reason — the sense of 
 the ideal. 
 
 The reflective representation answers to or com- 
 prises adequate causation in its three forms. 
 
 The principles of Being or causation are the three 
 forms of thought ; reflection summarises them, realises 
 them ideally. 
 
 Truth relates to Being, the denial or negation of 
 which is the inconceivable, and therefore pronounced 
 untrue, unreal. Being is a synthesis of feeling, 
 thought, and will. These are the forms under which 
 truth is apprehended. 
 
 Space and time are forms of imaginative repre- 
 sentation. 
 
 Being recognises Being. *^ Homo mensura " (of 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 177 
 
 c inception) Protagoras. Eelatively of conception to 
 individual Being. 
 
 A benevolent state of mind is the condition of 
 one's own peace and joy. 
 
 It ought not to appear to be self-sacrifice to be 
 prevented sacrificing the happiness of others to our 
 own. 
 
 It is not the poets who have invented love, but the 
 sentiment of love that has invented the poets. The 
 poet is the exponent of the afiectional relations of tlie 
 emotions under the forms of the imagination — the 
 man of science of the relations of reason, and the 
 man of God, or the prophet or moralist, is he who 
 expounds the relations of men to God, the Lawgiver, 
 or the transcendental duty of men to God, which 
 includes all other duties. 
 
 '' The most important part of the eiFect of fiction 
 is the kindling, expanding, and vivifying our social 
 affectual activities," and the elevating our intellectual 
 activities to greater moral heights. The question of 
 questions is. Does material perception engross our 
 attention to the exclusion of spiritual reflective per- 
 ception of the attributes of personality, which are 
 the " aids to conceptive (or spiritual) imagination," 
 just as the impressions of the senses are aids to 
 material imagination ? " The unconscious world has 
 its end or its complement in that conscious Being 
 in whom it excites pleasure, through apprehension 
 of a spiritual activity displayed in its creation and 
 providence, like or akin to his own. This is the 
 
 M 
 
178 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 rational process, through recognition of similar attri- 
 butes to our own, bj which the transcendental idea 
 of duty is arrived at, together with the doctrine of 
 a future state of perfection of Being or happiness. To 
 pretend to deny that in introspective reflection, a 
 Sufficient, Efficient, and Final Cause is required to 
 account for the existence of the subject-object, as 
 for that of any other object, is simply the denial of 
 the laws of thought by which we conduct every act 
 of our daily social life, and has therefore a semblance 
 of intellectual dishonesty. Just as in the moral life 
 " the just live by faith," in reflective reason and not 
 by sight, so with regard to the existence of a Supreme 
 Spiritual Being, we cannot look to our senses for evi- 
 dence, but to the necessary postulates of reflective 
 reason in its intuitive application of the organised 
 laws of thought to the explanation of nature and 
 human nature, and for the interpretation of the 
 destiny of man. A great Persian poet, Omar Khayam, 
 exclaims, *' The question is not whether God will for- 
 give us, but if we can forgive Him for all the suffer- 
 ings He has occasioned us." The answer furnished by 
 refl-ective reason to this bold query is — Yes ! if these 
 sufferings are seen, even here, to be the necessary 
 instrument of the intellectual development of an 
 agent gifted with free-will, who requires to make his 
 own experiments, and to undergo many painful experi- 
 ences for the proper and full understanding of the 
 wisdom, beauty, and goodness of the divine order 
 of the natural and spiritual world, so that he may 
 
SELF- CON SCI USNESS. 1 79 
 
 consciously and voluntarily adhere to it, and thus 
 obey the Lawgiver, and arrive at the happiness or 
 perfection of Being, rationally supposed to be the 
 object of his creation. 
 
 The unmorality and immorality exhibited by chil- 
 dren and savages only shows, that until man arrives 
 at the development of reflective reason through in- 
 trospective self-consciousness, he is not capable of 
 moralitv, which is based on the recoornition of man's 
 relativity to his fellows and to the Supreme Being. 
 For an exact and elevated ideal of morality to be 
 attained, a large comparison of the customs, man- 
 ners, laws, and conventionalities of ancient and 
 modern peoples, and of special individual lives, is 
 requisite ; for we learn as much by observation 
 of errors in judgment aud their accompanying 
 penalties in the case of other persons as in our 
 own. Children cannot, therefore, be expected to be 
 moral, except in the primary form of obedience to 
 those assumed to be wiser and better, as they are 
 more powerful than themselves ) such obedience is 
 the first lesson in the self-control according to reason, 
 which is of the very essence of morality^ such is 
 the strict relativity of man's nature to the great 
 First Cause, that his relations to his fellows have 
 also their securest guarantee for fulfilment in the 
 adoration of the Supreme Fount of all our being, 
 which we call religion. The divinely ordained moral 
 order of the universe is only so far maintained by 
 man, inasmuch as he keeps inviolate the integrity of 
 
i8o PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 his own Being in feeling, thought, and will ; thus 
 there is no rational severance possible between moral- 
 ity and religion ; and this generation, given over to 
 the exclusive study of efficient physical causes, will 
 soon find it so to their cost if it be possible to rear 
 any consecutive generations of infidels according to 
 the present scheme. Faith, love, and hope are the 
 sentiments towards the Supreme Being that arise out 
 of our reflective recognition of our kinship to Him 
 through similarity of the Divine attributes to our 
 own, these constituting the medium of our appre- 
 hension of spiritual Being, all knowledge being 
 through relativity. 
 
 If we disregard the natural relations in which we 
 stand to each other and to the Father of Spirits, we 
 lose all cue to what is the best for Being or the good 
 in Being. Above all, the fundamental primary rela- 
 tion of sex can never be ignored, influencing as it does 
 the spiritual life of our race — all secondary conven- 
 tional relations arising out of and never (rationally) 
 contradicting the primary scheme of creation."^'' Of 
 course, just as there are many children that die with- 
 out having developed here their reflective power, so 
 also there have been tribes of savaofes who, not haviuo^ 
 evolved any prophets or reflective thinkers amongst 
 them, have dwindled out of existence. But the truly 
 awful consideration is, that many who have been born 
 
 * Eeflective reason necessarily assumes the uniformity of spiritual as 
 of physical natiire. It would be strange, indeed, if chemical affinities 
 were enduring and spiritual elective affinities ephemeral. 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. i8i 
 
 iuto civilisation and possessed the faculty of reflective 
 2)0wer have individually, through refusing to culti- 
 vate it, consciously lapsed into savagery — what is 
 called evolved backwards, falling lower and lower in 
 the scale of Being. Surel}^ this is the hell prepared by 
 the Great Ordainer of natural laws for the warning 
 of man. 
 
 But even here the principle of Final Cause cannot 
 be lost sight of or denied. The Buddhist doctrine 
 of transmigrations was the early solution of the 
 question of man's destiny, and even now there are 
 forms of it that are not irrational, and so to be 
 repudiated; but the scientific doctrine of evolution 
 applied to man's spiritual nature enables us to con- 
 ceive that when the brutalised telluric organisa- 
 tion has been discarded by the spirit (still immortal, 
 heaven-descended), reason may recover its reign in 
 it in other spheres, and with another material frame ; 
 for it is the nervous system that is the awful seat of 
 intellectual and moral degeneration, as in madness 
 or brain -softening. This is what may be called the 
 fatal part of man's life ; this is probably the explana- 
 tion of the seeminor stranoje statement in the Jewish 
 Scripture, that " God hardened Pharaoh's heart," the 
 rationale of which is that habits of disregard of con- 
 scientiousness react upon, and remould, as it were, the 
 course of nervous action, which is always in the line 
 of least resistance, like all other forces. But to 
 blame the Creator for this would be to blame Him 
 for the most puissant medium of intellectual, emo- 
 
i82 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 tional, and moral progress, through which facility 
 in the art of right living is acquired as . much as in 
 any other art by practice, and which so modifies the 
 nervous organisation that such facility is, as it were, 
 thus ingrained in the system, and handed down from 
 generation to generation in particular families ; and 
 Spinoza says, " The better fitted the body is to be 
 impressed and to impress outward bodies in diverse 
 ways, the more fit is the mind for thinking. Where- 
 fore, for nourishing the body as it needs we must use 
 many foods of difierent kinds, the human body being 
 made up of very many parts of difi'erent kinds, which 
 be in need of constant and manifold nourishment, 
 that the body may be equally fit for performing all 
 things which are within its natural power, and conse- 
 quently that the mind may also be equally fit for 
 perceiving many difierent things. Now, for achieving 
 this the strength of any man would scarce avail, 
 unless men lent one another their help ; therefore 
 although men for the most part carry everything 
 after their own fancies, yet from their constant 
 fellowship there ensues far more convenience than 
 harm ; so it is the better part to bear wrong from 
 them with an even mind, and be diligent in what- 
 ever is fitted to bring about concord and fellowship." 
 '' Since, then, those things are good which assist the 
 members of the body to perform their ofiice, and 
 pleasure consists in this, that the power of man, in so 
 far as he is composed of body and mind, is advanced 
 or increased, therefore all things be good which 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 183 
 
 bring us pleasure, only superstition seemeth con- 
 trariwise to liold that for good wliicli brings pain, 
 and that for evil which brings pleasure. For the 
 greater is our pleasure, the more do we pass to 
 greater perfection, and therefore the more we partake 
 of the divine nature. Nor can pleasure ever be bad 
 when it is governed by a just regard for our interest 
 as a whole " (or rather for our spiritual being). *' A 
 man w^ho desires to help others by counsel or deed, 
 so as they may together enjoy the chief good, will 
 speak but sparingly of human weakness, but he will 
 speak at large of man's virtue and power, and the 
 means of perfecting the same, that thus men may 
 endeavour, not from fear, but wholly in joyfulness, 
 to live so far as in them lies after the command- 
 ment of reason " (" Spinoza," by Frederick Pollock). 
 So convinced is Spinoza that the order of the universe 
 is strictly an order of reason, i.e., strictly relative to 
 self-conscious or rational Being, that he goes on to 
 say, " Except men, we know of no particular thing 
 in nature in whose mind we may take pleasure and 
 which we may join to ourselves by friendship or any 
 manner of society ; and therefore, whatever there is 
 beside men in the world, the reason of our con- 
 venience doth not require us to preserve, but per- 
 suades us, according to the diverse uses thereof, to 
 jyreserve, destroy, or adapt it to our own use as we 
 will." This is the light thrown by reflective reason on 
 the prominent question of the present day, vivisection. 
 For the being that alone is created to see God through 
 
i84 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 Lis recognition of his own personal attributes of power, 
 wisdom, and goodness, as they are exhibited in nature, 
 and human nature is the one to whom dominion is 
 given over the earth or the physical universe, and all 
 that is therein. To say that the order of the universe 
 is a rational order simply means this, that it was 
 created with reference to the evolution of spiritual 
 beings — beings capable of seeing that the Creators 
 work is good, and therefore of consciously co- 
 operating with the divinely ordained order — Beings 
 gifted with conscience, or the intuitive knowledge 
 that to struggle against this order, or to defy it as 
 far as in him lies, is sinful or evil, i.e., as being the 
 contradiction of the intention of the Great Creator, 
 whose law or order is for the good for Being ; hence 
 sin is also the seZ/'-contradictory, the irrational. Not 
 to have faith in the goodness of the dispensations of 
 Providence, however trying they may be to us, is 
 to deny the perfection of the Divine Personality, is 
 again to deny the necessary inference of reason from 
 our own personality, that typical or normal action 
 has for its principle the good for Being. I shall 
 conclude this statement of the rational basis of 
 morals, as of faith in God and hope of a future 
 state of happiness or perfection of Being, as I have 
 done my rationale of love, with a few quotations 
 or axioms of reflective reason bearing upon the 
 principle of Final Cause or Sufficient Keason for 
 voluntary self-determination in feeling, thought, and 
 will. 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 185 
 
 *' Thought is a reflex of the Eternal mind, a glass to give man 
 back the truth " (of Being). 
 
 " The springs of Being are the springs of thought." 
 
 If our nature were not akin to the divine we could not conceive 
 the divine — conception being according to Being. 
 
 " The outward finite life must be pervaded by the sense of the 
 infinite and eternal, and so enjoyed, not separated." 
 
 " And to this end all who have been filled with the divine 
 idea have laboured, and shall still labour, that this consciousness 
 in its purest possible form maybe spread throughout the race." — 
 Fichte. 
 
 *' Our idea of order is what we mean when we speak of putting 
 together anything ourselves with a meaning and a reason." 
 
 " Out of the understanding of the subject-object or Ego arises 
 the belief in God through recognition of a similar mind and 
 moral nature manifested in nature." The knowableness of things 
 by us means their adaptedness to reason; we are thus really 
 conscious of a Non-ego through recognition of similars. 
 
 "God attracts us, says Newman, principally through the 
 affections and the conscience. The light we see is not the less to 
 be trusted because of the darkness beyond. To say we can 
 believe nothing because we do not know all things, is to do 
 violence to the constitution of our Being. Let us welcome 
 thankfully the gradual widening of the region of light of which 
 we have experience. It is altogether reasonable to believe that 
 what we know not is in harmony with what we know, could we 
 but see it." — MacLeod Campbell. 
 
 " There is one token for us that we are meant for a higher 
 and happier life than this in the fact that sorrow and sin always 
 come upon us as a surprise, whilst happy days do not astonish 
 us, nor does goodness awaken amazement in us." (This testifies 
 to the instinctively conceived ideal of life, or rather divinely 
 inplanted ideal within us of life as happiness.) 
 
 " The order of nature is discovered or observed, not laid down 
 by us." 
 
 " The place of a people in the scale of human development is 
 determined by the condition of its women." 
 
 *' What we mean by truth is correspondence with our con- 
 
1 86 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 sciousiiess. The opposite or contradiction of consciousness is tlie 
 inconceivable by reason. The negation of self-consciousness is 
 the inconceivable or necessarily untrue." 
 
 " It is only kindred griefs that draw forth our tears." Griefs, 
 i.e., similar to those we have ourselves experienced. 
 
 " The question will for ever remain, what education will best 
 fit women to fulfil their relation to the other sex % " 
 
 ** The maternal function tends to tenderness of heart, and the 
 consequent relation of the temporarily invalided and incapacitated 
 to the bread-winner and protector both of mother and child." 
 
 " The rational relations between the sexes are based on vital 
 relations." 
 
 "What is present in Being is the source of truth, or of the 
 representations of consciousness." 
 
 " To get to the root of the secret powers that hold together 
 tliis world of ours." — Faust. This can only be done by reason, 
 *' substitution of similars." 
 
 A Suffi Persian poet says, " Reason is the diver who plunges 
 into the depths of Being for the pearls of truth." 
 
 " No fact is so minute as to be incapable of aff'ecting such scien- 
 tific generalisations as relate to it." 
 
 President Edwards says, " If we expel Being out of our minds, 
 we must think of the somewhat that the sleeping rocks do 
 dream of" {i.e., nothing). 
 
 " Speculation, to be rational, must be based on induction " (of 
 laws from facts of experience). 
 
 " The specialists provide the facts for the speculative mind." 
 
 " Evidence can only produce conviction according to the under- 
 standing of the individual." *' I can give you a reason," said 
 Dr. Johnson, "but not an understanding." 
 
 " The attainment of the knowledge of the true is the first duty 
 of man." 
 
 " Salvation from doubt is what man needs." 
 
 " Science is founded upon facts ; conclusions must always be 
 correlated with facts." 
 
 " Science demands as a primary condition the absolute verifi- 
 cation of the alleged facts with which it has to deal." (Verification 
 is in the last resort reflective and subjective.) 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 187 
 
 *' Nothing has any existence except in consciousness, created 
 or uncreated." If it made no effect upon a conscious being, exist- 
 ence could not be predicated of it. 
 
 *' Duty demands that we should follow truth wherever it leads." 
 AYe are responsible to our Creator for the faithful use or exercise 
 of our intellect. 
 
 Aristotle says, " In matters of taste individuals are necessarily 
 one-sided ; one is capable of appreciating one excellence, another, 
 another." 
 
 '• Faith in the ideas of reason is a sure ground of confidence ; 
 they are the raw material of thought." 
 
 " Materialism is but a physico-metaphysical philosophy." 
 
 " Rhythmical self-completion " (marriage). 
 
 " Gefiihl ist alle."— Goethe. 
 
 Socrates quotes from the Greek poets, " God is ever drawing 
 like towards like." Empedocles preached the gospel of love — 
 Almighty love. 
 
 *' It is feeling that to human thought is nourishment." 
 
 *' Education should be a system for adjusting a person's sur- 
 roundings to their higher needs." 
 
 " One idea connected with the word good is completeness." 
 
 " Good living or happiness." — Aristotle. 
 
 " Benevolence the common bond." 
 
 " An alliance has no common end ; its law is a mere contract " 
 (mere external correspondence ; union is internal). 
 
 "Principles must not be self-destructive." Surely the altruist 
 will allow that. 
 
 *' The brain cannot think unless the heart beats." 
 
 " The study of harmony is useful for the investigation of the 
 beautiful and the good." — Plato. 
 
 " Order is rational ; the good for Being is the end of order." — 
 Plato. 
 
 " C'^tait la moiti^ de mon ame qui m'^tait rendue, je retrouvais 
 la notion de la vie, solidarity humaine" (rational basis of 
 morals). — George Sand. 
 
 " The pig to the pig, the ass to the ass is beautiful." — Horace. 
 
 *' I feel a unity in all aims, all hopes, since I have known 
 you. Life seems symmetrical and coherent (correspondence 
 
i88 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 of subject and object) and " vvoitli living." — Story of Avis 
 (American). 
 
 "But yet we hope that somehow good will be the final end 
 of all." — Tennyson. 
 
 ** To its own impulse every creature stirs," 
 
 " Love is the spring of force and joy, which, penetrating all, 
 sets the blind seed of Being, and from the bond of incomplete 
 ideal essences wakes the harmony which is life." 
 
 " Love the spring and cause of things. Love, with fiery accents 
 calling, wakes the slumbering soul." — Epic of Hades. 
 
 *' Once read thine own breast right, and thou hast done with 
 fears. Man gets no other light, search he a thousand years. 
 Sink in thyself; there ask what ails thee at that shrine." — 
 Maltheiv Arnold. 
 
 " 'Tis that the lot they have fails their own will to please." 
 
 "Heaven is the vision of fulfilled desire." — Persian poet. 
 
 "Yet thoroughly to believe in one's own self, so one's self 
 were thorough, were to do great things." — Tennyson. 
 
 " It seemed to her that these prayers, which bore the burden 
 of centuries of half-inarticulate human longing, surrounded her 
 like everlasting arms ; and upon the Church which held the cry 
 of ages she leaned her head, as John did upon the bosom of his 
 Lord." — The Story of Avis. 
 
 " Qui veut la fin, veut les moyens." " Were we omniscient, or 
 understanding perfectly what is required for our development, 
 we might of our own free will entreat that no cup, however 
 bitter, might pass by us untasted." 
 
 " After long agony, rapture and bliss ; 
 Bight was the pathway leading to this." 
 
 The satisfaction of rational desire, not the extinction of it, as 
 Buddha and the Stoics taught, is happiness. Dante describes 
 the third heaven, where he sees Beatrice, and has the perfect 
 vision of the Supreme Being, as " Dove il desio fini," and the 
 long agony of patience with which the Saints cry, " How long, 
 Lord ! how long ! " 
 
 " Quand la vie est mauvaise on la reve meilleure, 
 Des yeux en pleurs au ciel se Invent a toute heure ; 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, 189 
 
 Vespoir vers Dleu se tourne et Dieu Tentend crier, 
 Laissez tout ce qui pleure p-i<?r." 
 
 — Victor Hugo. 
 
 " Findmo: itself in the midst of that which knows 
 no rest, in the midst of that which is ever changing, 
 the soul is constrained bjits nature or constitution to 
 look for that which is abiding — the real, the eternal^ 
 This, alone brings that sense of reconciliation with God 
 and His providence for which distressed spirits pine — 
 this is the possible explanation of the burdens which 
 oppress and bear man down. *' The pain of the 
 present may have a far-off interest. This conviction 
 can only spring yro??i faith in an eternal order which 
 encloses (apparent) disorder, and constrains it to some 
 perfect end." 
 
 ** That we must fall back upon the existence of a 
 power behind nature, the support and cause of that 
 which is phenomenal, even the most decided agnostics 
 admit." 
 
 It is the adoration of this Divine Being which alone 
 satisfies the deep-seated capacity for reverence and 
 awe in human nature on which the sense of duty 
 reposes ; this it is that allots to self love and social 
 love their proper limits, through the ultimate refer- 
 ence of both to the Source and Ordainer of each. 
 Keligion is thus the natural basis of personal morality 
 — as of love to our spiritual brethren. And it is 
 also the strongest stimulus to the pursuit of truth — 
 all knowledge being ultimately knowledge of the 
 Being, activity, and wisdom of God, from whom all 
 
I90 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 tilings proceed. When Tliales, the first Greek philo- 
 sopher upon record, announced the metaphysical axiom 
 *' Know Thyself," he must have had a forecast of the 
 philosophy of Self-Consciousness ; but it was Socrates, 
 in his Dialectics, who first brought clearly and promi- 
 nently forward the principle of sufficient reason, or the 
 ontological or psychological test of the validity of 
 belief, — showing the identity of thought and being, 
 and consequently the synthetic nature or process of 
 thought. Thus is the God concept the product of the 
 triform idea of Personality or Self-Conscious Being. 
 
 Page Eoberts, M.A., in an article in Good Words 
 on '^ Old and New Creeds," by Frederick Harrison in 
 The Nineteenth Century, says, " The great idea which 
 inspires the minds of Positivists — an idea by no means 
 new — is that of a complete synthesis of man in all his 
 relations, a system which arranges in one harmonious 
 whole the vast area covered by religion and philosophy, 
 allotting its place to every branch of physical and 
 mental science, and making them all converge upon 
 one sustaining centre. That is a grand idea of 
 unity — an idea which has inspired all the great 
 explainers and classifiers of the world according 
 to the measure of their ao:e." — " To see all arrantred 
 according to one great explaining governing idea ; 
 that is, an ideal synthesis which may well inspire the 
 stronQ:est minds of the world." "The reader is 
 oblif>:ed to admit that there is no such arrans^ement 
 and universal co-ordination." — Page Roherts, 'Good 
 Words,' Aug. 1864. But surely the principle of sufii- 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 191 
 
 cient reason, wliicli is the governing principle of 
 reflective introspective reasoning — the principle of 
 rational conception, i.e., that the cosmos is always to 
 be judged in relation to, or in the ratio of personal 
 self-conscious being. I have actually stated that one 
 co-ordinating principle of all knowledge — whether of 
 sense or sense transcending. This is what I mean by 
 the idea — consisting of three movements comprising 
 man's whole being, i.e., in relation to his feeling, 
 thought or intelligence, and will or moral tendency 
 to the good for Being — '' the synthesis of nature and 
 of life" required by Frederick Harrison as here ex- 
 hibited — as also " of knowledge and ideas." Frederick 
 Harrison has also truly said that '' when philosophy 
 and science say it is no part of their function to give 
 us a religion, it is an unworthy answer." 
 
 I say so also, and I consider that my science 
 of metaphysics and my philosophy furnish that re- 
 quirement of man's nature — a religion of reflective 
 Eeason. 
 
 The essence of religion is further described as " faith 
 in the existence of a supreme, eternal, beneficent 
 Being reconciling the world unto Himself — yes, by 
 reflective reason ; as mere perception reveals a world 
 of hideous disorder, to which no sentient and rational 
 creature coidd he reconciled ; so reflective comprehen- 
 sion reveals a trustworthy Creator. 
 
 The God concept is an idea of reflective reason, not 
 of the untutored understanding ; but the inferences 
 of reflective reason take their starting-point from the 
 
192 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 principle of sufficient cause within tlie category of tlie 
 understanding, upon which the principle of sufficient 
 reason proceeds. It is only by examining our ideas 
 in the light of reflective reason that we know that 
 they are true ; i.e., that our ideas are in accordance or 
 conformity with the understanding of Being, which 
 is the only sufficient reason we have to give for our 
 belief. Emerson says : " We are natural believers. 
 Truth, or the connection hetiueen cause and effect, 
 alone interests us." It is only in reflective, intros- 
 j^ecting reason, that we clearly realise this connection 
 between cause and effect, i.e., by closely observing, 
 i.e., cognising the effects or impressions produced on 
 us, we arrive at the knowledge or recognition of their 
 causes, through the substitution of similars, for a 
 similar effect a similar cause is logically substituted. 
 A German writer calls man, '' Ein Ursach suchendes 
 Thier" — a cause-hunting animal. Above all, our 
 ideas of what constitutes the good for Being are 
 determined by our oivn experience, together with 
 general biographical and historical relations of the 
 experiences of others. Thus it is that we have come 
 to see that pain and suffering, as aids to affec- 
 tional, intellectual, and moral development, are not 
 evil permissions of the Creator, but benevolent pre- 
 vision of their salutary effects as means of advance to 
 perfection of Being. Even the possibility of sin itself 
 rouses the creature to the sense of the madness of 
 bringing down the established order of the Creator 
 upon himself as a consuming fire, instead of reaping 
 

 SELF- CONSCIO USNESS. — 195" 
 
 the benefit of it in his owu case as a life-giving 
 warmth. Goodness is not conceivable without wis- 
 dom and power — wisdom being the knowledge of 
 means to an end, and power the energy which is 
 necessary to execute its behests. The three functions 
 of consciousness are indivisible in Being, and so in 
 mental representation or thought. The nature of the 
 object of the emotions can only be learned by an 
 examination of the emotions occasioned in us. This 
 is marvellously true of spontaneous emotion, only 
 spontaneous emotion should be reflected upon to 
 make sure that no irrelevant cause has afi'ected us. 
 There are also emotions incidental to the general 
 conception of universals, or abstract ideas, such as the 
 true, the beautiful, and the good. Now false concep- 
 tions may, and often are, made of these as well as of 
 individual objects. 
 
 All science comes of reflective reason — the exact 
 knowledge of the true and of the beautiful or har- 
 monious as well as the knowledge of the good. The 
 rationale of truth as of love and of goodness can 
 only be arrived at in reflective consciousness of our 
 own being. " From the decision of self-conscious- 
 ness," says Mr. Shad worth H. Hodgson ("Time and 
 Space "), " there is no appeal, from the nature there 
 exhibited there is no escape" — any more than the 
 verdict given by a judge and jury can fail to represent 
 the human nature from which it emanates. Again, 
 Mr. Shad worth H. Hodgson goes on to say, *' Cogni- 
 tions are the fruit of the exercise of consciousness, as 
 
194 PHILOSOPHY OF 
 
 a tree produces its fruit as a consequence and result 
 of its development." *' Reason is the ultimate judge 
 of truth and goodness ; what it declares to be such 
 is such, as what the eye declares to be red is red." 
 *' Everything known must have a warrant in con- 
 sciousness." The d priori cognitions, from which all 
 a posteriori inferences are drawn, are given in the 
 understanding ; all reflective reasoning is upon the 
 ground of this fundamental intelligence of causation 
 in its three forms. It is only through the relations 
 of thinors to the Eo^o that we can understand them : 
 what is conformable to the nature of the ideal or 
 typically perfect Ego is judged to be true in thought, 
 beautiful in feeling, and right in action. An object 
 is regarded as perfect when considered as fully 
 developed in its nature. The unity of apprehension * 
 is one of a state of being. It lays hold of, or is 
 affected by similar attributes to its own, and enables 
 us to combine them in one Supreme Person, and thus 
 to reach the sense transcending belief (through reflec- 
 tion upon the Ego) in a Supreme Being or Sufiicient 
 Cause for the noumenal and phenomenal universe. 
 And the emotion attending this conception, i.e., the 
 religious sentiment, has manifested itself in some 
 form or other amongst all the races of mankind, just 
 as the belief in one's own ghost or sense-transcending 
 being is equally universal, and it must be remembered 
 
 * F. Harrison says, *' Philosophy and religion must remain impotent, 
 a bywor<l and a pest, while they are content to nibble at separate sides 
 of human nature." 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 19 
 
 that the conclusions of reflective reason are as bind- 
 ing upon our belief as the spontaneous concepts of 
 the understanding ; self- verification being the test of 
 both. The knowledge of being in self-consciousness 
 is the cause of the concepts of the understanding, 
 these being in their turn the foundation of the 
 principle of suflScieut reason or reflective reason. 
 Reflective reason is so far practical that '' all reason- 
 ing to the purpose " is for the satisfaction of either 
 the afiections, the understanding, or the moral sense 
 — what other motives can we conceivably have in 
 discussion or investigation — the aesthetic sense may 
 indeed, whilst involving these, add to them the 
 qualification of the sensuous imagination, but this 
 may vary whilst ontological relations are necessarily 
 unchanging. Even in **the glory of the restitution 
 of all things," — i.e., when all spirits are finally blessed, 
 — it is not conceivable that what has been so intensely 
 realised here as the supreme means to fulness of Being 
 and happiness, i.e., elective affinities — complementary 
 idiosyncratic attraction should ever lose its value of 
 importance — witness the anticipation, so universally 
 exhibited in all times and places, of the recovery of the 
 objects of personal afiection, rendering it inconceiv- 
 able that the supreme principle of social order should 
 ever be dropped out of the order of the universe, or 
 cease to be the crown of blessedness, according to the 
 Divine ordination. " The only bliss of Paradise that 
 has survived the Fall can certainly not be rationally 
 conceived to be wanting for the great Amen of souls 
 
196 PHILOSOPHY OF SELF-CONSCTOUSNESS, 
 
 to be possible. Our laws and customs may change 
 with time and place, but in the absolutely perfect 
 Being there is no shadow of change or of variability 
 in His ordinances — only the unwise regulation re- 
 quires contradiction. Thus each one having entered 
 into the eternal possession of their own heart's delight, 
 as Mahomet promised to his faithful, tliere shall be 
 *^no more grudgings," no more possible jealousy of 
 each other ; for in the kincrdom wherein dwelletlr 
 righteousness, peace and good- will towards all will 
 reign for ever, together with adoring gratitude to the 
 Joy-Giver, and the rapturous sense of communion with 
 Him, promised by reason to purity in heart and to 
 integrity of thought and Being. Spiritual harmony, 
 as I have before said, is at once the means and the 
 end — the summun honum — peace and joy here and 
 hereafter; this alone fulfils the requirement of the 
 principle of sufficient reason offering complete satis- 
 faction to the emotional, intellectual, and moral nature 
 of man. " Religion to be stable must be philoso- 
 phical," i.e., must proceed upon the principle of suffi- 
 cient reason. Faith springs from reflection on the 
 attributes of Personality, and rises through reason to 
 its hope and source in the Supreme Being. Faith, 
 love, and hope all centre in noumenal or spiritual 
 Being. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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