480 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



Of Pleasure and Pain. Let us notice what we have got, as he describes 

 it : " When a red light flashes across the field of vision, there arises in 

 the mind an impression of sensation which we call red. It appears to 

 me that this sensation red is something which may exist altogether in- 

 dependently of any other impression or idea as an individual existence. 

 . . . The whole content of consciousness might be that impression." 

 These Impressions, with the Pleasure and Pain, are represented by 

 him as knowledge ; this without a thing knoAving or a thing known. 

 It is such knowledge with which man starts, such knowledge as man 

 can attain, and the foundation of all other knowledge. 



He has already laid the foundation of agnostics. He has started 

 with an assumed principle, from which only nescience can follow. 

 These impressions can never by logic or any legitimate process give 

 us the knowledge of things. The addition or multiplication of can 

 give us only ; so the additions or multiplications of impressions, of 

 sensations, of pleasures and pains, can give us only impressions in sen- 

 sations and in pleasures and pains. 



Now, all this is to be met by showing that the mind begins in sense- 

 perception with the knowledge of things. It knows this stone as an 

 existing and resisting object. It knows self as perceiving this object. 

 "The whole content of consciousness" never is a mere impression, 

 say a sensation of red. It is of a thing impressed. If I am asked 

 for my proof, I answer that all this is contained in my very conscious- 

 ness. I have, in fact, the same evidence of this as I have of the exist- 

 ence of the impression "red." I am conscious of self perceiving a 

 red object. Indeed, any impression I may have is an abstraction taken 

 from the self impressed. 



2. Omitting for the present the impressions of Relation, we now 

 view the only other content which he gives the mind, Ideas, which he 

 defines " copies or reproductions in memory of the foregoing." We 

 are here at the point at which Mr. J. S. Mill was so perplexed. He 

 saw, and acknowledged in his candor, that in memory there is more 

 than a mere copy or a reproduction. There is the belief that the event 

 remembered has been before us in time 2)ast. We thus get the idea of 

 time always in the concrete ; that is, an event in time, and by abstrac- 

 tion we can separate the time from the events in time. We have got 

 more. We intuitively believe that we are the same persons at this 

 present time as we were when days or years ago we witnessed the 

 event. We can not be made to believe otherwise. In this process we 

 are adding knowledge to knowledge, and this a knowledge of our- 

 selves and of other things. These arc all revealed to and attested by 

 consciousness, the organ of things internal. The person who would 

 overlook such important facts as these in the animal structure would 

 be terribly lacerated by our acute zoologist. 



3. The next step in the progress of the mind is the discovery of Re- 

 lations. Hume's account of the relations which the mind can dis- 



