THE NERVOUS SYSTEM AND CONSCIOUSNESS. 159 



attain general acceptance, to the destruction of a huge load of the 

 world's misery. All this and more may come, but physiology will 

 never remove or investigate a state of consciousness ; it will never 

 front the inner side of a single sensation. This, if I mistake not, is 

 the annoying thing to many specialists. The resort has, for a long 

 time, been a vigorous pooh-poohing of consciousness, or a ridicule of 

 it as somehow synonymous with metaphysics and nonsense. It is a 

 singular and natural thing singular in its intensity and narrowness, 

 natural in its origin this conviction among many of the younger spe- 

 cialists that logical and psychological investigations are but rattle- 

 boxes for babes and fools. The natural origin of this, I say, is plain. 

 The chairs in many of our colleges and universities are occupied by 

 men nobly endowed by nature for their special studies, and culti- 

 vated through years of investigation abroad. They have not, however, 

 escaped the working of the association of ideas. All they have ever 

 known about psychology, logic, or ethics, dates back to a few hours' 

 perfunctory stumbling over the pages of Haven's " Mental Philosophy," 

 Day's " Logic," Wkately's " Logic," Thompson's " Outlines of the Laws 

 of Thought," Butler's " Analogy," Haven's " Moral Philosophy," or, 

 if specially fortunate, Hamilton's " Metaphysics." These exercises in 

 torture were held during those groping years of college-boy experi- 

 ence. Here were given all the facts ever furnished for coming to an 

 understanding of the processes of thought or the principles of morals. 

 Interest in these matters, an interest natural to all who share human 

 nature, was blasted at the outset of its development. Other pursuits 

 that could and did take on the semblance of reality fastened attention, 

 and led to the years of toil that fitted for life-work. What more nat- 

 ural than that henceforth (must it be said forever ?) each approach to 

 the subject of consciousness is, for these minds, an approach to confu- 

 sion worse confounded ? The fact that I occupy a chair in Philosophy 

 will very much weaken the force of what I am about to say ; still, the 

 conviction will get itself expressed with whatsoever power it may 

 have. The work of the workers would rise faster, stand firmer, come 

 to more universal recognition, if guided by some living logic, and some 

 appreciation of the processes of thought, emotion, and will. The fact 

 is, that in consciousness and in consciousness alone all things are known. 

 No physicist ever fronted or ever will front a pure fact, a thing as it 

 is, apart from consciousness. What the physicist knows are not sub- 

 stances in themselves, out of consciousness. Force and matter are, in 

 the way in which he uses them and must use them, products of his 

 consciousness. He, the conscious person, is affected so and so, that is, 

 is made to have such and such states of consciousness ; to the common 

 or resembling elements in these states, he gives a common name, be- 

 lieving, beyond a doubt, in the existence of a cause for these states, 

 but often failing to realize that such cause is unknown and unknow- 

 able, not at all revealed, in its essence and apart from consciousness, 



