THE ANTECHAMBER OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 667 



he, unconscious of his labor, acted or -^rote or clreamed after an even- 

 ing of sack at the " Mermaid " with " rare Ben Jonson." 



That indefinable personal equation which distinguishes the indi- 

 vidual from all others is the limit and condition of his unconscious in- 

 tellectual activity. .Newton discovered the workings cf the law of 

 gravitation and happily perceived it in his phase of consciousness, and 

 the world has become so much the wiser on account of this accident. 

 The workings of other laws of Nature he undoubtedly formulated to 

 just as definite and logical conclusions, yet these he and the world 

 have never known. It is most imjjrobable that Sir Isaac Newton in 

 consciousness or unconsciousness ever created a finished ideal like 

 Becky Sharp or the Heathen Chinee. The novelist Dumas, after a 

 period of active living and omnivorous reading, would board his yacht 

 on the Mediterranean, and lie half torpid and dreaming day after day 

 on her deck, hardly noticing his environment ; then suddenly would 

 change from this state and betake himself to work, summoning into 

 existence the results of his unconscious intellectual activity, dashing 

 off chapter after chapter, not of some work on theology, but of a novel. 

 So perhaps were Chicot and the immortal Athos, Porthos, and Aramis 

 conceived. The limitations of the personal equation forbid the idea 

 of an intellectual activity existing in unconsciousness unlike that found 

 in consciousness. On the contrary, we are forced to predicate an abso- 

 lute relation in kind between the results of such activity in the two 

 distinct phases of our life ; just as when we see the fossil types char- 

 acterizing a Silurian stratum cropping out horizontally on some hill- 

 side, we can as surely determine what will distinguish the fossil forms 

 of the interior of that hill as if we summoned an army to remove the 

 incubus and lay bare for our scrutiny the stratum at the center. 



Having once possessed knowledge, we can never lose it ; the power 

 to use it may be temporarily lost, but there is no knowing when the 

 proper chord may not be struck, and the old fact of memory or the 

 old problem long worked out may not be regained. All our experi- 

 ences may fade away into the realm of unconsciousness, yet they are 

 not lost, they are only dormant and biding their time. In conscious- 

 ness we find the means by which we can exercise self-consciousness, 

 and thus know our own existence. In this most specializtd form of 

 purely nervous activity, the ego is discerned as an ego endowed with 

 reason, will, and conscience. "What the genesis of consciousness from 

 unconsciousness is, we know not ; there is as great a gap here as the 

 step from nothing to life, and there we must stop, seeing our limita- 

 tions with reverent agnosticism and recognizing the folly and futility 

 of further investigations. The materialization of consciousness has 

 been ordered by science and it must be recognized as a fact. Mind 

 and body unquestionably react, but the psychologists have, in the 

 past, mingled too great an amount of matter with mind, and science 

 is now surely, but certainly and with pitiless accuracy, separating the 



