28 BEING AND FACULTIES OP MAN. 



space, and tliis qualification is fully admitted. But when 

 the student in a narrow room, with narrow and visible 

 walls of solid matter all around him, shutters closed, and 

 all external light excluded, darts away by an act of 

 thought from the midnight lamp before him, and in one 

 bound of free and outward bursting will contemplates in 

 imagination the remotest cluster of coloured stars that 

 gem the distant sapphire of the night, and plunges into 

 and peoples with his fancy the wide and ever-expanding 

 infinitude beyond them, it is not the real or material that 

 is or ever can be to him a practicable gauge of that vast 

 and traversed region of his mental will, but it is the 

 abstract power of his Consciousness alone, and its inherent 

 contact with and appreciation of the possible its divinely 

 endowed intelligence that makes him aware of space 

 which no physical perception can reveal, and no expanded 

 power of material optics ever measure or exhaustively 

 explore. It is here and in similar instances that he finds 

 his metaphysical powers to be superior in their capacity 

 to all his physical capabilities, and that his Consciousness 

 is shown to be aware of space to a degree far beyond all 

 that mere physics can know or reveal. Another character- 

 istic of man's Consciousness, therefore, is that it is capable 

 of action beyond the range of all known physical agency. 



But as actual contact is not necessary to consciousness 

 in the faculty of touch, so neither is actual seeing neces- 

 sary to consciousness in the eye, actual hearing to con- 

 sciousness in the ear, nor actual taste nor smell necessary 

 to consciousness, or the presence of consciousness, in these 

 organs. Consciousness may be present in any or all of 

 them without their being actually in exercise in a physical 

 sense. Further, Consciousness may excite them into 

 artificial action, and influence them with, and make them the 

 medium of hypothetical and imaginary impressions ; and 

 this fact forms the physical basis for the mental constructive 



