28 LESSONS FKOM NATURE. [CHAP. I- 



they are convinced they do know, and not to give up a certain 

 and absolute truth (their intellectual birthright) at the bid 

 ding of those who would illogically make use of such negation 

 as a ground for affirming the relativity of all our knowledge, 

 and consequently for denying all such truths as, for whatever 

 reason, they may desire to deny. 



Such, then, is the first lesson we may draw from the in- 

 The first les- vestigation of nature as revealed to us in and by 

 ture/ 01 our own minds. Our continued personal existence 

 is a certainty absolute and irresistible, directly known to 

 us as a particular contingent fact by means of conscious 

 ness itself. Our supreme certainty of this truth has, as we 

 have seen, been denied on grounds which, it is here con 

 tended, plainly show a want of accurate analysis and of careful 

 introspection on the part of the deniers. Their denial, how 

 ever, serves to bring out still more clearly the supreme im 

 portance of our recognition of our own self-consciousness, and 

 of all that our knowledge of the Ego implies and contains. 

 Each man who for the first time has his eyes thus opened to 

 the marvellous nature of his present knowledge of his own 

 past existence will see in this necessarily postulated &quot; veracity 

 of memory &quot; the evidence of his possession of real objective 

 truth and of knowledge other than phenomenal. That is to 

 say, he will see that his own mind has the power (however 

 acquired and however mysterious) of penetrating beyond the 

 appearances of things, beyond mere feelings, and the con 

 stant changes of nature, and of attaining a direct knowledge 

 of a persistent and real being namely, himself, as both 

 past and present learning through his passing states and 

 feelings the fact of his own persistent and enduring being. 

 We may now seek to learn whether this first lesson taught 

 us by nature can aid towards the acquirement of further 

 certainty. 



