378 LESSONS FROM NATURE. [CHAP. XIII. 



strengthening and wider diffusion in a more developed form 

 of those very beliefs which such efforts were designed to 

 uproot. To make manifest the reinvigorating effect of these 

 hostile efforts we must briefly traverse again some of the 

 ground we have gone over. 



I. As regards the Ego, the persistence with which our 

 Asto the knowledge of it has been denied, and the arguments 

 by which such denial has been supported, serve to 

 bring out the supreme importance of our recognition of our 

 own self-consciousness and all that our knowledge of the 

 Ego implies and contains. Each man who for the first 

 time has his eyes opened to the marvellous nature of his 

 present knowledge of his own past existence, will see in the 

 necessarily postulated &quot; veracity of memory &quot; the evidence 

 of his possession of real objective truth and of knowledge 

 other than phenomenal. In recognising his own self-con 

 sciousness he must also recognise that his mind declares 

 certain truths (e.g., that what thinks, exists) to be absolutely 

 and universally true. He must, on introspection, further 

 see that such truths are not passively apprehended by him, 

 through his impotence to think the contrary, but are actively 

 apprehended and seen to be truths positively necessary and 

 universal, and in this way his mind will again be carried by 

 its own force from subjectivity to objectivity. The validity 

 of the declarations of his intellect, and consequently of its 

 logical processes, being thus rendered unassailable except at 

 the price of absolute intellectual paralysis, its declarations 

 as to &quot; causation &quot; and &quot; morality &quot; gain at once a recognised 

 validity. That phenomenal conditional changes, even if 

 ranging in cycles through a past eternity, must require a 

 real, absolute, eternal Cause, will, as we have seen in the last 

 chapter, be apparent to him, while the absolute declarations 

 of the intellect in the sphere of morality will necessarily 

 lead to the attribution to that cause of &quot; a goodness &quot; har 

 monising with, however immeasurably exceeding, his own. 

 In other words, the widespread propagation of the absurd 

 denial of our own self-knowledge is an antecedent condition 



