FIRST PRINCIPLES 27 



study a man acquires a knowledge of knowing, thoughts 

 about thinking. He knows that he possesses consciousness. 

 It is not that he is consciousness merely a concomitant 

 of a certain kind of nerve-activity. He owns a conscious- 

 ness which he can direct and control ; from which it fol- 

 lows that there is a He to own it. But the two sources of 

 information must never be confused. The lines of thought 

 for which the external and the internal worlds supply 

 materials are parallel, and neither diverging nor converg- 

 ing lines. A man's consciousness gives him no more infor- 

 mation with regard to his science than his senses give him 

 with regard to his consciousness. The two worlds are 

 absolutely and permanently distinct. 



Science prosecutes its researches to the confines of the 

 observable. Self-analysis is carried to the limits of con- 

 sciousness. Each line of research is abandoned with a 

 sense that there is something beyond. Beyond the know- 

 able, the unknowable. Beyond the self-conscious, the All- 

 conscious. It is in this beyond that the philosophy of the 

 Absolute weaves its system. It is this beyond that religion 

 seeks to explain. Religion claims, indeed, that the world 

 behind sense and the world beyond consciousness are one. 



"We know nothing beyond our simple ideas which we 

 are not at all to wonder at, since we, having but some 

 superficial ideas of things, discovered to us only by the 

 senses from without, or by the mind reflecting on what it 

 experiments in itself within, have no knowledge beyond 

 that, much less of the internal constitution and true nature 

 of things, being destitute of faculties to attain it. And, there- 

 fore, experimenting and discovering in ourselves knowledge 

 and the power of voluntary motion as certainly as we 

 experiment or discover in things without us the cohesion 

 and separation of solid parts, which is the extension and 

 motion of bodies, we have as much reason to be satisfied 

 with our notion of immaterial spirit as with our notion of 

 body, and the existence of the one as well as the other. 



