284 THE HUMAN SKIN. 



merit our consciousness is ourself, the boundary of our apprehension. 

 Cogito ergo sum is this reflex power, and means that we see our 

 outline in our states of consciousness. These states are elastic robes 

 to our faculties, clothing the placid eye of thought equally with the 

 long arms of will; and where they are not, the faculties considered 

 as human possessions are not. But consciousness is an ocular tunic, 

 or a man of eye ; it sees self, nature and space without it, or per- 

 meates all the inferior extenses.* It also looks inwards, and feels 

 as if it saw the vitals of the mind. It has moreover different layers 

 whereof the one is conscious of the other ; and it is luminous in 

 various degrees, from glimmers of perception to complete thought, 

 in which it forms a tight envelope of self-knowledge that insures 



mind. Again, when consciousness is sought for its own sake, it forms the 

 mental itch, which is a general and excessive self-consciousness. And when it 

 is taken for the world, as by the Berkleyans, it constitutes elephantiasis scroti 

 mentis, in which the intellect dwells in the crannies of the warts of its own 

 imagination. We might easily range the diseases of consciousness parallel to 

 those of the skin, and classify the philosophies of consciousness under vesicles, 

 papules, pustules, exanthems, and the like; but time fails, and the work would be 

 both unseemly and irritating. It is enough, however, to indicate that the idols 

 of modern philosophy, the Ego, and the Me, the personality, the self, the indivi- 

 duality, are as necessary as our skins, but that they are our surfaces and lowest 

 parts, and require brushing and combing, washing and tending; but will by no 

 means bear deifying; for whatever of dirt and ugliness, whatever private parts 

 there are in us. or come upon us, these skins catch. When we look at the phi- 

 losophies through the organon of the human body, we see that the skin of every 

 subject, the sensual part, has alone been studied ; and that speaking bodily, 

 neither brain, heart, bowels, lungs nor muscles have entered into philosophy, 

 which accordingly has been the dead plane and flatness of the human mind, the 

 coarsest texture of all, as if it were the dishcloth of the fates. 



* We may notice cursorily that the various skin principles are in their own 

 way co-extensive. But the law of extension is different for each. Conscious- 

 ness reaches the stars, not by being put on the stretcher of space, but by enjoying 

 the faculty of representation. Conscience extends similarly, because duty is 

 co-equal with consciousness. The perfection and relative infiniteness of things 

 lies in their having the greatest amount of presence in the smallest space. Thus 

 it is the pre-eminence of the eye over the skin that it touches things without 

 contact, and that there is no known proportion between its size and that of its 

 objects. And thus it is the perfection of motive force to move bodies without 

 exerting any push like their own resistance. In thinking, therefore, of the 

 higher spaces and forms, we must regard each successive perfection as equiva- 

 lent to all the matter and extension that preceded it, and look within the human 

 skin, and not in the cosmos, for the image of infinity and power. 



