AND ITS SELF-CONSERYATION. 5 



C. RANGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 



We have next to observe that these facts of the indi- 

 vidual consciousness necessarily have relation to a world 

 lying beyond the range of the individual's immediate 

 experience. They had a beginning as such facts of con- 

 sciousness, and with whatever powers we may regard the 

 mind of any individual man as endowed, we cannot in- 

 clude as among those powers the ability to create, out 

 of pure nothing, the facts which go to make up its own 

 world of growing consciousness. If, in a certain sense, 

 the individual consciousness possesses creative powers, 

 those powers can still be regarded as creative only in 

 the sense of being powers of transformation, or rather 

 of transfiguration. It reaches out to a world "beyond 

 itself," and in that world finds material which it seizes 

 upon and appropriates to its own uses. At the same 

 time, this " reaching out " is but a self -expansion of the 

 individual consciousness so as to include in, and assimi- 

 late to, its own inner world more and more of what 

 previously belonged to a world that was external and 

 apparently alien to such consciousness. 



And yet this gradual appropriation by the individual 

 consciousness of the world which, at the outset, lies 

 beyond such consciousness, could not take place at all, 

 if that world were wholly an alien world. Rather, it 

 demonstrates that the world lying beyond the immediate 

 range of the individual consciousness is still in vital 

 relation to the actual present facts of such consciousness. 



The limit of the possible experience of the individual 

 then is to be found only where the "outer world" ceases 

 to be in relation to the world of consciousness at all. 



