CONSCIOUSNESS. 175 



efforts of reason threaten to miscarry. This fact 

 would suffice of itself to induce us to make a special 

 critical study of consciousness from our monistic 

 point of view. We shall see that consciousness is 

 simply a natural phenomenon like any other psychic 

 quality, and that it is subject to the law of substance 

 like all other natural phenomena. 



Even as to the elementary idea of consciousness, 

 its contents and extension, the views of the most 

 distinguished philosophers and scientists are widely 

 divergent. Perhaps the meaning of consciousness is 

 best conceived as an internal perception, and com- 

 pared with the action of a mirror. As its two chief 

 departments we distinguish objective and subjective 

 consciousness — consciousness of the world, the non- 

 ego, and of the ego. By far the greater part of our 

 conscious activity, as Schopenhauer justly remarked, 

 belongs to the consciousness of the outer world, or 

 the non-ego : this world-consciousness embraces all 

 possible phenomena of the outer world which are in 

 any sense accessible to our minds. Much more 

 contracted is the sphere of self -consciousness, the 

 internal mirror of all our own psychic activity, all 

 our presentations, sensations, and volitions. 



Many distinguished thinkers, especially on the 

 physiological side (Wundt and Ziehen, for instance), 

 take the ideas of consciousness and psychic function 

 to be identical — " all psychic action is conscious " ; 

 the province of psychic life, they say, is co-extensive 

 with that of consciousness. In our opinion, such a 

 definition gives an undue extension to the meaning 

 of consciousness, and occasions many errors and 

 misunderstandings. We share, rather, the view of 

 other philosophers (Romanes, Fritz Schultze, and 



