186 THE GREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



hinting that mere blank non-being, the mere privation 

 of our present conscious being as shown in the stone 

 or clod, is a greater thing than consciousness ; nor that 

 Nirvana, the dark goal of the Buddhist's hopes the 

 mere stripping off of all our present modes of conscious- 

 ness, sensation, desire, affection, aspiration, thought, and 

 hope, as hindrances, not helps to happiness or peace 

 is superior to consciousness, or the greater thing that we 

 may reach hereafter. We do not mean to imply that 

 the unconscious existence of the stone, of the wave, of 

 the cloud, nor yet that the blank nonentity, the sudden 

 precipitation into eternal darkness, and our reduction 

 to nothing (if any such thing be possible in Nature), 

 which the extreme materialist contemplates as the only 

 outlook after death, is the better state than conscious- 

 ness. Not any of these things, even if any of them be 

 thinkable or possible. What, then, do we mean ? This : 

 that the division of the sphere of existence roundly into 

 two parts, the conscious and unconscious, is misleading ; 

 the second segment of the sphere, to wit, the uncon- 

 scious, containing vastly more than the first, while also 

 its separate divisions and modes may be wholly different 

 from each other, though all confounded under one name 

 the unconscious. To divide existence into the con- 

 scious and unconscious provinces is as if we were to 

 divide animals into men and not-men, where the second 

 expresses a far greater sum of life than the first, though 

 without reference to any of its differential features. 

 So the word " unconscious," or not-conscious, strictly 

 speaking, expresses no more than the absence of con- 

 sciousness, while the sphere itself may embrace a much 

 greater region than the conscious, while also it may have 

 and it has modes of being greatly varied, amongst which 

 some greater than consciousness may well have place. 



