14 BEING AND FACULTIES OF MAN. 



10. Such a fact lands this great primary perceptive 

 faculty of our being fairly and fully on the margin of the 

 infinite, and proves it to be capable of being enabled to 

 perceive all reality, physical or. metaphysical, beyond 

 the range of our present experience, were it only allowed 

 to come into competent contact with such reality ? 



It will be observed that the argument here is not for 

 the immortality of the soul, but for its highest powers of 

 perception or knowing, and of acting. The immortality, 

 or durability, of our consciousness is, as we have said, 

 dependent, not on anything inherent in itself; for it did 

 not exist from all eternity ; but on the Great Will and 

 Power by which it was called into existence and continues 

 to exist, and no one can prove what that Will is but by 

 the revelation of it, so that a proof of the immortality of 

 the soul on any other ground is impossible. 



From this point let us omitting the third proposition, 

 p. 9, now stated, and all that follows upon it look back 

 for a moment to the condition of human philosophy dis- 

 played down to the present time by the state of these 

 questions, and what it reveals of man's mental power of 

 self-deception. 



When Epicurus based his philosophy on the aphorism, 

 nothing but matter can touch or be touched, he was 

 guided by one faculty, the eye only, in arriving at the 

 conclusion to which he came ; for had he been guided by 

 the sense of touch itself, in addition, he must have 

 become aware of the fact that FEELING touched as well as 

 MATTER. His blunder, therefore, was that he reasoned 

 from partial and defective premises. Indeed, caustic 

 though the remark may seem, it is more than doubtful 

 whether a blind man would have fallen into the same 

 ditch, for a blind man does not so readily perceive the 

 contact of matter with matter, and is more impressed 

 with the contact of consciousness with matter. Aristotle 



