CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS POWERS. 17 



human consciousness, possessed a power of touch or 

 contact with physical nature, without their finding it 

 necessary, as a step in the logical progress of their 

 intelligence, to lay down that fact among the abstract 

 sequences of dialectics, and that they have not erred 

 the more in all the practice and nobler aims of life from 

 neglecting to do so'? Fortunately, practical human life 

 is not conducted under the light of dialectics, but men 

 have to judge very much on the impulse and necessity 

 of the occasion in most things, and were it not for their 

 power to do so few would be able competently to meet 

 the responsibilities of existence. 



It may now form an amusement for such of our readers 

 as care for the exercise of logical analysis to turn back 

 to the syllogism stated at page 7, of the preceding 

 remarks, which contains the whole concentrated force 

 of David Hume's philosophy, and satisfy themselves how 

 much sophistry there may be, after all, even in so solemn 

 a formula as a syllogism, and how utterly false it may be 

 in every member of it ; for in that instance it will be 

 found that the first blunder is a double one in the major 

 proposition. For those who would like to follow the 

 subject of Metaphysics still further, reference is made to 

 the learned and discriminating article, " Metaphysics," 

 in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the first dissertation 

 prefixed to that work, which will show what a muddle has 

 hiherto, in all ages, been made* of this great department of 

 thought, and in what a disgraceful condition it has been 

 left to the present day from want of a little consecutive 

 directness and unbiased simplicity of thought. 



But the primary perceptive power or Consciousness of 

 man, its actual contact with, and knowledge of, Matter and the 

 Immaterial, and its proximity to the Infinite, having been 

 so far indicated, let us now deal with the physical faculties 

 in connection with it. as forming its existing channels of 



c 



