62 BEING AND FACULTIES OF MAN. 



tion, and find we have hitherto been looking at the half calf 

 and gilt edges of the volume only, and that the Book in 

 the running Brook, and the Sermon in the Stone, do not 

 preach or expose their letter-press to every one, but, like 

 sensitive and highly-gifted ministers, pause till the audience 

 is sufficiently reverential and attentive. Much of the very 

 best elements of philosophic truth and wisdom is hid 

 under the aspect of commonplace, and familiarity with 

 facts is not necessarily knowledge. The man who has 

 used his hands from youth to age until they have acquired 

 such a property of easiness in custom that for them to go 

 right has become intuitive, and to use them wrong 

 would involve the necessity of special direction, does not 

 from all this experience of his powers know one bit the 

 more how or why it is that the hand so instantly obeys 

 the Will, or by what sprite-quick and Ariel agency the 

 sympathy between the master and the servant is so full that, 

 ere the pulse beats twice, or even once, the hand has acted 

 the thought or seized what the volition, 'has resolved on, 

 and holds it prisoner to our further purpose. Why or 

 how is it that our motions obey our will ? Has all our 

 life-long familiarity with this fact led us a step nearer to 

 the solution of its modus operandi ? Or has our experience 

 only intensified our stupidity, and schooled us into arro- 

 gant indifference and self-satisfied ignorance ? 



All we have said of the great perceptive power of our 

 being CONSCIOUSNESS, we see no reason to qualify here, 

 but neither do we feel it possible to expand the ranges 

 of what we have said, or propound an extension of its 

 energies, save in only one direction. Consciousness is 

 not physical, nor possessed of physical powers or agencies. 

 It is an intelligence, not material, nor incapable of 

 separate existence from matter. But its connection with 

 matter, in addition to its contact with and powers of 

 perceiving it which have been already dealt with, appears 



