206 W. L. COURTNEY, M.A., LL.D., 
mind recognises itself as the subject of its own states, and 
recognises these states as its own. The mind, as it were, 
appears to itself and links every mental state together by the 
bond that they all belong to its one self. What does any 
man mean by speaking of his own personality, except that he 
is conscious of himself as being: the one identical being who 
has had every kind of experience and undergone various 
mental phases and knows them all as his own? How can 
there be any material substratum, analogous or correspondent 
to self-consciousness ? ‘he question is almost absurd. How 
can any physiological process represent this faculty of self- 
consciousness, when we can conceive of no relation between 
them which could bring them into any intelligible corre- 
spondence—when one remains a process, while the other is a 
flash of self-identifying power? We hardly know what it is 
which we are going to set about to attempt to describe. 
Self-consciousness is the unique property of a mind which is 
so real that it can appear to itself. 
We must not shrink from the conclusion to which these and 
many other considerations which might be mentioned seem 
to tend. If we were to say that there was by the side of the 
physical and nervous organism, a real mind with conditions 
of its own, and developing according to laws of its own, we 
should seem to be relapsing into the old dualism of Descartes, 
and be exposed to the difficulties of understanding how two 
alien natures could act on each other. That may be so: and 
perhaps we have not even yet got much further than the 
assertion that the spiritual is not the physical and the physical 
not the spiritual. But one dogma I think we can hold fast ; 
that if there be a real being in the universe, it is not the 
physical but the mental which alone throws lhght on the 
physical and enables us to understand it. The real is the 
mind, over and above all other realities. Further questions 
as to mind and matter and their mutual relations, and whether 
we can find some ultimate pomt or power which comprehends 
them both, and in which they become fused—whether that 
point or that power be called Absolute Spirit or God—would 
lead us into some of the most abstruse problems of Meta- 
physics and make us far overpass the bounds of our present 
subject. 
