366 eepoet— 1879. 



that we know we have any feelings at all. Without thought, indeed, we might 

 feel, hut we could not know that we felt or know ourselves as feeling. If then 

 we have rational grounds for the acceptance of such a purely intellectual concep- 

 tion as that of an immanent principle as the essence of each living creature, the 

 poverty of our powers of imagination should he no bar to its acceptance. We are 

 continually employing terms and conceptions — such, e.g., as ' being,' ' substance,' 

 ' cause,' &c. — which are intelligible to the intellect (since they can be discussed), 

 though they transcend the powers of the imagination to picture. 



It seems to me that the spirit which would deny such realities is the same spirit 

 which would deny our real knowledge of an external world at all, and represent any 

 material object as ' a state of consciousness,' and at the very same time represent ' a 

 state of consciousness,' as the accompaniment of a peculiar state of a material object 

 — the body. 1 This mode of representation may be shortly, but not unjustly, described 

 as a process of intellectual ' thimble-rigging,' by which the unwary spectator is apt to 

 be cheated out of his most valuable mental possession — his rational certainty. 



The same spirit asserts that our psychical powers never themselves enter into the 

 circuit of physical causation, and yet few things would seem more certain to a plain 

 man than that (supposing him to have received a message saying his house is on 

 fire) it is his knowledge of what has been communicated which sets him in motion. 

 To deny this is to deny the evident teaching of our consciousness. It is to deny 

 what is necessarily the more certain in favour of what is less so. If I do not know 

 this I know nothing, and discussion is useless. As a distinguished writer has said : 

 ' That we are conscious, and that our actions are determined by sensations, emotions, 

 and ideas, are facts which may or may not be explained by reference to material 

 conditions, but which no material explanation can render more certain.' The advo- 

 cate of ' Natural Selection ' may also be asked, How did knowledge ever come to be, 

 if it is in no way useful, if it is utterly without action, and is but a superfluous 

 accompaniment of physical changes which would go on as well without it ? 



As we may be confident that thought not only is but also acts, as well as that 

 there are things which are not psychical, but which are physical ; so I would urge 

 that the conception of living things, which I venture to put before you, is one 

 which may be rationally entertained. 



Assuming for the moment and for argument's sake that it may be accepted, 

 what light does our knowledge of ourselves throw upon the intimate life-processes 

 of lower organisms ? We know that with us a multitude of actions, which are at 

 first performed with consciousness, come to be performed unconsciously ; we know 

 that we experience sensations a without perceiving them ; we know also that 

 countless organic activities take place in us under the influence and control of the 

 nervous system, which either never rise into consciousness at all, or only do so 

 under abnormal conditions. Yet we cannot but think that those activities are 

 of the same generic nature, whether we feel, perceive, or attend to them or 

 not. The principle of individuation in ourselves, then, evidently acts with intel- 

 ligence in some actions, with sentience in many actions, but constantly in an 

 unperceived and unfelt manner. Yet we have seen it undeniably intervene in the 

 chain of physical causation. 



1 Those who deny that we have a real power of perceiving objects, refute them- 

 selves when they speak of 'purely physical changes,' or of anything 'physical' of 

 which feelings are but the ' accompaniment ' or ' subjects.' For according to them 

 'matter 'is but a term for certain 'states of consciousness,' while they represent each 

 state of consciousness as a function of matter. According to this, let a represent a 

 ' state of consciousness, and b a physical state.' Then a sensation and its physical 

 accompaniment may be represented by the symbol a + b. But a physical state is 

 itself but a state of consciousness with its objective correlate, and is, therefore, 

 a + o. We thus get an equation infinitely more erroneous than b = a + b, because 

 the b of the a + b is itself ever again and again a + b. 



2 As when having gazed vacantly through a window we revert to the pages of a 

 manuscript we may be writing and see there the spectra of the window bars we had 

 before unconsciously seen. Here the effect on the organism must have been similar 

 to what it would have been had we attended to it — i.e. it was an unfelt sensation. 



