THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 347 



as it seems connected with it ; and after all, if the brain could 

 cognize at all, one does not well see wliy it might not cog- 

 nize one sort of thing as well as another. The great diffi- 

 culty is in seeing how a thing can cognize anything. This 

 difficulty is not in the least removed by giving to the thing 

 that cognizes the name of Soul. The Spiritualists do not 

 deduce any of the properties of the mental life from 

 otherwise known properties of the soul. They simply find 

 various characters ready-made in the mental life, and 

 these they clap into the Soul, saying, " Lo ! behold the 

 source from whence they flow !" The merely verbal charac- 

 ter of this ' explanation ' is obvious. The Soul invoked, far 

 from making the jphenomena more intelligible, can only be 

 made intelligible itself by borrowing their form, — it must 

 be represented, if at all, as a transcendent stream of con- 

 sciousness duplicating the one we know. 



Altogether, the Soul is an outbirth of that sort of phi- 

 losophizing whose great maxim, according to Dr. Hodgson, 

 is : " Whatever you are totally ignorant of, assert to be the 

 explanation of everything else." 



Locke and Kant, whilst still belie\'ing in the soul, began 

 the work of undermining the notion that we know anything 

 about it. Most modern writers of the mitigated spiritual- 

 istic, or dualistic philosophy — the Scotch school, as it is 

 often called among us — are forward to proclaim this igno- 

 rance, and to attend exclusively to the verifiable phenomena 

 of self-consciousness, as we have laid them down. Dr. 

 Wayland, for example, begins his Elements of Intellectual 

 Philosophy with the phrase " Of the essence of Mind we 

 know nothing," and goes on : " All that we are able to affirm 

 of it is that it is something which perceives, reflects, remem- 

 bers, imagines, and wills ; but what that something is 

 which exerts these energies we know not. It is only ao we 

 are conscious of the action of these energies that we are 

 conscious of the existence of mind. It is only by the exer- 

 tion of its own powers that the mind becomes cognizant of 

 their existence. The cognizance of its powers, however, 

 gives us no knowledge of that essence of which they are 

 predicated. In these respects our knowledge of mind is 



