940 The Relations of Mind and Matter. [October, 
THE RELATIONS OF MIND AND MATTER. 
BY CHARLES MORRIS. 
(Continued from p. 857, September number.) 
V. THe CONDITIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 
HE greatest mystery of the universe is the mystery of con- 
sciousness. That we can ever understand its innate nature 
is not to be expected. The mind may measure everything out- 
side itself, but it cannot measure itself. The eye sees everything 
except the eye. There must always remain one thing unknown; 
that to and by which everything else is known. But though the 
nature of consciousness may be beyond our ken, its relations to 
matter and the mind are not necessarily so. Some of these rela- 
tions are apparent. Others are within the reach of conjecture. 
We are therefore free to consider the mystery of consciousness 
from this point of view. 
The character of consciousness has undoubtedly been greatly 
misapprehended, even by some very acute thinkers. It is cus- 
tomary to talk and write as if consciousness and mind were iden- 
tical, or as if the words thought and consciousness were synon- 
ymous. It is, indeed, on this ground that the brain-mind theorists 
have based their deductions. They find that the existence of 
consciousness and the loss of brain force are closely related. 
Thought bears heavily upon the nerve cells. They sink beneath 
its pressure, lose their organization and yield energy, of which 
there is no evident physical display. This energy, as is claimed, 
is the element of consciousness, and its successive manifestations 
constitute the mind. But this amounts to a distinct claim that 
the consideration of the origin of consciousness involves that of 
the whole mental constitution, and that thought and the conscious 
perception of thought are one and the same thing; a hypothesis 
which may safely be disputed. For the mind impresses us with 
a sense of unity and continuity which certainly do not belong to 
consciousness. Its thoughts continue to exist, whether or not we 
_ are conscious of their existence. A thought may arise to our 
mental perception to-morrow, another next year, a third only 
, after a decade of years. But they are evidently the same thoughts 
that we formerly knew. Their loss to sight has had no effect on 
their persistent existence. The action of consciousness or men- 
een is, in fact, singularly like that of the eye. We per- 
