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insists on the Cartesian principle of the inseparability of 
thought and consciousness. Since, he argues, it is as absurd 
to suppose that we think, without having knowledge of our 
thought, as to affirm hunger, without the sensation ot hunger, 
or extension, in that which has no parts, it follows that, unless 
as children, or, in the majority of cases, as men, we are con- 
sciously aware of the so-called “ eternal verities, innate 
ideas,” these verities and ideas do not exist in us. Locke s 
error lay in the nai’rowness of his field of view, and in his 
tendency to substitute actual consciousness for spiritual being. 
The soul was for him a blank tablet, possibly material, and its 
spiritual life consisted in the impressions written upon it, 
through the senses, and in reflection. Hence the tendency 
to regard the soul as that which at each moment of time is 
actually presented in consciousness, as a succession of ex- 
perienced states, and not as an active principle, possessing a 
rational and organic nature, by which all its operations, and 
hence consciousness itself, are governed — a nature which, as 
being rational, is necessarily a “spiritual,” implicit embodi- 
ment (as the concrete universe is a physical and explicit one) 
of those “eternal” truths, which are presupposed by— are 
necessary to the very conception of — reason, but which emerge 
into actual consciousness only when the soul, no longer pas- 
sively vielding to the impressions of sense, actively directs her 
view to herself, to that which, on the one hand, is implied in 
her own operations and in the nature of reason, the mother of 
the soul, and on the other, is really exemplified in the whole 
universe, underlies it as its hidden meaning, its truth, and 
is more and more discovered and demonstrated in proportion 
as true science advances. 
Natural history treats of the organic products of nature 
experimentally, descriptively, recording facts as they appear to 
outward observation, and with only a secondary, if any, reference 
to all which they imply, or to their final rationale. It Aristotle, 
as (in his Physics) a sort of natural-historian of the universe, 
contents himself too much with simply reading off and record- 
ing the fact of the presence of the “ idea ” (the final, i.e. by 
implication, the intelligent cause) in nature, without tracing up 
the idea to the mind which possesses and executes it, Locke 
illustrates the opposite danger. Proceeding from the narrower 
point of view of human psychology, restricting ideal life to the 
sphere of actual, experimental consciousness, and viewing the 
latter fundamentally on the side of its dependence on sense and 
organs of sense, he was obliged to make concessions to matter 
and mechanism, of which the sensational and (at least in their 
