94 
Inaccuracy 
also in tlie in- 
ference itself. 
to them. 
mena? In every mental movement some accompanying 
defect thus warns ns that it cannot belong to this Perfect 
Supreme Eternal Being ! There is even an essential contrast 
alleged between the finite Conscious Agent and the Supreme 
The confu- Being. For our consciousness is a present fact ; 
sion is in the and the past and the future would be blanks to ns 
premisses. we CO uld remember nothing and expect nothing. 
But the Infinite Being ever is : unlimited, untouched by others. 
Being perfect, can He remember ? can He expect ? If not, 
once more, what correspondence is there between Him and 
us ? 
64. The fact, both on the surface and deep down in all these 
confused investigations, is that man cannot but “ feel after ' 3 
the Supreme, however blindly. The further fact also, which 
our previous analysis has taught us, no less appears, viz., that 
these uncouth conclusions result from a failing to distinguish 
the essential relation of all conscious agency to the true-always 
(§ 29). The Eleatic philosophy assumes (what 
nothing but an exhaustive analysis of such ideas as 
“ Being,” “ Thought,” and Volition” would justify) 
that the finite limitations of our ideas are essential 
Evidently, however, there always remains some- 
thing beyond the ideas and phenomena which we explore, and 
therein would be a basis of correspondence between the Su- 
preme and the finite conscious agent : so that the Eleatic 
analysis is not only defective in principle and method, but 
wrong in fact. 
65. A consciousness transcending the phenomenal is a great 
fact on which our whole investigation here rests. If the con- 
scious agent were even admitted to find himself always in juxta- 
position with some phenomena (which is far from indisputable, 
as to the whole interior world of reflection and a priori assump- 
tion, § 26), yet he is not identified for a moment 
with the phenomena. If we are conscious at all, 
we know that we are not identical with anterior 
being, and that the phenomena and ourselves are 
not the same. The universe may (as has been 
said) be affirmed to consist of the “perceiving 
and the perceived ” — the conscious agents and the 
phenomena. — Even the final dissatisfaction of the conscious 
agent with all that is merely phenomenal is itself a sufficient 
fact for the purposes of the present part of our argument. 
The Eleatic 66. ^he Eleatic philosophy could not, from its 
philosophy interior unsatisfactoriness, be transmitted without 
change. Its conclusions were such as the human 
mind in fact resisted. Among the Latins it was regarded as 
The con- 
scious being is 
not to be con- 
fused with 
phenomena. 
(On Final 
Causes , p. 41.) 
