INSANITY RESULTING FROM PERVERTED CONSCIOUSNESS. 107

and that there cannot be valid discrimination between true and false deliverances of consciousness, because this would imply the possession of a faculty higher than consciousness, which is the judge; and there is nothing to guarantee the veracity of this higher power: and he pleads that it argues nothing against the trustworthiness of consciousness that all or any of its deliverances are inexplicable or incomprehensible, that is, that we are unable to conceive through a higher notion HOW that is possible which the deliverance avouches actually to be. To make the comprehensibility of a datum of consciousness the criterion of its truth would be, indeed, the climax of absurdity; because the primary data of consciousness, as themselves the conditions under which all else is comprehended, are necessarily themselves incomprehensible. To ask how an immediate fact of consciousness is possible, is to ask how consciousness itself is possible; and to ask how this is possible is to suppose that man possesses another consciousness before and above that human consciousness whose mode of operation we attempt to analyze. Could men answer this, verily they would be gods, says Hamilton.

Again," Primary and ultimate facts which cannot be "resolved into any higher principle, must, as the basis of all "human reasoning, necessarily be believed to be true. Con"sciousness must be believed unless it can be proved to bear "false witness; but consciousness is the sole witness possible, "and therefore can only be condemned out of its own "mouth."

Now, Hamilton has contended that consciousness cannot be condemned out of its mouth, because the ultimate facts in its nature are to him an inscrutable mystery. He contends that man knows by conscious testimony; but his knowledge is limited to this fact, and does not and cannot extend to how this evidence can be. Thus the philosopher, par excellence, of this century, stops short at the most important point of all; and he allows his followers to build theories upon his conclusions, to the effect that the human mind is a free agent disconnected with mighty chains of

natural phenomena, because the relative character of human consciousness is made absolute on the ground of inscrutability. Hamilton asserts that consciousness cannot be proved to bear false witness, because it is the "sole witness" possible; therefore it must be condemned out of its own mouth, which he maintains cannot be done.

The very fact of human testimony being limited to deliverance of evidence of "itself" as the sole witness of truth, is the precise ground of condemnation upon which the great judge of account must set aside the verdict of man's judgment as false; for if the deliverances of human consciousness is the witness of self, it must necessarily be false-witness, because it is confessedly self-evidence and does not exist in relation to any other thing or entity.

It is a proverb as old as the hills, and one that was quoted by the Jews against Jesus of Nazareth, that if a man bears witness of himself, that witness is untrue. And this is so because no entity that exists has been created to live as an end in itself; but on the contrary, everything exists only in relation to the whole, and this necessitates the interdependence of everything. The deliverances of human consciousness, as they are confessedly those of a witness testifying of himself, are by the very nature of their sole evidence necessarily false; because they do not plead relation to any interdependent arrangements in the universe, but limit their testimony to self-witness; and if a man bears witness of himself such witness is untrue, for no being exists absolute in itself, but only in relation to another. Consequently it is quite possible to condemn the testimony of human consciousness out of its own mouth, and upon the very ground taken by Sir William Hamilton to build his impregnable citadel upon.

The deliverances of consciousness are those of reflection or imagination; but if the images or reflected objects thrown off the sensorial mental mirror are of self, or brother man's inadvertent thoughts, they are aborted or premature concepts, and not the vital germs begotten of a true parent of genuine procreative power.

The mental mirror of man will cease to subtend the rays

TESTIMONY OF SELF WITNESS NECESSARILY FALSE. 109

of reflected images, equal in angles to those of incidence, if the mirror be perverted by squinting upon self.

as

Mental obliquity or latent insanity commences, confessed by Dr. Moore, by gradual and unperceived selfdeception. This strabismus of mind is unnoticed when the sap commences, for the siege of the citadel is conducted by those skilful engineers, Generals Deception and Delusion, who never fire their mine until failure is impossible, so that the unhappy garrison are blown into what is vulgarly called the condition of "smithereens," while all are slumbering in fancied security.

The assumed knowledge of the absolute, infinite, and unconditioned, vitiates all philosophy where it is maintained as a basis of reasoning. Hamilton abandons it, but when he comes to argue upon the phenomena of human consciousness, he drops the chain of merely relative and conditioned knowledge, and implies that the facts of consciousness are to all intents and purposes absolute, because he cannot see how an image, and a conscious image, can be reflected from a material organization.

He implies that the human mind is conscious of things as they exist in themselves, and not as they are related to this sensorial image reflector-the human mind. He says the "primary data" of consciousness are themselves the conditions under which all else is comprehended, and that such data are necessarily incomprehensible, because? Why simply because the philosopher has severed the human mind from its necessary connection with the interdependent relations that one entity sustains towards another throughout the universe.

Divine revelation itself is not of Deity as he exists per se, absolute, infinite, and unconditioned; but only as he is related to the being or relative who reveals him. The witness of this relative is never of himself; but only as a conditioned being who is related to the infinite, indefinite, and otherwise incomprehensible. Consequently his witness is never that of a sole witness whose evidence is true of itself, but it is true because accompanied by corroborating

testimony which to man appears preternatural because it transcends his limited power of comprehension.

The meaning of the proverb, that the light of the body is the eye, evidently is that all consciousness comes through perception, and if that eyesight be only of phenomenal effects, as related to that perception, it follows that if such sight be imperfect, then conscious existence is purblind, since knowledge comes from without, and not from within or from the mind itself. Then if the eye be darkness, how great is

the darkness in which consciousness exists?

The assumption that the evidence of consciousness is an inherent, immaterial, or spiritual power, antecedent to all sensational experience, and therefore more than that state or cerebral condition which is the result of psychical activity consequent upon external impulse, is the logical sequence of the larger assumption of the immortality of the human soul or mind, which, in defiance of the evidence of all true positive science, and revelation in the Bible, is maintained to be an existence or entity that is not dependent upon a material or nervous apparatus. Let any person accustomed to sustained thought ask himself the question, what innate or intuitive conviction he came into the world with? and what he would suppose his individual consciousness would be if he had been deprived of all external influence? Let him endeavour to divest himself of all sensational experience, of all that he has acquired by reading, or hearing viva voce of others, of everything seen, heard, felt, and tasted, and then ask himself the question: what would my innate ideas amount to without this sensational; experience, would they amount to, or be worth, anything at all? There are many avenues, or nervous wires, to the sensorial mirror of consciousness, but suppose them to be blocked up or broken short from infancy what would that mental mirror reflect, and what becomes of this consciousness at death? If it is axiomatic that moisture is essential to cerebral action, how can it be continued in a dead body?

No man has power to conceive of any conscious being existing without a material organization; the wildest false

FALLACY OF THE INTUITIONAL HYPOTHESIS.

111

hoods about ghosts and spirits always imply something connected with an organization.

Intuitional a priori psychologists maintain that there is a certain principle existing in the human mind that acts as a special creative faculty, contributing to form mind or mental action; a fountain of internal cognitions; antecedent to all experience and observation; an independent sovereign, or regulator of mental movements, but which they have no power to describe, contenting themselves with saying that it is "an element," an inscrutable power, not to be analyzed because homogeneous with the supreme existence of wisdom himself.

In reference to this system of very precarious philosophy, Professor Baden Powell remarks very pertinently :-"It is "a theory appealing powerfully to imagination, very

66

plausible and very pleasing to human nature. The habit "of referring everything to ultimate principles, originating "as intuition in the human mind itself, saves the trouble of "further anlaysis, and supplies specious explanation of mental phenomena, gratifying the desire of penetrating the secrets "of our nature, and the love of the mysterious; a species of "occult philosophy, harmonizing with the mysticising ten"dencies of the present age, but conceived in a spirit the 66 very antithesis of the simple and positive character of the "inductive method, and although sanctioned by great names, "rather a retrograde movement, evincing a lingering attach"ment to the scholastic mysticism, if not in some sense an "actual revival of it."

It is remarkable that those who have, of all men, the poorest chance of ever making themselves intelligible to minds of the stamp most commonly met with in everyday life, are nevertheless the most admired for their learning, as if wisdom consisted in Sidrophel-like obscurity and cloudy ambiguity. These professors of what is called faith anterior to reason and logic, omit no opportunity for expressing their undisguised abhorrence of the inductive sciences, which they stigmatise as mere rationalism, although they have before them for reference what they profess to believe and teach,