to the principal signification is not difficult to explain. We have formerly had occasion, more especially with reference to Pursuit and Plot interest, to advert to the anaesthetic character of the object regards. It is in the remission of those regards, that feeling, and other states of the ego, attain their full development. Even Pleasure and Pain are in abeyance during a moment of intense objectivity, as in aiming a blow or in watching a race. A nice question is thereupon suggested— Are we conscious in any shape when engaged exclusively upon the object world? It seems to me that we are, and I have called this the object-consciousness, to distinguish it from the elements of the subject-consciousness.

The only other important restriction of the meaning of the word consciousness is the employment of it to signify Belief. Most disastrous have been the effects of this limitation. People have heen thereby led to suppose not only that the human mind evolves beliefs of its own accord without reference to, or in anticipation of, actual trial (which is very true); but that these beliefs carry their own evidence with them, and dispense with the confirmation of experience-which is a different proposition, noway admissible. The term consciousness has been the medium for playing off this piece of jugglery. There being one acceptation wherein the name means the final criterion of knowledge, the credit due to that is transferred to a number of cases where the meaning is entirely changed. Let us once dismiss this equivocation, and we shall come face to face with the realities of the questions that concern human knowledge, belief, and certainty. (See also Appendix, D.)

Having thus surveyed the common acceptations of the term in dispute, and commented upon the shifting quicksands introduced by means of it into philosophy, I shall now proceed in a more systematic way to the consideration of the entire subject brought into view by its employment.

CHARACTERS OF NEUTRAL EXCITEMENT.

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CONSCIOUSNESS AS FEELING.

1. The Passive States.

3. That we are conscious when under Pleasure or Pain is admitted on all hands. These are our states of feeling by pre-eminence. I have always contended, in addition, for the existence of states of Neutral excitement, where we are mentally alive, and, it may be, to an intense degree. Perhaps the best example of these is the excitement of a surprise. There are pleasurable, and also painful, surprises, but there are many that are neither; and yet they are genuine emotions. And even our emotions that have pleasure or pain for their usual character, often pass into neutral phases without disappearing, or ceasing to operate as mental excitement. I may be under an attack of fear, and something may occur that takes away the painful part of the state, but I am not thereby restored to the quiescent indifference that preceded the shock. So our moments of pleasurable elation very often lose the element of delight, long before the system subsides into the condition of perfect calm. We feel mentally alive on all those occasions, but neither enjoy nor suffer.

Again, neutral excitement has its emotional wave, or diffusion, as much as the other kinds. The shock of a surprise causes an animated expression and stir of movements and gestures, which are very much the same whether we are pleased or otherwise. When the tremor of a great excitement is thoroughly roused, the system continues to be agitated with it for a length of time, no matter whether we like it or not. The inward or conscious condition is allied with the corresponding outward embodiment, and the two are sustained together. Whence the physical characters or expression, which are the natural accompaniment of an emotional wave, show themselves in connexion with the neutral, as well as with the pleasing, or painful.

Next it is to be noted that as regards the occupying of the mind, to the shutting out of other states, the neutral sort of

excitement avails quite as much as pain or pleasure. Under any kind of stimulation we are mentally roused up and engrossed, and so much the less open to subsequent impressions. A stimulation, in itself indifferent as regards enjoyment, may indirectly contribute to our pleasure by displacing a painful mode of occupation, and, on the other hand, it may prevent us from falling under a real pleasure. The mind can thus be taken up with what is neither agreeable nor disagreeable, and it may be a matter of difficulty to find room for any object possessing one or other of these qualities.

4. Further, the wave of neutral excitement has an efficacy as regards the intellect, which should by no means be omitted as a positive characteristic. It is not merely pleasure and pain that keep the mind alive to intellectual impressions, and deepen the stamp of them for after times; the state now before us has the very same power. An object that can strike us with surprise, raises around it a condition of the brain so active as to retain the impression to the exclusion of other objects. We speak of rousing the attention to a particular thing, which does not imply necessarily either suffering or delight, but merely a degree of mental animation. The astronomer, Tycho, walking out one evening, came upon a group of persons gazing on a new star. They were arrested and detained by the emotion of surprise; they could not quit the thing that had so powerfully wakened their attention. We cannot say whether they were pained or pleased; they may have passed through moments of both the one condition and the other. Such moments, however, would be accidental to the occasion; what was essential was the excited detention of the gaze, resulting in a proportionate depth of enduring impression of the object that gave the surprise. All through life the remembrance of that night would probably be fresh. Without either sensibly adding to their happiness, or causing them misery, the new star would occasionally recur to their recollection, and occupy the mental trains and determine the mental attitude for a certain time, as did the original on the night of first breaking on their view. They might rise to the pleasur

CONSCIOUSNESS OF ACTIVITY.

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able pitch of the state of wonder, or they might experience some of the pains of terror, but without either there would be an emotion roused, and an impression engrained.

2. The Active States.

5. I have frequently spoken of the consciousness of energy put forth as the basis of the objective attitude, the medium of cognising Extension, Force, and the other attributes of the so-called External World. This does not involve pleasure or pain; there may be pleasures and pains of exercise, but the mind, when given up to these, has lapsed into a purely subject condition. It is a kind of neutral excitement, having for its speciality the feeling of degrees of expended energy; to which is added, in the cognition of the Extended Universe, a vast range of associations of potential or possible energy.

THE INTELLECTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS.

6. The gravamen of the present subject centres in the intellectual aspect of consciousness. There is a great transition made in passing from the emotional to the intellectual; and no small difficulty is experienced in determining, on the one hand, the common groundwork, and, on the other, the special peculiarities of the two. As suggested by Sir William Hamil

The Volitional Consciousness. It might be expected on some show of plausibility, that a characteristic form of consciousness should attach to Volition, as well as to the two other departments of mind, where a marked antithesis exists. It is not so, however. The modes of consciousness growing up in the course of voluntary action are fully described as either emotional or intellectual. We have, in the first place, all the pleasures and pains connected with the exercise of the active organs, with the pursuit of ends, with desire, and the opposite. There are, further, states of excitement and occupation of mind without either pain or pleasure. Then, again, as to the appreciation of degrees of expended energy, whereon are based the sense of weight, resistance, force, extension, rate of movement, &c. ; these are varieties of the intellectual consciousness. The states of Deliberation, Resolution, Desire, Belief, wherein the volitional impetus is under arrest, are states of ideal exertion.

ton, there is often an inverse relationship, or mutual exclusion, one of the other. We are mentally alive while engaged in intellectual operations, and yet, as regards pleasure or pain, we may be in a state of indifference. What is there then that can be a common foundation of two mental modes whose extreme manifestations diverge to opposite poles? At what point do the two pass into one another, supposing them to shade gradually, or where is the abrupt separation on the contrary supposition? The bridge is to be found in that property of neutral excitement just explained.

Sense of Difference.

7. As more than once expressly stated in former parts of our exposition (INTELLECT, Introduction) the basis or fundamental peculiarity of the intellect is Discrimination, or the feeling of difference between consecutive, or co-existing, impressions. Nothing more fundamental can possibly be assigned as the defining mark of intelligence, and emotion itself does not necessarily imply any such property. When I am differently affected by two colours, two sounds, two odours, two weights, or by a taste as compared with a touch or a sound, I am intellectually conscious. By such distinctiveness of feeling am I prepared, in the first instance, for imbibing that various experience implied in the term knowledge, and essential even to the lowest forms of voluntary action. There need be nothing of the agreeable or the disagreeable in this discriminative sensibility; pleasure and pain in this connexion are mere accidents, and not essentials. The fact that I am differently affected by blue and red, by the bark of a dog, and the crowing of a cock, may be accompanied with pleasure, but the mental phenomenon is there in all its fulness, in the absence alike of pleasure and pain. We are awake, alive, mentally alert, under the discriminative exercise, and accordingly may be said to be conscious. The point is to connect, if possible, this new mode of consciousness with what is certainly the broad typical form of it represented by emotion.