Page:Essays in Philosophy (1856).djvu/101

mind is in fact in closer connexion with its own observed qualities than with the observed qualities of matter, and, in the opinion of many of them, we know the latter through the medium of the sensations which they occasion in the former. According to Dr. Thomas Brown, for instance, we know immediately, i.e., are conscious of, all our mental states, whereas any external object is known only by means of certain modes of mind (external states or sensations) which its presence has somehow occasioned. In this view of perception, the intercourse of the mind with the external world is through the intermediate sensations which alone are perceived by it; but in self-consciousness it is in direct intercourse with its objects. As in the less refined hypothesis of representation, the sphere of immediate knowledge is still confined within the mind itself, only instead of a succession of representative entities, distinct at once from the percipient mind and from the material object, the understanding is presented with a succession of its own states. Each of these evanescent modes of mind, is, according to the relation in which it happens to be regarded, either an object or an act of perception. Now, it is argued by Sir William Hamilton that the germ of universal scepticism is latent in this more subtle, as Reid had proved it to be latent in a less refined, hypothesis respecting our knowledge of matter. On neither hypothesis do we get directly beyond the objects of self-consciousness, and, therefore, as each is said to violate that utterance of the original judgments of our nature which declares that we do, on neither can we get beyond the succession of our