Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/377

THE OBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE. 365 cumulative processes in nature, and especially the growth in time of the faculties of our race, represent merely a pro- gressive recognition on our side of facts unalterably abid- ing in universal consciousness. Instead of this, he declares with amazing scientific naivete that " our consciousness may mean either of two things ; either a function of the animal organism, which is being made, gradually and with interruptions, a vehicle of the eternal consciousness ; or that eternal consciousness itself, as making the animal org'anism its vehicle." " The consciousness which varies from moment to moment, which is in succession, and of which each suc- cessive state depends on a series of ' external and internal ' events, is consciousness in the former sense. It consists in what may properly be called phenomena in successive modi- fications of the animal organism." (MiXD XXYIL, p. 323.) It is Professor Green who tells us, that our phenomenal consciousness " consists in successive modifications of the animal organism " ! Who is willing to go this length with him ? If it were once decisively understood, or only generally accepted and firmly believed, that " in the process of our learning to know the world, effects of sentient experience are accumulated in the organism, yielding new modes of reaction upon stimulus, and fresh associations of feeling with feeling (p. 324) ; if that much had become quite certain to knowledge, it would not puzzle us long to determine the true meaning of such organically accumulated experience. Of course, Transcendent alists in general cannot be held responsible for such self-immolating concessions. But these reveal the excessive scientific weakness of the scheme, and they also disclose the very quintessence of the supernatural postulation it involves ; namely, the neutralisation of time and its changing consequences through spiritual agency. The last thing we should have expected to find conceded by a Transcendentalist is, that feelings of any kind can be functions of the organism, whatever that organism in itself may be taken to be. If this is so readily granted and comprehended by supernaturalists, there remains indeed no valid reason why naturalistic thinkers should any further exert themselves. The understanding of mental pheno- mena as functions of the organism has been their chief aim, ever since the nervous system was found to be the seat or instrument of consciousness. But with what scientific result hitherto ? It has been confessed by one after another of those who have most earnestly devoted themselves to the solution of this central problem, that our understanding