Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/106

penetrates behind the associations, to explain their possibility and their origin by his doctrine that the rational elements have their seat, not directly in the mind of each man, but in the eternal and universal Mind to which he gives the name of God. In neither view is a priori consciousness admitted in the individual person as individual, nor in the human mind at all, as specifically human. In fact, by the associative agnostic method, which would build these elements up outright in the course of evolution from what seems to be their assumed non-existence, they are all put as if explicable by evolution. But as our analysis has shown, they are all, on the contrary, prerequisites to the existence of evolution as well as to our conceiving of it. Legitimately, they are likewise inexplicable by the pantheistic method of seating them a priori in God, to be thence gradually imparted to minds as they are slowly created by the process of psychic evolution; for this ignores the fact that a priori cognition, by virtue of its pertinent proofs, is an act in the mind of each particular conscious being, be the development of the mere experience of such being as low as it may. The proper interpretation of a priori consciousness, at the juncture where it is established, is at most, and at next hand, as a human, not a divine, original consciousness, and, indeed, as a consciousness interior to the individual mind.