CH. III. § 4. of Nature and BOOK II. perception in the form of time, and is therefore (always taking it in its nature and not as an Re-union existent) infinite as time is infinite, and unique as Being is unique, of which it is the knowing or Genesis. subjective aspect. The various actual or possible modes of it, which are innumerable, are parts within it as a perceptual whole, not species or varieties under it as a logical whole; and it is itself plural only when taken as an existent, or as existing in individual Subjects. The consciousness, therefore, of every individual Subject has the same nature, the same infinity; but the richness of content of that infinite nature is different in each individual. The same infinite universe of Being is the object of all alike, but each perceives it after its own measure of endowment or capacity. The consciousness of each individual Subject is necessarily separate from that of every other; but then this is consciousness taken in its existence, not in its nature. The consciousness of an individual Subject, which should be the adequate knowing of the infinite universe of Being, that is, be an individual and yet omniscient consciousness, is for us an ideal which we can never positively conceive as realised, inasmuch as we cannot conceive either infinite Being, or infinite Knowing, as at once complete and infinite. At the same time, it is an ideal which involves no logical contradiction, seeing that both Being and the Knowing of it may equally and alike be conceived as infinite, though neither can be conceived as at once infinite and complete.-A finite intelligence is one which is restricted to move by taking one part after another in exhaustion of a whole, which at BOOK II. § 4. of Nature and Genesis. the same time, and at every step of the process, it knows or may know to be inexhaustible. An infinite intelligence cannot be conceived as restricted Re-union to work on these lines. For us, therefore, such an intelligence is an ideal, the type of whose activity we have no positive means of conceiving. For us to conceive positively an individual consciousness or intelligence is to conceive a finite and existent At the same time, to embrace infinity is characteristic of the nature of consciousness, because time-duration is an essential element of its nature. one. This cannot be said of genesis, nor of any particular existent which pre-supposes it, such for instance as Matter. All genesis supposes a limit introduced into Being or Existence in the widest sense, which is the object of consciousness in the widest sense, a limit at or after which the thing generated begins to exist. Consequently all genesis presupposes an eternal existence, an existence having a wholly unlimited duration, eternal meaning that of which no ultimate limits in time are possible, or their possibility conceivable, compared to which everything else has a finite duration, that is to say, is either preceded or followed, or both, by something not itself. And the moment we consider things as having a finite duration, preceded or followed by other things, that is, as particular existents, the question,-How or Why they come to exist,-immediately arises, which is the question of the real conditions of their genesis. It is thus impossible to conceive the nature of consciousness, or consciousness in its entirety, as a particular existent. Which is saying in other VOL. II. A A CH. III. § 4. of Nature and BOOK II. words, that consciousness as a whole can never be identified with anything short of eternal existence, Re-union and with that only in the character of its subjective and commensurate aspect, not by way of undisGenesis. tinguished union. Awareness (using this term as a brief expression for the entirety of its nature), if taken as being the whole of existence would be awareness of nothing; and the possibility of distinguishing one content from another, in point of reality, would be taken away. It is only some particular nature or other which can be conceived as a particular existent. And no particular nature, no particular mode or combination of modes of consciousness, the human for instance, is identical with the nature of consciousness in its entirety. It can be only to this or that particular nature, this or that mode of consciousness, that the questions of genesis and real conditioning apply. But to these they apply necessarily and inevitably, so soon as we take them in respect of their existence. There is, then, nothing arbitrary in the use now made of the distinction between nature and genesis. For, first, the distinction is applicable to everything without exception, and secondly, when applied to consciousness, in forcing us to recognise, that consciousness in its nature is essentially different from all things else in their respective natures, it does no more than make explicit that indispensable minimum of difference, within otherwise unanalysed and undifferentiated experience, which alone endows the term knowledge with any fixed significance. Consciousness taken in its nature alone, in which respect it is the wholly unconditioned source of knowledge, admits of no genesis from what is not itself. In this latter respect it is paralleled only by its own inseparable objective aspect, Existence or Being, likewise considered in its utmost generality. It is only within the limits of consciousness and existence generally, as opposite aspects of each other, that genesis of anything takes place; whether it be of particular modes of consciousness, or particular modes of existence other than consciousness, but known as objects of it; or whether it be of individual consciousnesses as particular existents, or of particular existents from the nature of which consciousness is excluded, but upon the existence of which the existence either of individual consciousnesses, or of the modes of consciousness belonging to them, is immediately conditioned. BOOK II. CH. III. $ 4. Re-union of Nature and Genesis. $ 5. The Being. § 5. Once more recurring to the fact that, in the opening chapters of Book I., the process-content of Conscious consciousness, as we actually experience it, was distinguished into two parts or aspects, its content and the fact of its being perceived, its whatness and its thatness, the latter being at once the fact and the evidence of its existence, we see that what has been done in the present Book is to account for its thatness, or the fact of its being perceived, by referring it, as an existent, to nerve structure and process in living organisms, as its proximate real condition, and by showing, in general terms, the connection between living organisms and other less complex forms of matter, thereby making it evident that matter, in some form or other, embraces all the real conditions which are or can be positively known to us. In this way we have brought into view a different object from consciousness distinguished § 5. The Conscious BOOK II simply into its two aspects, whatness and thatness. We have now before us the conscious being, the object of psychology, a concrete real object, consisting, so to speak, of two moieties, a system composed of real conditions and their conditionates, the organism and its consciousness, bound up together. The agent and the agency proximately concerned in consciousness are thus added to consciousness taken alone, with the analysis of certain parts of which, considered as a knowing, we were busied in the preceding Book. The agent of consciousness and the proximate real condition of consciousness are one and the same thing. But it is with the thatness of consciousness, or (what is the same thing) with consciousness as an existent, not as a knowing, that they stand immediately connected; being connected with consciousness as a knowing, which is the philosophically subjective aspect of it, mediately only, through its existential character. It was made, I hope, sufficiently clear in the preceding Section, that the nature of consciousness, as distinguished from its existence, was wholly unconditioned upon anything whatever. Consciousness as an existent in individual conscious beings is thus, psychologically speaking, the subjective half of the whole object-matter of psychology. It is not immediately with our knowledge, but with the genesis and history of our knowledge, taken as itself an existent, that psychology has to do. In what remains of the present work, in the following Books, I propose to return to the analysis of consciousness in its philosophically subjective character as a knowing. But inasmuch as more complex cases of consciousness |