We can not be faithless
to this immediate intuition. The dualism
is a fundamental _datum_: Let no man join what
God has put asunder."
My reply to this is my last word, and I
greatly grieve that to many it will sound materialistic.
I can not help that, however, for
I, too, have my intuitions and I must obey
them. Let the case be what it may in others, I
am as confident as I am of anything that, in
37
myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize
emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a
careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals
itself to consist chiefly of the stream of
my breathing. The 'I think' which Kant said
must be able to accompany all my objects, is
the 'I breath' which actually does accompany
them. There are other internal facts
besides breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments,
etc., of which I have said a word in
my larger Psychology), and these increase the
assets of 'consciousness,' so far as the latter is
subject to immediate perception; but breath,
which was ever the original of 'spirit,' breath
moving outwards, between the glottis and the
nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of
which philosophers have constructed the entity
known to them as consciousness.
Pages:
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45