He starts the question, What
is it that thinks? and answers, We do not know. (p. 63). He admits that
the reality of individual personal minds, the conviction of personal
existence is universal, and perhaps indestructible. Nevertheless that
conviction cannot justify itself at the bar of reason; nay, reason is
found to reject it. (p. 65). Dean Mansel says, that consciousness gives
us a knowledge of self as a substance and not merely of its varying
states. This, however, he says, "is absolutely negatived by the laws of
thought. The fundamental condition to all consciousness, emphatically
insisted upon by Mr. Mansel in common with Sir William Hamilton and
others, is the antithesis of subject and object.... What is the
corollary from this doctrine, as bearing on the consciousness of self?
The mental act in which self is known implies, like every other mental
act, a perceiving subject and a perceived object. If, then, the object
perceived is self, what is the subject that perceives? Or if it is the
true self which thinks, what other self can it be that is thought of?
Clearly, a true cognition of self implies a state in which the knowing
and the known are one--in which subject and object are identified; and
this Mr. Mansel rightly holds to be the annihilation of both. So that
the personality of which each is conscious, and of which the existence
is to each a fact beyond all others the most certain, is yet a thing
which cannot be known at all; knowledge of it is forbidden by the very
nature of human thought.
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