THE OBJECTS ABOUT YOU.

99

unless they have been destroyed since the light left them by which you now see them. But if that is your answer, you can not say that you know that they exist so absolutely as to make doubt an impossibility, for you do not know that they have not been destroyed since the light left them which enables you to see them. Therefore you are not

conscious of them.

Are you Conscious of the Objects about you?— "But at any rate," perhaps you will say, "I am conscious of the objects about me. I take a walk, and I see the beautiful bouquets of autumn adorning the hill-sides. I see the fields stretching out before me, and here and there a farmer busy at work. As I mark how the leaves of the hedge were nipped by last night's frost, a rabbit suddenly leaps from under my feet, and I wish for my gun as he fairly flies away from me. Surely," you will say, "you will admit that I am conscious of these things."

Are you? Put the question to yourself. Ask yourself if you know that these things exist so absolutely that doubt is an impossibility. Do you like hunting? If so, I am sure you have dreamed of standing behind a trusty pointer, gun in hand, ready to take the first quail that made its appearance above the weeds. And while you are in the midst of your excitement you awake perhaps to find that you have neither dog nor gun ·to find that you have been hunting only in a dream. "What of it?" you ask. This: A certainty quite as great as indeed indistinguishable from your waking certainties proved untrustworthy; may not your waking certainties be unreliable? You will not, of course, imagine that I doubt that I see and hear the various things which I seem to see and hear, or that

I am trying to make you doubt them. I am simply trying to show that you do not know them with the same absolute certainty that you do the mental facts of your experience, and that, therefore, you are not conscious of them.

Strongest Argument that we are not Conscious of External Objects. But these arguments, conclusive as they seem to me, are not the considerations which are entitled to most weight. Simply by looking into my own mind, I know that I do not know the existence of the objects about me with the same kind and degree of certainty that I do the mental facts I am conscious of, and therefore I know that I am not conscious of them.

Look carefully into your experience, and you will see that the only facts which you know with absolute certainty are the facts of your own mental life. You will need no arguments to prove that you can not have absolute knowledge of any other individual facts- you will see that you do not so clearly as to make argument superfluous. But if you do not, permit me to ask you to hold your judgment in suspense until you have had more experience in the study of mental facts. You would take the opinion of a sailor as to the character of a distant object at sea in preference to your own, simply because of his more extended experience. Inasmuch as trained psychologists, almost without exception, contend that we are not conscious of the objects about us, I ask you to hold your judgment in suspense until you have studied the subject long enough to give you a right to an opinion.

Not Conscious of our own Bodies. It seems to me equally clear that we are not conscious of our own bodies.

A man with an amputated limb often feels pain in the amputated member, exactly as he does in any other part of the body. But he can not be conscious of the ampu tated limb. You admit that. You admit that a man can not be conscious of a leg that has been buried for months. Well, if he seems to be conscious of the amputated member and is not, he has no reason to believe that he is conscious of a member that is not amputated because he seems to be.

I think we may conclude, therefore, that we know no other individual facts with the same kind and degree of certainty that we do the facts of which we are conscious; and that, therefore, we are conscious of nothing else.

QUESTIONS ON THE TEXT.

I. What is the foundation of all we know and believe? 2. What is the difference between our knowledge of a necessary truth and our knowledge of a mental fact?

3. Are you conscious of the stars?

Of your own body?

4. Give your reasons for your answers.

Of the objects about you?

5. If you believe that you are not conscious of anything except mental facts, state what you regard as the strongest reason for your opinion.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS.

1. Give examples of necessary truths that are beyond the grasp of a savage.

2. How do you account for the effect of looking at an object through an opera-glass?

3. What is the difference between real pain and imaginary pain?

4.

"In this wonder-world a dream is
Our whole life and all its changes,

All we seem to be and do
Is a dream and fancy too.
Briefly, on this earthen ball

Dreaming that we're living all.”

What part of these assertions do you know to be false?

5. How do you account for the fact that a man often feels pain

in an amputated limb?

LESSON XII.

ATTENTION.

Sensation and Attention.-We have seen that conscious knowledge is that knowledge which we have of those mental facts which we know directly. We have learned also that there are mental facts of which we are not conscious. You remember the example-a student intent upon a book and not hearing the clock strike till a moment after. What is the explanation of such facts? The attention of the student was so fixed upon this book—his entire consciousness was so concentrated upon it that there was no consciousness left for the sensation. Thus the sensations of which we are conscious depend upon attention. In his Mental Physiology, Carpenter gives some remarkable examples of this. For instance: "Before the introduction. of chloroform, patients sometimes went through severe operations without giving any sign of pain, and afterwards declared that they felt none: having concentrated their thoughts, by a powerful effort of abstraction, on some subject which held them engaged throughout." "The

writer has frequently begun a lecture, whilst suffering neuralgic pain so severe as to make him apprehend that he would find it impossible to proceed; yet no sooner has he, by a determined effort, fairly launched himself into the stream of thought than he has found himself continu