Phenocryst

“ III. Thus we have reduced the whole consciousness, in so far as we can survey it now, to two fundamental facts: immediate contemplation, which we have characterized through opposition as internal, and absolute thinking, which, in regard to the former, is externalizing. IV. But it is by no means to be understood as if the individual thinks by means of himself and his own power. He thinks only as one and with the annihilation of his individuality. ”

“ Whence does this determination or limitation arise as the only genuine, true, and original limitation? Evidently through original thinking itself, and in the following way:
The world, even in its inner character, as a force, and as a resisting force, is to be object of the causality of the one common Ego; and the force or power of this world is to be overcome by the power of that one common life. In this subjugation a certain determined power of life, peculiarly and essentially belonging to it, will, no doubt, make itself visible to universal contemplation. ”

“ Hence to say that the Ego must realize the conception of its causality in an act, is to say that the Ego must move from the region of a Being, which can be annihilated at any moment by the withdrawal of freedom, or the region of conception, into the region of the immediately confined power of imagination, wherein everything assumes a fixed, permanent, and on-itself-reposing Being. ”

“ Now, in this act, which is arbitrary and in time for the philosopher as such, but which is for the Ego—which he constructs, by virtue of his just deduced right, for the sake of subsequent observations and conclusions—necessarily and originally; in this act, I say, the philosopher looks at himself, and immediately contemplates his own acting; he knows what he does, because he does it. Does a consciousness thereof arise in him? ”

“ Nay, you actually did so when you told me that in the thinking of your self, the thinking and the thought unite for you. It is, therefore, in this uniting of the thinking and the thought, which in the thinking of an object always dirempts, that you discover the Ego, and hence, the essential characteristic of the Ego,—of that much abused, pure Ego, concerning which our modern philosophers have for years puzzled their brains, and do still assert that it is a psychological—write psychological—deception, and an infinitely laughable affair altogether. ”

“ Spencer undertakes to write must be from such an account as we might gather from the dicta of consciousness. But, if our individual lives are but links in one great chain of life, which we have learned in these latter days to extend to the lowest forms of the animate creation, can the individual consciousness, however bright and penetrating we may suppose it, be trusted in its affirmations regarding the genesis of action and the development of moral feeling? What can mere consciousness—apart from knowledge derived from external sources—tell us of our bodily constitution and development? ”

“ I have the life in myself, and take it from out of myself. Only through this medium of the Moral Law do I see myself; and if I see myself through that law, I necessarily see myself as self-active; and it is thus that there arises in a consciousness—which otherwise would only be the consciousness of a sequence of my representations—the utterly foreign ingredient of an activity of myself. ”

“ We have stated that not only the body of a rational being, but also the product of its activity, must be perceivable, and perceivable as such, by all other rational beings; and this absolute perception of the products of free beings, as such, belongs to the objective representations of the world. This perceptibility of the products, etc., we have established as a mere naked fact of consciousness. ”

“ Hence, for the common man, and upon the standpoint of common consciousness, there are only objects and no conceptions; the comprehension vanishes in the object, and becomes one with it. The philosophical genius, that is, the talent to find in and during the acting not only that which arises in it, but also the acting itself, as such, and to unite these utterly opposite directions in one comprehension, thus to catch one's own mind in the act, as it were; this talent first discovered the conception in the object, and it was thus that a new field was added to the sphere of consciousness. ”

“ We have shown above that the sensuous world is not posited by the individual as such, but as one life; and this also appears from the mere analysis of the thinking of a sensuous object. That which is individual is perceived simply because the Ego in its inner contemplation perceives itself as the principle of that individual; hence, it is visible, and exists only as the result of that principle, as we have seen above in the instances of the freely produced conception of a purpose of reproduction, etc. ”

“ Among these questions may be classed the two following, which must be answered, with others, before any natural right is so much as possible;—first, By what authority does man call a particular portion of the physical world his body? how does he come to consider this body as belonging to his Ego, whereas it is altogether opposed to it?—and second, On what grounds does man assume and admit the existence around him of rational beings like himself, whereas such beings are by no means directly revealed to him in his own consciousness? ”

“ Because the original and absolute power of imagination is limited; and hence originates extension, quality generally, and externality outside of the Ego, all of which constitute the mere empty form of external contemplation, which has no inner significance at all. But we have already shown that the real Inner Essence of the world, as a resistance to the power of free life, must be something quite different, must be, in fact, itself a power—a pure noumenon, which no external contemplation can reach. ”

“ R. But in spite of the harmony between your science and common sense, which you assert to exist, you cannot well deny that you say: Whatsoever is for us, we produce ourselves. Now this is doubtless an assertion which directly contradicts common consciousness. We are not conscious of producing that which exists, but are conscious only that it exists as we find it, or that we find it given. ”

“ For these, the philosophy which I now, for the first time, thoroughly understand, will be the first power that shall set free the imprisoned Psyche and unfold her wings, so that, hovering for a moment above her former self, she may cast a glance on her abandoned slough, and then soar upwards, thenceforward to live and move in higher spheres. ”

“ In our last lecture we set forth the principle directly opposed to that of the Third Age which we have undertaken to characterize,—the principle of the Life according to Reason;—this, namely,—that the personal life of man should be devoted to the Life of the Race, or, as we further defined this expression, to Ideas; and we found it desirable to prolong our consideration of this principle, as one of the more luminous points in our inquiry. ”

“ Those questionings after unity still present themselves and demand their reply. He who cannot enter upon the inquiry, has no alternative but to harden himself against this impulse, and assume, of his own will, as his true wisdom and the ruling maxim of his life, that absolute thoughtlessness which Nature has denied him as a natural condition. There is no lack of distinguished appellations under which this maxim may be entertained:—Common Sense of Mankind, Scepticism, Struggle against Fanaticism and Superstition, &c. ”

“ To this class belong, among others, illusions of the senses, which may in part be corrected by the use of instruments, with which we arm our organs; further, the tendency to hold fast to opinions acceptable to us in spite of contrary instances; similarly, the tendency to anthropomorphic views, including, as its most important special instance, the mistake of thinking that we perceive purposive relations everywhere and the working of final causes, after the analogy of human action, when in reality efficient causes alone are concerned. ”

“ Can we explain the principles upon which mankind adjudge the preference of characters, and upon which they indulge such vehement emotions of admiration or contempt? If it be admitted that we cannot, are the facts less true? Or must we suspend the movements of the heart, until they who are employed in framing systems of science have discovered the principle from which those movements proceed? If a finger burn, we care not for information on the properties of fire: if the heart be torn, or the mind overjoyed, we have not leisure for speculations on the subjects of moral sensibility. ”

“ The rock-specimens have a more andesitic than basaltic appearance. Numerous phenocrysts of hornblende and augite are imbedded in the dense bluish-gray groundmass. The next most abundant mineral is nepheline in the form of phenocrysts, in part well-shaped crystals, in part rounded, the largest of which are 0.5 cm. in diameter. The nepheline differs from the feldspar in having a grayish color and greasy lustre. Phenocrysts of feldspar and crystals of olivine are scarce. Beside these components, the rocks contain apatite, some titanite and iron ores. ”

“ The Ego is thought absolute—precisely as it was generated above through the absolute synthesis of internal and external contemplation, and as the uniting central point of both. Hence the thought Ego receives internally its immediate self-contemplation—its faculty of conception, of self-determination, &c.; and externally a materially organized body and a possible causality in the material world, precisely as pertains to the first Ego, from which we started in our internal investigation. ”

“ At first every human being (and, therefore, also these two classes) is alike in this, that underlying the various manifestations of his life there is one impulse, which amid all change persists unchanged and is always the same. Incidentally, the self-comprehension of this impulse and its translation into ideas creates the world, and there is no other world but this world which is created thus in thought, not freely but of necessity. ”

“ We saw above that the mere sensuous individuality, even without any appearance of the moral law in consciousness, makes actual acting completely possible, and real freedom, the possibility of determining one's self to do a specific act, in every way perfectible. ”

“ Herein, indeed, consists the perverted way of thinking of the Third Age, and generally every perverted way of thinking,—that it ascribes independence, self-reliance, and self-subsistence to mere dead and torpid matter, and then superadds to that the quite superfluous quality of thought, one knows not why or how. ”

“ Nay, he even insists that without this inherent strife, consciousness could not be, that the opposition of subject and object, in its various phases, is the indispensable condition of intellectual life, of practical endeavor, of moral and spiritual achievement. ”

“ Now, a scientific form of philosophy was not possible so long as that something, which is not Ego, was looked for outside of the Ego as ground of the objective reality of the transcendental content of the Ego. ”

“ Now this Ego, thus first created through the free development of life and entering consciousness, can either remain in this checkedness of its life-development, or surrender itself unto a free constructing of the power of imagination, or surrender itself to external perception. ”

“ This inner acting of the rational being occurs either necessarily or through freedom.
The rational being is simply in so far as it posits itself as being; that is, in so far as it is self-conscious. All Being, that of the Ego as well as that of the Non-Ego, is a determined modification of consciousness; and without consciousness there is no Being. ”

“ We have actually deduced fixed nature from an inner and higher principle; the existing power of life is the ground of its existence and its determination. Have we deduced in the same way the system of Egos and their organized bodies? As a fact, we have established it also; and we have, furthermore, added the general deduction that, in this representation of life, its unity, which was broken off in the individuality, is restored. After that we closed with the general reflection that this sum of Egos is infinite in its possibility, but ended and determined in actuality. ”

“ And if, as is the case, our most intense and passionate experience, when the rhythm of our nature is at the fullest, is the intuition of some world-deep authority or sanction giving an eternal validity to our ideas, this authority or sanction cannot be interpreted in mere metaphors or similes abstracted from personality, or in any material substance without a mind, or in any "stream of thought" without a thinker: but can only be interpreted in terms of what alone we have an inside consciousness of, namely in terms of personality itself. ”

“ So far as the Ego is concerned, there is here a twofold relation. In regard to external perception the Ego is purely substance, and by no means principle or ground. The Ego is principle or ground solely in relation to the productions of its inner freedom, and it is only through its being thus a principle that it becomes also the substance of the knowing of these productions. This distinction will be very important hereafter.
Chapter 3 Concerning the Reproduction of External Perception
We have seen how through the discovery of freedom in reflection a power of imagination has sprung up. ”