Unity of consciousness

“ The soul has, therefore, an intuition of itself; that is to say, it is conscious of its unity in multiplicity, of its identity in diversity, of its permanence in succession, of its constant duration in the appearance and disappearance of phenomena. Either we must admit this, or we must renounce the legitimacy of all testimony of consciousness, and embrace the most complete skepticism that ever existed, extending it both to the internal and to the external world. ”

“ For in conceiving of all that is as a single whole, as the life, the meaning, and the consciousness of a single Self, we are not limited to merely universal considerations. Human thought has long been conscious of some aspects of the unity of Being. The world of ordinary experience, of common sense, and of science, has already its provisional unity, which our own idealism must view as a genuine, if fragmentary, hint of the final unity. ”

“ In every act of consciousness we distinguish a self or ego, and something different from self, a non-ego; each limited and modified by the other. These, together, constitute the finite element. But at the same instant that we are conscious of these existences, plural, relative, and contingent, we are conscious likewise of a superior unity in which they are contained, and by which they are explained;—a unity absolute as they are conditioned, substantive as they are phenomenal, and an infinite cause as they are finite causes. ”

“ And so, when we speak of the final unity of the world-life, we have no right to define that unity merely in terms of the special categories of the distinctively human type of consciousness. Our foregoing sketch of the manner in which, for us men, present, past, future, physical, mental, mathematical, and moral reality seem to be linked in a single system, is not therefore by itself a sufficient basis for stating the way in which the whole meaning of reality gets presented to the single unity of the consciousness that we have already called divine. ”

“ The inward sense attests with irresistible certainty the identity of the me. This unity, this identity, is as certain, as evident to the child who begins to feel pleasure or pain, and is sure that he is one and the same that experiences both impressions, as they are to the [Pg 186] philosopher who has spent long years in profoundly investigating the idea of the me and the unity of consciousness. ”

“ Since, on the one hand, our perceptive faculties do not create their objects, but are limited to the combining of them; and, on the other hand, our perception is not capable of embracing many at one time, it results that the exercise of our faculties is necessarily successive; the unity of consciousness serving as the bond of union to our perceptions. ”

“ The manifold affections of sense are not simply aggregated in the individual, like the heroes in the Trojan horse. There must be convergence in a unitary principle, soul or consciousness, which is that which really functions in perception, the senses and their organs being merely its instruments. It is this unity of apperception which enables us to combine the data of more than one sense, to affirm reality, unreality, identity, difference, unity, plurality and so forth, as also the good, the beautiful and their contraries. ”

“ Is our psychical life also articulated with a higher unity, a more comprehensive system of consciousness? Are the separate heavenly bodies, to start with, bearers of a unified inner life? Are the stars, is the earth an animated being? The poets speak of the earth-spirit; is that more than a poetic metaphor? The Greek philosophers, among them Plato and Aristotle, speak of astral spirits; is that more than the last reflection of a dream of childish fancy? ”

“ I saw also the possibility of man's becoming conscious of this absolute unity of the universe, as well as of the diversity of things and appearances which is perpetually unfolding itself within that unity; and then, when I had made clear to myself, and brought fully home to my consciousness, the view that the infinitely varied phenomena in man's life, work, thought, feeling, and position, were all summed up in the unity of his personal existence, I felt myself able to turn my thoughts once more to educational problems. ”

“ Thus it is that in man's consciousness there is a manifestation and proof at once of the unity and of the complex nature of the human being; that is, in accordance with the spontaneous language of mankind, at once of the distinction and of the union of the soul and of the body. This is the primitive and essential fact of man in his actual life. ”

“ If we imagine each finger to possess a consciousness of its own, which is limited to itself and cannot pass beyond to the hand, we shall have a fair analogy of the unity and identity of interests of all living things. ”

“ There was nothing they lacked, there was no way that the wise man, the thinking man, was ahead of them except for one detail, one single tiny detail: consciousness, conscious awareness of the unity of all life. ”

“ Neither abstraction nor experience can bring us back to the source whence issue our ideas of necessity and of universality: this source is concealed in its origin in time from the observer, and its super-sensuous origin from the researches of the metaphysician. But, to sum up in a few words, consciousness is there, and, together with its immutable unity, the law of all that is for man is established, as well as of all that is to be by man, for his understanding and his activity. ”

“ Now, if we stopped here, life in the background as the matter of the manifold facts of reflection might well remain one and the same, as we have just now maintained; but it could certainly never arrive at a unity, at least in consciousness, since all consciousness would be altogether individual. Indeed it would even remain inexplicable how we, who confess ourselves to be individuals, could think such a unity, though it were simply problematically, and how we could possibly make ourselves understood about the matter. ”

“ If we have the consciousness of object and subject only in relation to each other, it is not necessary to seek the principle of their unity in any third principle, for his unknowable absolute is "in our mouths and in our hearts," and found in the inseparable unity of experience in which the inward and outward are correlative elements. ”

“ Now, on the contrary, the general inclination of consciousness is to maintain the difference, partly in order to mark itself out as implicitly free in opposition to its object—Being, nature, and God, and partly in order to recognize the unity in this opposition, and from the opposition itself to make the unity emerge. ”

“ Hence, the unity of life reposes for all eternity in the unity of the self-consciousness of the individuals, which began in this world, and in the unity of its contemplations of all its worlds, which, on that account, must also remain connected. ”

“ The human mind in seeking explanation of the phenomena of its consciousness—presumably a reflex of the universe without—tends to seek a unity of explanation. A unity of explanation requires a completeness in the mental scheme of what is to be explained. Thoughtful men in the Middle Ages craved a scheme of life complete even in detail, which should educe life’s currents from a primal Godhead, and project them compacted, with none left straying or pointing nowhither, on toward universal fulfilment of His will. ”

“ Here on the one hand we see a unity of thought and Being, on the other the absolute unity as infinite understanding—the former is the self-consciousness which is apprehended as finite merely. Actuality, Being, has its possibility in thought, or its possibility is thought ”

“ The great unity of sensation, that is, the state which prevailed anterior to the dualisation of subject and object, is broken up, and man's sensations and other passive states of existence never again possess the entireness of their first unalloyed condition, that entireness which they possessed in his infantine years, that wholeness and singleness which was theirs before the act of negation broke the universe asunder into the world of man and the world of nature. ”

“ Nor do we divide the substance, but unite these three Persons in one numerical essence: for we know nothing of the unity of the mind, but self-consciousness, as I showed before; and therefore as the self-consciousness of every Person to itself makes them distinct Persons, so the mutual consciousness of all three divine Persons to each other makes them all but one infinite God: as far as consciousness reaches, so far the unity of a spirit extends, for we know no other unity of a mind or spirit, but consciousness. ”

“ But tension, taken by itself, cannot furnish the true measure of life. For the general nature of consciousness is a synthesis, a comprehensive unity: not only contrast, but also concentration, must make itself felt, as long as the life of consciousness endures. ”

“ But, in this evolution, man—or say rather and always the principle of sensation and consciousness in which man inheres—is merely the general form, diversely individualized, of the One All-Inclusive Spirit in the activity of self-manifestation. The earth, the sun, moon, and stars, the human body, its house and the landscape, with every particle of all of them, are outwoven of universal Spirit through the loom of subjective being and unity. ”

“ Nature and Spirit are not separated; their unity is the formal understanding, in which is contained the pure Notion, not as in consciousness, but as free and independent, remaining within itself, and at the same time exercising activity and passing beyond itself. The understanding working towards one particular end is the inward form of the thing itself, an inward principle of the understanding. ”

“ It is inevitable that consciousness, volition, and thought should make an effort to rise above this condition and seek for the universality, unity, and satisfaction which it eventually finds in the infinite substance of Spirit and its Truth. This unity and satisfaction, to which mind is carried forward by the impulse of its own ideal activity, transmuting the raw material of its finite conditions, constitutes the first revelation of that which the world of appearances is under a more notional grasp of it. ”

“ This principle, as blending in one energetic whole above the categories the two activities of absolute subject and absolute cause, is the one intelligible creative unity — the unity of the Person in its whole reality. The universe-consciousness thus passes from apparent mere Fact into a pure conscious Act. ”

“ But unity of this sort is characteristic of all animal bodies; and, though the mind has this kind of organic unity, it acquires, in proportion as self-consciousness develops, over and above this kind of unity, a unity of an altogether new and unique kind; a unity which consists in the whole (or the self) being present to consciousness, whether clearly or obscurely, during almost every moment of thought, and pervading and playing some part in the determination of the course of thought and action. ”

“ All thought is unification or differentiation. Its materials lie in the objects of consciousness. Its process consists in the consciousness of likeness and difference. Its laws are reducible to the principles of identity, contradiction and excluded middle. What we call “reason” is the unity which harmonizes diversity. Its categories are at once the forms of thoughts and of things, for otherwise thought and its objects would have no common bond and reason would know no necessity. Consciousness is this sense of unity. ”

“ For it is precisely the wholeness, and not the mere fragmentariness, the presence, and not the mere absence of unity in our consciousness, the relative attainment, and not the mere postponement of our meanings, which, from this point of view, guides us towards a positive view of how the unity of Being is, in the midst of all the varieties, attained. ”

“ Through such a limited determination we are still removed from a vision of the coalescent unity of the whole we identified with the notion, the soul itself.
(γ) The truth is we can only, in this sphere, bring before our consciousness the entire unity of life by means of our thought and grasp of reason. In the natural world the soul, in its full activity, is not found; that is to say, the subjective unity, in its pure ideality, does not exist there for a self-consciousness. ”

“ The universe created, the principles which determined the creation are found still to govern the worlds of matter and mind. Two ideas and their connexion explain the intelligence of God; two laws in their counterpoise explain the material universe. The law of expansion is the movement of unity to variety; the law of attraction, the return of variety to unity.
In the world of mind the same analogy is apparent. The study of consciousness is psychology. ”

“ We have pointed out above that synthetic unity is the essence of consciousness. Consciousness is not an association of independently existing ideas, images, feelings, and sensations. Mental events must form a unity, a synthesis in the total psychic life of some psycho-biological organization. Disconnected words of a sentence thought by a series of thinkers do not give rise to that unified mental process which goes to form the psychic experience of the meaning of the sentence. The words must be cognized by the consciousness of one psycho-biological organism. ”

“ This is an abstract way of dealing with consciousness, in which, as it actually presents itself, a plurality of such faculties are always to be simultaneously found; or we may insist on a concrete view, and then the spiritual self in us will be either the entire stream of our personal consciousness, or the present 'segment' or 'section' of that stream, according as we take a broader or a narrower view—both the stream and the section being concrete existences in time, and each being a unity after its own peculiar kind. ”