and universal experience of control is his omnipresence and omnipotence, so his immediate and universal experience of succession is his omniscience. All of these considerations show us that time is a mental experience, subjective in mind, and has no other existence. Yet, while time is real, we may easily interpret or conceive it in an unreal and illusive way. We must not think of time as something that stretches out behind us in the past and before us in the future. There is no such spatial world it can reach through. Time is always present, the experience of succession, and there is no existing past or future except as a thought-relation in the present. CHAPTER VI SUBJECTIVE REALITY Flower in the crannied wall, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, - TENNYSON. "GIVE me where I may stand," exclaimed Archimedes, "and I will move the world." "Give me a bit of reality," says the metaphysician, “and I will show you the universe." This pou sto, or standing-place, where we may rest our lever to move the world, this original and representative bit of reality that will reveal to us the universe, we find in our own soul. "I think, therefore I am," said Descartes, and thus found in himself a solid ground of reality on which to stand and a center from which to sweep the circumference of the universe. We may go far off for what is near at hand; we may vainly search the earth and the heavens for what is nigh us, even in our heart. Let us now take a look into our own soul that we may see in this microcosm of the self the image of the macrocosm of the world, as in a dewdrop we may see all the mechanism and wonders of the sun. This chapter only aims at presenting the slightest elementary sketch map of the large and wealthy field of psychology, which in recent years has been the subject of such fruitful study and has given birth to a literature so voluminous and rich. I. THE SOUL'S KNOWLEDGE OF ITSELF The soul knows itself. It is immediately aware of its own states and of itself as knowing these states. It uses no intermediate means, such as the senses, in knowing itself, but is in direct relation with the object known and is itself the object known. These mental states are the only object thus known to us immediately. All external objects are known to us mediately, through their play upon our senses, producing in us their phenomena. It is by a process of inference that we pass from the subjective phenomena to the objective noumena, an inference that is universal, necessary, and instinctive, but none the less an inferential and interpretative process, as we shall see later on. But it is by no such process that we know the subjective phenomena and all subjective states themselves: they are known by direct intuition. As a consequence of this fact, our knowledge of the self is the clearest and most certain knowledge we have. This knowledge may quickly become mixed and muddied with inferences that are widely wrong, but our awareness or consciousness of our mental states themselves is absolutely sure and free from error. We may not be able to describe these states in words, we may be egregiously wrong in our interpretation of them, but our experience of them is an ultimate fact. If we do not know the soul, we do not know anything; and if we do not know anything else, we do know the soul. From this intuitive knowledge of our personal self, there follows the great conclusion that in the soul we know reality itself. We know external objects through the mediation of the senses that present to us phenomena or appearances, which we endeavor to interpret and, if possible, resolve back in their noumena or realities, a process that is the task of metaphysics. No such process of mediation takes place in the soul's knowledge of itself, and therefore in this self-knowledge there are no phenomena, but only noumena. Our experiences, thoughts, feelings, volitions, considered in themselves apart from their objective reference and interpretation, are not appearances to us of realities that lie back of them, but are just what they seem. We are not looking at them through senses or processes that can transform them into phenomena, but we are ourselves these very states. They do not, therefore, appear to us under any transformed shape, but they exist in consciousness in their own form. They are not something apart from consciousness which consciousness is viewing, but they are consciousness itself. They are not symbols or shadows of something beyond them, but are ultimate reality. Here we reach essential reality, a core of pure being that cannot be resolved into phenomena or illusion or anything else than itself. This is a fact of tremendous importance in our search for reality. The metaphysician has often ransacked the heavens for the secret of being while stumbling over it in his own soul. If our conclusion is correct, we have in our own soul the point where we may rest our lever that will move the world. Here is the bit of reality that will show us the stuff of the universe. In plucking this "flower" from its "crannied wall" and knowing it "root and all," we "know what God and man is." 'Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? Or, Who shall descend into the deep? The world is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart.' It may be remarked, in passing, that the view that is taken of the relation of our subjective states to reality is one of the turning points in the history of philosophy. Kant maintained that our conscious states are phenomena of an unknown and unknowable "thing-in-itself" or ultimate reality, the things of nature being in the same way phenomena of unknowable "things-in-themselves" – which was the view of Herbert Spencer. Descartes started with his thinking self as a bit of indubitable reality, and Schopenhauer firmly grasped the fact that we know reality itself in our own internal states of idea and of will (in his "The World as Will and as Idea"), and these thinkers made it the corner stone of idealistic philosophy, where it remains to this day. Our conscious states exist in a relation of succession, or "stream of consciousness." The word "stream" in |