THE CENTRAL INSIGHT OF THE ANGLOSPHERE:

THE life of man consists of impulses which spring from the coming together of inner desires and outer impressions. By the word desires is here not meant the intelligent want of a definite object, but the mere outreaching of vital energy. Desires and impressions, so far as our knowledge attains, cannot exist independently, that is to say, there can be no living organism without the constant interaction of an inner vital energy and an enveloping world. Impulses tend to pass into mental and physical activities, of the latter of which many belong to our animal functions and scarcely reach to the senses. Mental activities react in the form of new desires, physical activities in the form of new impressions. Certain activities are beneficial to our organization, others are detrimental. The sum of desires and impressions we call the great self-moving, incessant flux.

Beside the flux of life there is also that within man which displays itself intermittently as an inhibition upon this or that impulse, preventing its prolongation in activity, and making a pause or eddy, so to speak, in the stream. This negation of the flux we call the inner check. It is not the mere blocking of one impulse by another, which is a quality of the confusion of the flux itself, but a restraint upon the flux exercised by a force contrary to it.

In the repeated exercise of the inner check we are conscious of two elements of our being - the inner check itself and the stream of impulses - as coexistent and cooperative, yet essentially irreconcilable, forces. What, if anything, lies behind the inner check, what it is, why and how it acts or neglects to act, we cannot express in rational terms. Of the ultimate source of desires and impressions, and of the relation of the resulting flux of impulses to the inner check in that union which we call ourselves, we are darkly ignorant. These are the final elements of self-knowledge - on the one hand multiplicity of impulses, on the other hand unity and cupiditatum oblivio, alta rerum quies. Consciousness, the more deeply we look into ourselves, tells us that we are ceaselessly changing, yet tells us also that we are ever the same. This dualism of consciousness, it seems, is the last irrational fact, the report behind which we cannot go, the decision against which there is no appeal, the reality which only stands out the more clearly the more it is questioned. If a man denies this dualism of consciousness there is no argument with him, but a fundamental difference of intuition which will follow into every view of philosophy and criticism.

The attempt to resolve the irrational paradox by asserting that there is an absolute consciousness which embraces the two elements of a lower consciousness can only fall into endless regression. Thus, let A and B represent the two elements of consciousness. If a man asserts that there is a third element, C, which is conscious of A and B as mere aspects of one and the same mental activity, then for the original dualism he establishes a new-dualism in which C is one element while A and B together form the other element. And so on without end. The difficulty arises here from attempting to treat the so-called self-knowledge of consciousness as if it were the same intellectual process as knowledge which requires a subject and an object, a knower and a thing known, or, in our mental life, a present and a past. We do not know the flux by the inner check, or the inner check by the flux, or either of these by some other element of our being, but we are immediately and inexplicably conscious of both at once - we are both at once.

Reason, which is our instrument of analysis and definition, is itself an organ of the flux.

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