sented, requires some attention. It is not easy to make it perfectly accurate, yet we may very readily cause it to subserve the purposes of expression, without being misled by it. We may say, consciousness testifies to this feeling, or that thought; and yet exclude the inference that consciousness is either a witness or a power. Knowing, feeling, willing, by virtue of their own simple, direct constitution, have a double aspect: the knowledge or experience which belongs to them as a particular perception, emotion, purpose; and the condition common to them all, that they are known to the mind whose states or acts they are. The convenience of language leads us to speak of this inseparable condition as if it were a distinct, complete form of knowing. This we can do with safety only on condition that we constantly remember the partial application of the words we employ. A feeling is not at once a feeling and a knowing, though we express the clearness of our conviction of the fact of emotion by saying, I know that I feel. Feeling, as feeling, involves a condition which allies it to knowledge; yet not more to knowledge than to volition, to every act of mind. Philosophers constantly appeal to consciousness in proof of this or that feature of their several theories; how far does such an appeal hold? Consciousness, in the qualified use of language now spoken of, may be said to testify to all the phenomena of the mind, as phenomena; but not to their correctness or fitness. That it thinks and what it thinks, that it perceives and what it perceives, that it feels and what it feels, the mind necessarily knows. The fact is impossible without the knowledge of it, since the knowledge of it is what is meant by the fact. The justness of the thought, however, the accuracy of the alleged perception, its reliability as a phase of mental action, are totally distinct questions, not directly referable to consciousness for their solution. The clear, decided way in which they transpire in the mind, as acts, prepares us to believe in that which they declare; but the final, philosophical basis of this belief is found in a careful analysis of our several faculties of knowing, in a determination of what they reveal, and in a direct faith reposed on them as powers of knowledge. There is no opportunity for any scepticism as, regards consciousness. That we think and feel and will, all philosophy presupposes. The act of philosophizing involves it, and no man ever distrusts the mere fact of his own mental states. Such an unbelief is intrinsically absurd; it doubts itself. If the mind be represented by a mirror, the fact that an image is in the mirror is one thing, and the analytical character of the image, and its relation to an actual knowledge of the outer world, are very different things. Consciousness declares the first, the powers of knowing as means of knowledge declare the second. More exactly, a perception, a judgment or a recollection, as a knowing process, issues backward toward the mind in revealing itself, issues forward toward the object in disclosing it. For the first fact, to wit, the mind's own action, we rely on consciousness; for the second, to wit, the thing known, we trust to the given faculty of knowledge. In the night, I mistake a stump for a shrouded ghost. It is an error of the eye, not of consciousness. We can not rightly, in a discussion concerning perception, say that we are conscious of an external object, unless that object be really and veritably a portion of the phenomena of the mind. Consciousness underlies these and these alone, is commensurate with these and these alone. An act of memory, and the event remembered; an act of judgment and the conclusion involved therein; an act of perception, and the thing perceived, are very different. Consciousness pertains to the first, and memory, judgment, and perception to the second. To take any other view is to dispense with the necessity of the specific power, and to attribute to the general condition of knowledge the results which belong to the separate acts of knowing. If we are conscious of the external world, why perceive it? If we are conscious of liberty, why reason abut it? Nothing can be more immediate and undeniable than consciousness. Indeed, to doubt it, where it is truly involved, is, as we have said, absurd. Let us see how the view, now briefly presented, leaves on the one hand the Scylla of materialism, and on the other the Charybdis of idealism. Materialism is the imminent danger of our times. Its chief, its insuperable barrier is the irresolvable nature of consciousness, the utter disconnection of its phenomena from those of matter; their radically diverse character and method of acquisition from the most subtle facts dependent on the play of nerve-forces. If consciousness is to be regarded as a regulative idea, one more of these stubborn, irreducible notions is placed in the path of materialism. The mind's conception of the necessary nature of its own activity, like its conception of the necessary conditions of physical events, is found to run before, and expound phenomena, incomprehensible without it. Farther, consciousness is thus made to stand over against space, as dividing the conditions of being with it, and giving a wholly new, diverse, independent form of existence. Thus the physical and the mental are cut squarely and cleanly apart, and the identification of the two classes of facts made more than ever impossible. All middle ground is swept away, and while the dependence and parallelism of certain physical changes are recognized, their essentially, diverse, and alien nature is made equally plain. To call the state or condition of a nerve-centre a thought, a feeling, is thus to confound things so utterly unlike that they do not belong to the same general, generic category of being. The one arises under the regulative idea of space, the other under that of consciousness. There is thrown between them the broadest possible distinction, a distinction like that which exists between time and number, or space and causation. The inter-action between these two realms of matter and mind we do not pretend to explain; nor need we be disturbed because we can not, since it is of a final, non-phenomenal character. The last phenomena in brain-tissue may be observed, the first in consciousness attended to; but the connection between the two, like the connection between successive, physical events, springing the one from the other, is unsearchable. ་ Idealism, on the other hand, is embarrassed by this view, since the dual action of the mind of which it makes so much is lost. Each action, each state, in final analysis, is simple and complete, existing under one common condition. The mind can no longer be figured as situated centrewise, and watching the phenomena transpiring within its own subjective circle; as classifying them, and projecting certain of them outward, as a material world. Each act is simple, and the mind is moving through it not upon it; is accomplishing something else, viewing something else, by means of it, not watching it and playing tricks with it, as the juggler with his deceptive images. Thus the proof derivable from the character and integrity of our knowing faculties, and applicable for the confirmation of a belief in the external world, has its full force. Perception and the judgment of causation are single, separate, outward-going activities of the mind, which have no verity whatever, unless it be that of affirming correctly what they seem to affirm. They are not secondary, subjective phenomena, transpiring under the primary inspection of the mind, but they are direct, original activities of the intellect, bent on this very errand of knowing, and utterly false and futile if they fail to yield knowledge. So, also, the sensations are of a simple, primitive character, and betray the independent nature of the causes which excite them. The mind finds itself reached in them by outside forces, and this becomes its inevitable conviction. We are not so sanguine as to suppose that the above view will be readily accepted; but we believe that increasing consideration will give it increasing force, and reveal its adaptation to the elucidation and defense of that common, general body of belief concerning mind and matter, which holds possession of the public faith in spite of the shifting and erratic forms of philosophy. 30 ART. IV. THE RELATION OF THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT TO CHRISTIAN DUTY.* By Rev. ROBERT AIKMAN, Madison, New Jersey. WE HAVE directed attention to the works indicated in the foot-note, not because we design in this article anything which can fairly be called a review of them. But they indicate the lines of thought taken by candid and fervent Christian men, whose zeal for the truest and most hallowed observance of the Lord's day does not yield in the least to that of any of those who take the different and more common view. The two Sermons by the late Incumbent of Trinity Chapel, Brightonthat rare and glowing intellect whose posthumous light broke so suddenly upon us—have been some years before the public, and must be admitted to have made a wide impression. The little work by Mr. Bacon is of recent issue. While in full sympathy with the views of Robertson, and coming to the same general conclusions, it is a reverent and manly discussion of a great subject, in a spirit equally courteous and independent. It is by discussions such as these from the pulpits of the Brighton and the Valley Church, and by calm consideration and reply, that we shall at last come (it may be) to a common theory and a uniform Christian practice. The heading of this article indicates the general drift we propose: "The Relation of the Fourth Commandment to Christian Duty." Has Christian duty anything to do with the fourth commandment? Are there any obligations imposed in it which are binding on us? In it have we a divine command which is, in any proper sense, a divine command under the new dispensation? Or, upon the other hand, is the observance of a Sabbath or Rest-day a matter without command upon us? something which is left for the enlightened conscience of every man to decide, upon principles of high Christian expediency? Christian expediency which, when *The Shadow and the servance of the Sabbath. The Sabbath Question. by George B. Bacon, N. J. Substance of the Sabbath. The Religious Non-ob- |