Beyond the
limits of this coherent aggregate of activities exist activities quite
independent of it, and which cannot be brought into it. We may imagine,
then, that by their exclusion from the circumscribed activities
constituting consciousness, these outer activities, though of the same
intrinsic nature, become antithetically opposed in aspect. Being
disconnected from consciousness, or cut off by its limits, they are thereby
rendered foreign to it. Not being incorporated with its activities, or
linked with these as they are with one another, consciousness cannot, as it
were, run through them; and so they come to be figured as unconscious--are
symbolised as having the nature called material, as opposed to that called
spiritual. While, however, it thus seems an imaginable possibility that
units of external Force may be identical in nature with units of the force
known as Feeling, yet we cannot by so representing them get any nearer to a
comprehension of external Force. For, as already shown, supposing all forms
of Mind to be composed of homogeneous units of feeling variously
aggregated, the resolution of them into such units leaves us as unable as
before to think of the substance of Mind as it exists in such units; and
thus, even could we really figure to ourselves all units of external Force
as being essentially like units of the force known as Feeling, and as so
constituting a universal sentiency, we should be as far as ever from
forming a conception of that which is universally sentient.
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