MS 298-299 Phaneroscopy

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“Thou art the unanswered question; Couldst see thy proper eye, Alway it asketh, asketh; And each answer is a lie.”

But whatever he may have meant, it is plain enough that all that is immediately present to a man is what is in his mind in the present instant, his whole life is in the present. But when he asks what is the content of the present instant, his question always comes too late. The present has gone, gone by, and what remains of it is greatly metamorphosed. He can, it is true, recognize that he was a[t?] that time, for example, looking at a specimen of red-lead, and must have seen that color, which, he perceives, is something positive and sui-generis, of the nature of Feeling. But nobody's immediate consciousness, unless when he was much more than half asleep, ever consisted wholly of a color-sensation; and since, a

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feeling is absolutely simple and without parts, as it evidently is, since it is whatever it is regardless of anything else, and therefore regardless of any part, which would be something other than the whole, it follow that if the red color-sensation was not the whole feeling of the instant it has nothing in common with the feeling of the instant. Indeed, although a Feeling is immediate consciousness, that is, is whatever of consciousness there may be that is immediately present, yet there is no consciousness in it because it is instantaneous. For we have seen already that Feeling is nothing but a Quality, and Quality is not conscious; it is a mere possibility. We can, it is true, see what a Feeling in general is like; that, for example, this of tht red is a Feeling; and it is perfectly conceivable that a being should have that color for its entire consciousness, throughout a lapse of time, and therefore of

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every instant of that time. But such a being could never know anything about its own consciousness. It could not think anything that is expressible as a proposition. It could have no idea of such a thing. It would be confined to feeling that color. True, if you perceive that you must at the instant in question have been looking at a given specimen of red-lead, you know that that color has some resemblance to your feeling at that instant. But this only means that when the feeling gives place to comparison this resemblance appears. But there is no resemblance at all in Feeling, since Feeling is whatever it is, positively and regardless of anything else, while the resemblance of anything lies in the comparison of that thing with something else. (omitted[?)]

If all this which I am saying to you seems hardly intelligible, allow

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me to remind you, dear Reader, that there is no royal road to thought. If one person, A, has an idea, and it is deemed desirable that another person, B, should have it too, there is absolutely no other way than for B to go through substantially the same process of thought that A has gone through; and if it happens that the particular mode of thought is one in which B is more or less unpracticed, there necessarily will be a certain awkwardness in his attempts to follow A's thought. A can arrange the different stimuli to the to thoughts so as to make the path somewhat easy, if B will only keep to that path. But he will stumble more or less because he has not been trained to going over that kind of ground. At first , the difficulties may be great; but at last he will get the knack of it, and it will become comparatively easy, although there will be a certain amount

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of mental energy to be expended, even when the unnecessary friction has been got rid of.

Every operation of the mind, however complex, has its absolutely simple feeling, the emotion of the tout ensemble. This is a secondary feeling or sensation excited from within the mind, just as the qualities of outward sense are excited by something psychic without us. It seems at first glance unaccountable that a mere slight difference in the speed of vibration should make such a difference of quality as that between deep vermillion and violet blue. But then it is to be remembered that it is doubtless our imperfect knowledge of those vibrations which has led us to represent them abstractly as differing only in quantity. There is actually a hint in the behaviour of electrons that a lower speed and a greater one