solution, but is a most frivolous and irrelevant question. We thus, then, fix for Dr Brown and many other philosophers the first horn of our dilemma. If by "perception" they understand "sensation" merely, they no doubt hit the true facts and their true explanation, but then they entirely miss, as we shall see, the question properly at issue, and, instead of grappling with it, they explain to us that which stands in need of no explanation.
But by "perception," Dr Brown and other philosophers probably understand something more than "sensation." If so, what is the additional fact they understand by it? When we have found it, we will then fix for them the other horn of our dilemma.
When animals and young children are sentient, there is in them, as we have all along seen, nothing more than sensation. The state of being into which they are cast is simple and single. It is merely a certain effect following a certain cause. There is in it nothing whatsoever of a reflex character. A particular sensation is, in their case, given or induced by its particular external cause, and nothing more is given. Indeed, what more could we rationally expect the fragrant particles of a rose to give than the sensation of the smell of a rose? Here, then, the state into which the sentient creature is thrown begins, continues, and ends, in simple and mixed sensation, and that is all that can be said about it.
But when we ourselves are sentient, we find the state of the fact to be widely different from this. We find that our sentient condition is not, as is the case in children and animals, a monopoly of sensation, but that here a new fact is evolved, over and above the sensation, which makes the phenomenon a much more complicated and extraordinary one. This new and anomalous phenomenon which accompanies our sensations, but which is, at the same time, completely distinct from them—is the fact of our own personality—the fact and the notion denoted by the word "I." Surely no one will maintain that this realisation of self, in conjunction with our sensations, and as distinguished from the objects causing them, is the same fact as these sensations themselves. In man, then, there is the notion and the reality of himself, as well as the sensation that passes through him. In other words, he is not only sentient, like other animals, but, unlike them, he is sentient with a consciousness, or reference to self, of sensation;—two very different, and, as we have already seen, and shall see still further, mutually repugnant and antithetical states of existence.
This consciousness of sensation, then, is the other fact contained in perception; and it is an inquiry into the nature and origin of this fact, and of it alone, that forms the true and proper problem of psychology when we are busied with the phenomena of perception; because it is this fact, and not the fact of sensation, which constitutes man's peculiar and distinctive characteristic, and lies as the foundation-stone of all the grander structures of his moral and intellectual being.
We now then ask:—Have Dr Brown and other philosophers entertained the problem as to the origin and import of this fact—the fact, namely, of consciousness as distinguished from the fact of sensation, passion, &c.—and have they thus grappled with the true question at issue? We answer: That if they have, then have they grossly falsified the facts of the case. For it is not the fact that the consciousness of sensation is "induced, either directly or indirectly, by its external cause," or by any cause whatsoever. Sensation, no doubt, is induced by its external cause, but consciousness is altogether exempt from the law of causality, as we shall very shortly prove by a reference to experience itself. In fine, then, the dilemma to which Dr Brown, and, we believe, all other theorists on the subject of perception, may be reduced, stands thus: Are they, primo loco, right in their facts?—then they are wrong in the question they take up. Or, secundo loco, do they hit the right question?—then they falsify, ab initio, the facts upon which its solution depends. In other words, in so far as their statement of facts is true, they take up a wrong question, inasmuch as they explain to us the origin of our sensations when they ought to be explaining to us the origin of our consciousness of sensations, or the notion of self which accompanies them. Or, again, supposing that they take up the right question; then their statement of facts is false, inasmuch as their assumption
