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consciousness, but to which, for distinction's sake, he prefixes self, and designates it self-consciousness. It is the office of this special faculty to afford us a knowledge of the phenomena of our minds." (Vol. II. p. 192.) He justifies himself in drawing a distinction between sense- perception and self-consciousness on the ground that, " though the immediate knowledge of matter and of mind are still only modifications of consciousness, yet that their discrimination as subaltern faculties is both allowable and convenient."

Such is the doctrine and such the nomenclature of Hamilton {436} on this subject. I confess that I have great doubts of the propriety of applying the phrase "consciousness," both in this general and specific way. In the first sense "Consciousness constitutes, or is co- extensive with all Our faculties of knowledge," and he speaks of our being endowed with a faculty of cognition or consciousness, in general (Vol. 2. p. 10), and says that " consciousness may be regarded as the general faculty of knowledge." Now it is certainly desirable to have a word to denote our faculties of knowledge, or of immediate knowledge but why not call them knowing powers, or cognitive powers, and their exercise or energy, knowledge or cognition, and then the word " consciousness " would be reserved unambiguously for the cognizance which the mind takes of self in its particular states. The word (from to know together with) seems the appropriate one to denote that knowledge of self which co exists with all our other knowledge of things material or things spiritual; and indeed with all our other mental exercises, such as feelings and volitions. It is certainly in this sense that the term is employed by Hutcheson, by Reid, by Stewart, by Royer Collard; and all Hamilton's vehement criticisms of these men are inapplicable and powerless, for this very obvious reason, that they use the word consciousness as he uses self-consciousness, acknowledged by him to be a special faculty. It is an inevitable result of using the phrases in two senses, a wider and a straiter, that we are ever in danger of passing inadvertently from the one meaning to the other, and making affirmations in the one sense which are true only in the other. I rather think that Hamilton himself has not escaped this error, and the confusion thence arising. lie is ever appealing to consciousness, as Locke did to ideal and Brown did to suggestion; but we are not always sure in which of the senses, whether in both, or in one, or in which one. He is ever ascribing powers to consciousness, which he would have explained, or modified, or limited, if the distinction had been kept steadily in view. Thus he is often announcing that consciousness is the universal condition of intelligence; if this is meant of the general consciousness, it can mean no more than this, that man must have knowing powers in order to know; if meant of the special consciousness, it is not true; it is rather true that there must be some mental exercise as a condition of the knowledge of {437} self. He calls the principles of common sense the facts of consciousness, emphatically; whereas these principles, as principles, are not before the consciousness as principles at all. The individual manifestations are of course before the consciousness (though not more so than any other mental exercise), but not the principles themselves, which are derived from the individual exercises, by a reflex process of abstraction and generalization. He speaks everywhere as if we must ever be conscious at one and the same time of subject and object, -- meaning external object; whereas we may be conscious of the subject mind thinking about some state of self present or absent. His friend, Professor Ferrier, carried the doctrine a step farther, and maintained that a knowledge of self is a condition of all knowledge of not self, whereas it is merely a fact that the one co-exists with the other in one concrete act, in which we know not self to be different from self, and independent of self.