Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER SECOND. IXONSISTENCY OF OUR CONCLUSIONS IN THE FOREGOING CHAPTER WITH LOCKE'S ACCOUNT OF THE ORIGIN OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. IT was already observed, that it is from consciousness, or rather from reflection, that we derive all our notions of the faculties and operations of the mind; and that, in analysing these, we must lay our account with arriving, sooner or later, at certain simple notions or ideas, which we have no means of conveying to others, but by teaching those to whom our reasonings are addressed, how to direct their attention with accuracy to what passes within them. These mental phenomena form the direct and appropriate subjects of consciousness; and, indeed, the only direct and appropriate subjects of consciousness, in the strict acceptation of that word. It must not, however, be concluded from this, that the proper subjects of consciousness (when the phrase is thus understood) comprehend all the simple notions or ideas about which the science of mind is conversant; far less (as some philosophers have imagined) that they comprehend all the elements into which human knowledge may, in the last result, be analysed. Not to mention such notions as those of extension and figure, (both of which are inseparable concomitants of some of our external perceptions, and which certainly bear no resemblance to any thing of which we are conscious within ourselves,) there is a great variety of others so connected with our different intellectual faculties, that the exercise of the faculty may be justly regarded as a condition indispensably necessary to account for the first origin of the notion. Thus, by a mind destitute of the faculty of memory, neither the ideas of time, nor of motion, nor of personal identity, could possibly have been formed; ideas which are confessed...