stance, passive, and only active through a species of reaction. But the ego is never passive. Its being is pure act. To hold it passive is to hold it annihilated. It is for ever acting against the fatalistic forces of nature. Its free and antagonist power shows itself equally to the eye of reflection in our simplest perceptive as in our highest moral acts. It lives and has a being only in so far as it refuses to bow under the yoke of causality; and whenever it bends beneath that yoke, its life and all its results are gone.[1]
One word to those who imagine that the ego is merely a variety of expression signifying nothing more than the proper name of the person employing it. There cannot be a greater philosophical error than to conceive that the non-manifestation of the ego is merely a verbal or logical defect, and that the reality of it may exist in a being where the notion of it is wanting. Yet this appears to us to be one of the commonest errors in psychology. Metaphysicians undisciplined by reflection, when contemplating the condition of a young child, and observing its various sensitive, passionate, or rational states, are prone, in the exercise of an unwarranted imagination, also to invest it with a personality, with conscious-
- ↑ "The false facts of metaphysics" ought to form no inconsiderable chapter in the history of philosophy. Those specified are but a few of them; but they are all that we have room for at present. To state, almost in one wont, the fundamental error we have noticed in the text we should say, that the whole perversion and falsity of the philosophy of man are owing to our commencing with a substance, "mind," and not with an act, the act or fact of consciousness.
