THE OBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE. 363 and being. For him there is only a more or less adequate recognition of the eternal facts of universal consciousness. Even our voluntary activity he can regard only as a spiritual action, which, without the aid of intervening instrumen- talities, immediately influences our knowledge. Any kind of effective exertion on our part can result only in a truer recognition of that which eternally abides in universal consciousness. Not by any means can we effect an actual modification of the immutable facts which are held to con- stitute the only standard of our knowledge. From the Transcendental standpoint our body can be, therefore, neither an instrument of intercommunication nor a place of transition between sensible apprehension and con- ceptual recognition. Indeed, our body, together with ah 1 other sensible phenomena, can signify to genuine Transcen- dentalism nothing but the inadequate conception of eternal and unalterable facts within universal consciousness. Now, can there be found a scientific Transcendent alist bold enough actually to maintain that our growing, ever- changing, and at last utterly perishing body is, nevertheless, when truthfully conceived, nothing but an eternal and im- mutable fact in universal consciousness ? And, if such an indomitable thinker can really be found, it will then be still incumbent on him to show how our spiritual subject can at all be related to the eternal fact in universal consciousness which constitutes our body our body now strangely ele- vated to the rank of an eternal thought of the all-comprising consciousness ; whilst our own thought, which but even now was confidently settled upon as the one stable element of our personality, turns out to be a power only vicariously, chaiigeably and confusedly conceiving the much more stead- fast reality actually represented by our bodily appearance. Thus hopelessly contradictory is the endeavour to establish objective reality by means of the conceptual recognition of eternal thought. Reasoning from transcendental premisses, the obvious truth is, that our body must ever remain an utterly refractory group of perceptual phenomena ; not only perfectly useless, but thoroughly obstructive ; indeed, a constantly obtruding nuisance, wantonly and bewilderingly interpolated between thinking and being. This monstrous negation, implied in the conceptual origina- tion of reality, must, in all verity, form the final verdict of Transcendentalism as regards the import of that intimately familiar, pre-eminently efficient and marvellously endowed vehicle of life, which ushers our embryonic mind into being,
