THE OBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE. 375 indirectly through adjoining media, play upon it the rhythm of their own activity. By means of the specific energies of living nerve-tissue the imparted rhythms are to the organic subject sensorial affections. Now the entire nervous sys- tem, in its present molecular composition and structural collocation, represents the result of such rhythmic attune- ment between the world of foreign powers and the intrinsic powers of the organism itself ; a result attained by endlessly reiterated interaction between those foreign pow r ers and the affected organism, during which process the gradually ac- complished organic adjustments are cumulatively transmitted from one generation to another. In what we call the nervous system and its functions, we thus find efficiently reconsti- tuted by organic reproduction the complete range and prac- tical order of possible effects from sensory stimulation by foreign powers, so that anything normal or abnormal that may now strike upon it the stimulating rhythm will elicit the corresponding sensorial response. But we are not merely passive receivers of stimulating rhythms. We spon- taneously set ourselves in readiness and motion to solicit or to reject contact with their source of emanation ; for this contact means to us either satisfaction or danger through harmonious blending or destructive clash. That which renders contact with foreign powers salutary or deleterious to us, lies in the nature of the foreign powers as things-in- themselves in their relation to our organism as thing-in-itself ; and not in the sensorial affections which they arouse in our consciousness through stimulation. It is connatural suitable- ness or unsuitableness to what we ourselves are or, as repre- sentatives of our race, tend to become, which commands our attraction or repulsion, our sympathy or aversion. AVe ask whether, as the only possible way of escape from the Identity-philosophy, or simply taken on its own merits, such a naturally pre-established correspondence between our own and other existences, sufficiently explain- ing the objective validity of our percepts and concepts, is really so unintelligible as Transcendentalism seems to think? so unintelligible, for instance, as individual recognition of eternal facts in universal consciousness ? Of course, those supematurally pre-established harmonies of the rationalistic school, by which it attempted to account for the parallelism of the inner and the outer world, are altogether inconceiv- able and, indeed, quite useless. If thought, by means of supernatural powers of its own, is capable of originating all the contents of our consciousness, what need is there for hypostatising a nature outside consciousness to harmonise
