Let us now place ourselves at the point of view of the consciousness. We have supposed up to the present the suppression of the consciousness, and have seen that we can still imagine the object continuing to exist. Is the converse possible? Let us suppose that the object is suppressed. Can the consciousness then continue to exist? On this last point it seems that doubt is not possible, and we must answer in the negative. A consciousness without an object, an empty consciousness, in consequence, cannot be conceived; it would be a zero—a pure nothingness; it could not manifest itself. We might admit, in strictness, that such a consciousness might exist virtually as a power which is not exercised, a reserve, a potentiality, or a possibility of being; but we cannot comprehend that this power can realise or actualise itself. There is therefore no actual consciousness without an object.
The problem we have just raised, that of the separability of the elements which compose an act of consciousness, is continued by another problem—that of unconsciousness. It is almost the same problem, for to ask one’s self what becomes of a known thing when we separate from it the consciousness which at first accompanied it, is to ask one’s self in what an unconscious phenomenon consists.
We have, till now, considered the two principal
