not previously expressible without circumlocution and obscurity, viz. that hitherto apperceptive discernment has monopolised the name, consciousness, and that the name now denotes the genus of which apperceptive discernment, inapperceptive discernment, and ignored complete consciousness, are species.1

XIII.

1. I have now to explain what I understand by the terms distinctness and indistinctness. They denote undefinable attributes of objects. When a tree is an object of visual perception and attention it is a distinct object, and its qualities, e.g. its solidity, colour, form, etc., are indistinct objects. When a grove is an object of visual perception and attention it is a distinct object, and those of its trees that are nearest to the centre of the field of vision may, if not too remote, be distinct objects. In the second case, the trees near to the circumference of the field of vision may be indis

1 The advantage of restoring the term, consciousness, to the larger signification from which it was warped by philosophy, is evinced by the misnomer, "unconscious feeling," employed by the late Mr. Lewes. According to the popular and better understanding of the terms, consciousness and feeling, feeling is a species of consciousness, so that the term "unconscious feeling" affects common sense with the shock of contradiction. The term Feeling has been popularly applied as denoting emotion and sensation; but when philosophy detects the species, ignored or latent consciousness, that species tends to fall under the sub-genus, feeling. Latent consciousness is what Mr. Lewes misnamed unconscious feeling. Not Mr. Lewes, but philosophy, is responsible for the misnomer. The kind of consciousness which it denotes is never absent from the waking mind, and probably comprises what there is of consciousness in the lowest animals.

tinct. The qualities of a tree that is an indistinct object are more indistinct than those of a tree that is distinct. Of distinct objects those that are objects of attention are more distinct than those that are not. Thus we see that there are degrees of distinctness and of indistinctness. It is essential to the object of attention to be distinct, but objects of inattentive discernment are not necessarily indistinct.

2. Indistinctness supposes objectivity. What is not an object cannot be indistinct.

3. There are two well-marked degrees of indistinctness, viz., that which does, and that which does not, exclude knowledge of the indistinct object. The indistinctness of normal inchoate consciousness, e.g. the ignored light, is an example of indistinctness that excludes knowledge of the object. Let indistinctness of this degree be distinguished as abditive. The indistinctness of objects near the circumference of the field of vision is an example of the kind that does not exclude knowledge. Let it be distinguished as inabditive.

4. Distinctness graduates, through instances, into inabditive indistinctness, and the latter into abditive indistinctness, as neighbour colours of the rainbow graduate one into the other, equally excluding a detection of boundary and doubt of the existence of specific difference. For example, the graduation excludes the possibility of ascertaining a minimum of distance from the centre of the field of vision beyond which a thing that, within the distance, would be distinct, is indistinct.

CHAPTER II.

KNOWLEDGE.

XIV.

In order to explain what is denoted by the term, Knowledge, I must take a liberty with the term, thesis, assigning to it a partially new meaning. I trust that the importance of the new signification, to which no other known term is, by its connotation, so well adapted, will be found a sufficient apology. I employ the term, thesis, as denoting a thing which, when objective, is verbally expressible by a proposition and not otherwise. Imagine yourself seeing at a distance a person who so affects your faculty of identification as to beget in you a faint opinion that he is your father, imagine that the opinion alternates for a time with the opposite opinion until, getting near to the object, you become certain that it is your father. The objects of the fluctuating opinions and of the certitude which finally supplants them are not propositions. No verbal formula is on such occasions objective; and a proposition is a verbal formula. But an object such as it is the nature of a proposition to express, one exhibiting the aspect of probability, must be present to each of the opinions; to the affirmative opinion an object cor

responding to the proposition, The person I see is my father, to the negative one an object corresponding to the proposition, The person I see is not my father; and a third kind of object must be present to the final certitude, viz., one corresponding to the proposition, The person I see is my father, but exhibiting the aspect of certainty instead of that of probability. Now these several objects are ideas intimately connected with the immediate object of the perception,-ideas which it is important to distinguish from that object. It is important to distinguish them from propositions as not being verbal, and, as being ideas, from the immediate object of perception.

XV.

The correlatives, certainty and certitude, are undefinable. The former is an attribute and aspect of a thesis, the latter an attribute of a mind to which the former is objective; in other words, when a thesis exhibits the aspect, certainty, the corresponding discernment involves the attribute, certitude. Certainty and certitude refer to truth,-to the truth of the thesis

which they suppose. The correlation of certainty to certitude supposes that there is no such thing as absolute certainty.

XVI.

We are said to know what is not altogether strange to our minds, e.g. the name, John, the figment of fancy,

D

Ariel, a song, an art, and also to know what we are certain of, e.g. the truth of the thesis, Two and two are four. If the relation of mind to what is not altogether strange to it be knowledge, knowledge is a genus comprised by the two species, knowledge that does, and knowledge that does not, suppose certitude. So far as

I know, philosophy has ignored the genus and regarded knowledge as supposing certitude. This I presume has been an inadvertence, and I therefore adopt the popular view, according to which knowledge is mental relation to what is not altogether strange. Knowledge

that supposes certitude I distinguish as "certive," and the opposite as "non-certive."

XVII.

Knowledge is either conscious or unconscious, the former when the thing known is objective, otherwise the latter. The mathematician's knowledge of mathematics subsists when he is in dreamless sleep. A man is not. necessarily nor always ignorant of what he is not thinking about, and what he is not ignorant of, though he be not thinking of it, he knows. Popular language implies the existence of unconscious knowledge. In conformity with it I presume to disregard the dictum of Hamilton, "consciousness and knowledge each involves the other." But though consciousness be not essential to knowledge, it is essential to certitude and certainty. These determine knowledge, but are not commensurate with it in time: they necessarily obtain, but obtain only when the knowledge they determine is conscious.