2. Consciousness, while involved in, cannot be, either psychologically or chronologically, distinguished from the mental acts which it accompanies. The act and the consciousness of the act are inseparable in time, and they are incapable of being distinguished as distinct states of mind. We cannot break up the sensation or perception into a fact, and the consciousness of that fact. Logically we may distinguish them as different objects of thought and attention, but not psychologically as distinct acts of mind.
3. Consciousness is not under the control of the will, and is not therefore a faculty of the mind. It is not a power of doing something, but an inseparable concomitant of all doing. What has been termed by some writers voluntary consciousness, or reflection, is simply attention directed to our own mental acts.
Distinction of Consciousness and Self-Consciousness.—Others again distinguish between consciousness and self-consciousness; but all consciousness, properly so called, involves the idea of self or the subjective element. To know that I have a sensation is virtually to know myself as having it.
Cases of abnormal or suspended Consciousness.—In certain disordered and abnormal states of the nervous organism, the knowledge of what has transpired previously to that state seems to be lost; and then again, on passing out of that condition into the normal one, all knowledge of what took place while in the abnormal state is wanting. Instances are on record where persons have alternated in this manner from one to the other condition, carrying on, as it were, by turns, two separate and independent lines of mental activity. An instance of this nature is related by Dr. Wayland. It has been usual to speak of these as instances of disordered or suspended consciousness. Strictly speaking, however, it is not consciousness but memory that is in such cases disordered. It is not the knowledge of the present, but of the past, that is disturbed and deficient. While the abnormal state continues, the individual is conscious of what transpires in that state. When it ceases, the patient wakes as from a reverie or dream, and retains no recollection of any thing that took place during its continuance. It is the memory that fails, and not the consciousness. We are never conscious of the past.
Objects of Consciousness.—1. Consciousness deals only with reality. We are conscious only of that which is, not of that which may be. The poet is conscious indeed of his fiction, the builder of air-castles is conscious of his reverie, but the fiction and the reverie, regarded as mental acts, are realities, and it is only as mental acts that they are objects of consciousness.
2. Not every thing real is an object of consciousness, but only that which is present and in immediate relation to us. The destruction of Pompeii, and the existence of an Antarctic continent are realities, but not objects of my consciousness.
3. Primarily and directly we are conscious of our own mental states and operations; of whatever passes over the field of our mental vision, our thoughts, feelings, actions, physical sensations, moral sentiments and purposes: mediately and indirectly we are conscious of whatever, through the medium of sense, comes into direct relation to us. For instance, when I put forth my hand and it strikes this table, I am conscious not only of the movement, and the effort to move, but of the sensation of resistance also, and indirectly I may be said to be conscious not of the resistance only, but of something—to wit, the table—as resisting. This something I know, as really as I know the sensation and the fact of resistance. To this immediate perception of the external world in direct relation to our physical organism, Sir W. Hamilton would extend the sphere of consciousness. Usually, however, the term has been employed in a more restricted sense—to denote the knowledge of what passes within, rather than of what lies without the mind itself.