142. A more positive answer it is not our present business to give. Our concern is to show that ‘eternity and immensity,’ according to any meaning that Locke recognises, or that the observation of our ideas could justify, do not express any conception that can carry us beyond the perpetual incompleteness of our experience; but that in his doctrine of personal identity he does admit a conception which no observation of our ideas of reflection--since these are in succession and could not be observed if they were not--can account for; and that it is just this conception, the conception of a constant presence of consciousness to itself incompatible with conditions of space and time, that can alone give such meaning to ‘eternal and infinite’ as can render them significant epithets of God. Such a conception (we say it with respect) Locke admits when it is wanted without knowing it. It must indeed always underlie the idea of God, however alien to it may be attempted adaptations of the other ‘infinite’--the _progressus ad indefinitum_ in space and time--by which, as with Locke, the idea is explained. But it is one for which the psychological method of observing what happens in oneself cannot account, and which therefore this method, just so far as it is thoroughly carried out, must tend to discard. That which happens, whether we reckon it an inward or an outward, a physical or a psychical event--and nothing but an event can, properly speaking, be observed--is as such in time. But the presence of consciousness to itself, though, as the true ‘punctum stans,’ [1] it is the condition of the observation of events in time, is not such an event itself. In the ordinary and proper sense of ‘fact,’ it is not a fact at all, nor yet a possible abstraction from facts. To the method, then, which deals with phrases about the mind by ascertaining the observable ‘mental phenomena’ which they represent, it must remain a mere phrase, to be explained as the offspring of other phrases whose real import has been misunderstood. It can only recover a significance when this method, as with Hume, has done its worst, and is found to leave the possibility of knowledge, without such ‘punctum stans,’ still unaccounted for. [1] Locke, Essay II. chap. xvii. sec. 16. How do I know my own real existence?--Locke’s answer.