Singular reflections are provoked when one contrasts with these extravagant profundities the conception of things presented by the Indian thinker six hundred years before the Christian era began. In the Buddha-thought there is no something called “consciousness,” as equally there is no something called “life.” There is only an experience of the unfolding of consciousness--a constant _becoming conscious_. I do not _have_ consciousness as I might have a half-crown in my pocket, but I _am_ consciousness objectified, as I am will objectified. As long as I think in terms of actuality, there is just but _one_ consciousness in the world--I myself. As long as I think in terms of actuality, consciousness means just this and no more--to experience myself. But this is possible only as an intuition, and a specific impulsion, instruction, is needed in order to arrive at this intuition. Consciousness, just like all the remainder of the _I_-process, is a form of the individual process of nutrition; the only difference is this, that it is the last, the highest phase, as the fruit is the last, the highest phase of the vegetative process. To speak of a “seat” of consciousness has about as much meaning as to speak of a “seat” of bodily heat. All this falls under the one inclusive concept, “nutrition.” What modern physicist would ever be so childish as in some hot body to search for the “seat” of heat? But physiologist and biologist stagger along exhausted under the load of their learnedness on the subject of the “seat” of consciousness. There is just as much reason, and no more, for holding the brain-cells of the cerebral cortex to be the seat of consciousness as there is for regarding the electric cells in its central telegraph office as the seat of the intelligence of a great city. The teaching of Buddhist physiology is as follows:-- Where the eye and forms encounter one another, and the antecedent conditions are such that each acts upon the other, there arises visual consciousness. Where the ear and sounds encounter one another, there arises aural consciousness. Where nose and odours encounter one another, there arises olfactory consciousness. Where tongue and flavours encounter one another, there arises gustatory consciousness. Where bodies and objects come in contact with one another, there arises tactile consciousness. Where thinking and things (known abstractly) encounter one another, there arises thought-consciousness.