I may indeed _read_ consciousness under the figure of associative occurrences, but only in the form of recollection. Applied to the corresponding dissociative event, forgetting, this explanation is as impossible as that a molecular mixture which has once come to equilibrium within itself should again spontaneously return to dissolution, to dissociation. As the natural adjustment of differences of molecular tension may be explained or read as a fall, so in its associative activities consciousness may be explained or read as a fall, but never so in its dissociative activities. This, however, involves the utter worthlessness of the former explanation; for every mixture, every association, presupposes separation, dissociation, and, called upon to indicate the _essence_ of consciousness, what I should point to is not so much the associative as the dissociative, not so much recollection, conjunction, as forgetting, disjunction. Once the stone is raised from the earth’s surface its return fall forthwith ensues. But it is the separation from the earth’s surface for which effective causes must be found. In like manner, it is dissociation, forgetting, that really demands elucidation; association, recollection can as easily be read mechanistically as the fall of a stone once it has been raised. Dissociation is the physiological miracle, in presence of which science stands altogether helpless. The like holds good of faith, illusion, error. The purely mechanistic conception of things, the view which regards the _I_-process simply as an instance of the phenomenon of the compensation of tensile differences, can never be accommodated to the possibility of such things as faith, illusion, and error. But a similar impossibility also exists for the teleological apprehension of the world. How should a “force” ever acquire the faculty of deceiving itself or of falling into error? To a compensation-phenomenon pure and simple, as to God, illusion and error are wholly unattainable potentialities; they belong to mankind alone, to the man whom the Buddha points out to us. If I am nothing but an unceasing reaction to the outer world, if I constantly adapt myself to things and things adapt themselves to me, not as a mere adjustment but in virtue of specific energies, only then are faith, illusion, error, and all other negative phenomena equally possible with all positive phenomena. Beginningless process furnishes the possibility of both.