Now, if once we feel ourselves able to transcend the preliminary--and
doubtless very considerable--difficulty of symbolically conceiving the
world-eject as super-conscious, and (because not limited) also
super-personal, I think there can be no question that the world-object
furnishes overwhelming proof of psychism. I candidly confess that I am
not myself able to overcome the preliminary difficulty in question. By
discharging the elements of personality and conscious volition from the
world-eject, I appear to be discharging from my conception of mind all
that most distinctively belongs to that conception; and thus I seem to
be brought back again to the point from which we started: the
world-eject appears to have again resolved itself into the unknown
quantity _x_. But here we must distinguish between actual conception and
symbolical conception. Although it is unquestionably true that I can
form no actual conception of Mind save as an eject of personality and
conscious volition, it is a question whether I am not able to form a
symbolical conception of Mind as thus extended. For I know that
consciousness, implying as it does continual change in serial order of
circumscribed mental processes, is not (symbolically considered) the
highest conceivable exhibition of Mind; and just as a mathematician is
able to deal symbolically with space of _n_ dimensions, while only able
really to conceive of space as limited to three dimensions, so I feel
that I ought not to limit the abstract possibilities of mental being by
what I may term the accidental conditions of my own being.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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