What seems to stand out most clearly after all these explanations is the role which we ought to attribute to the consciousness. Two rival theories have been maintained: that of the mirror-consciousness and that of the focus-consciousness. It would seem--I merely say it would seem--that the first of these best harmonises with the preceding facts. For what seems most probable is, that the consciousness illuminates and reveals but does not act. The theory of the focus-consciousness adapts itself less to the mechanism of the association of ideas. From this we come quite naturally to see in the intelligence only an inactive consciousness; at one moment it apprehends an object, and it is a perception or an idea; at another time it perceives a connection, and it is a judgment; at yet another, it perceives connections between connections, and it is an act of reason. But however subtle the object it contemplates may become, it does not depart from its contemplative attitude, and cognition is but a consciousness. One step further, and we should get so far as to admit that the consciousness serves no purpose whatever, and that it is a useless luxury, since, if all efficacious virtue is to be found in the sensations and the ideas which we consider as material facts, the consciousness which reveals them adds nothing to, takes nothing from and modifies nothing in them; and everything would go on the same, nor would anything in this world be changed, if one day the light of consciousness were, by chance, to be put out. We might imagine a collection of automatons forming a human society as complicated as, and not different in appearance from, that of conscious beings; these automatons would make the same gestures, utter the same words as ourselves, would dispute, complain, cry, and make love like us; we might even imagine them capable, like us, of psychology. This is the thesis of the epiphenomenal consciousness which Huxley has boldly carried to its uttermost conclusions. I indicate here these possible conclusions, without discussing them. It is a question I prefer to leave in suspense; it seems to me that one can do nothing on this subject but form hypotheses. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 25: At the risk of being deemed too subtle, I ask whether we are conscious of a relation between objects, or whether that which occurs is not rather the perception of an object which has been modified in its nature by its relation with another object.] [Footnote 26: This conclusion may seem contradictory to that which I enunciated when studying the constitution of matter. I then asserted that we only know our sensations and not the excitants which produce them. But these sensations are matter; they are matter modified by other matter, viz. our nervous centres. We therefore take up very distinctly an opposite standpoint to the principle of _relativity_: in other terms, we reject the phenomenism of Berkeley.