[Footnote 29: We think spontaneously of the general and the necessary. It is this which serves as a basis for the suggestion and the catchword (_reclame_), and it explains how minds of slender culture always tend towards absolute assertions and hasty generalisations.] CHAPTER VII DEFINITION OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS--THE SEPARABILITY OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS FROM ITS OBJECT--DISCUSSION OF IDEALISM One last question suggests itself with regard to the consciousness. In what measure is it separable from the object? Do the consciousness and its object form two things or only one? Under observation these two terms constantly show themselves united. We experience a sensation and have consciousness of it; it is the same fact expressed in two different ways. All facts of our perception thus present themselves, and they are one. But our reason may outstrip our observation. We are able to make a distinction between the two elements _being_ and _being perceived_. This is not an experimental but an ideological distinction, and an abstraction that language makes easy. Can we go further, and suppose one of the parts thus analysed capable of existing without the other? Can sensation exist as physical expression, as an object; without being illuminated by the consciousness? Can the consciousness exist without having an object? Let us first speak of the existence of the object when considered as separated from the consciousness. The problem is highly complicated. It has sometimes been connected with the idealist thesis according to which the object of consciousness, being itself a modality of the consciousness, cannot exist apart from it--that is to say, outside the periods in which it is perceived. It would therefore result from this that this separation between existence and perception might be made, when it is admitted (contrary to the idealist hypothesis) that the object perceived is material and the consciousness which perceives it mental. In this case, it will be thought, there is no link of solidarity between the consciousness and its continuity. But I am not of that opinion. The union of the consciousness and its object is one of fact, which presents itself outside any hypothesis on the nature of the object. It is observation which demonstrates to us that we must perceive an object to be assured of its existence; the reason, moreover, confirms the necessity of this condition, which remains true whatever may be the "stuff" of the object. Having stated this, the question is simply to know whether this observation of fact should be generalised or not. We may, it seems to me, decline to generalise it without falling into a contradiction in terms. It may be conceived that the objects which we are looking at continue to exist, without change, during the moments when we have lost sight of them. This seems reasonable enough, and is the opinion of "common" sense.[30]