Now it is, of course, true that false Mysticism does attempt such an impossible feat as the thing at which Hermann is thus aiming. But, even here, the facts and problems are again misstated. Just now the object presented was everything, and the apprehending subject was nothing. Here, on the contrary, the apprehension by the subject is pressed to the degree of requiring the soul to remain throughout reflexly aware of its own processes. Already in 1798 Kant had, in full acceptance of the great distinction worked out by Leibniz in the years 1701-1709, but not published till 1765, declared: “We can be mediately conscious of an apprehension as to which we have no direct consciousness”; and “the field of our obscure apprehensions,--that is, apprehensions and impressions of which we are not directly conscious, although we can conclude without doubt that we have them,--is immeasurable, whereas clear apprehensions constitute but a very few points within the complete extent of our mental life.”[315] This great fact psychologists can now describe with greater knowledge and precision: yet the observations and analyses of Pierre Janet, William James, James Ward and others, concerning Subconsciousness, have but confirmed and deepened the Leibnizian-Kantian apprehensions. Without much dim apprehension, no clear perception; nothing is more certain than this. And it is certain, also, that this absence of reflex consciousness, of perceiving that we are apprehending, applies not only to impressions of sensible objects, or to apprehensions of realities inferior in richness, in interiority, to our own nature, but also, indeed especially, to apprehensions of realities superior, in dignity and profundity of organization, to our own constitution. When engrossed in a great landscape of Turner, the Parthenon sculptures, a sonata of Beethoven, Dante’s _Paradiso_; or when lost in the contemplation of the seemingly endless spaces of the heavens, or of the apparently boundless times of geology; or when absorbed in the mysterious greatness of Mind, so incommensurable with matter, and of Personality, so truly presupposed in all these appreciations yet so transcendent of even their collectivity--we are as little occupied with the facts of our engrossment, our self-oblivion, our absorption, or with the aim and use of such immensely beneficial self-oblivion, as we are, in our ordinary, loosely-knit states, occupied with the impression which, nevertheless, is being produced upon our senses and mind by some small insect or slight ray of light to which we are not giving our attention, or which may be incapable of impressing us sufficiently to be thus attended to and clearly perceived.[316] And, as in the case of these under-impressions, so in that of those over-impressions, we can often judge, as to their actual occurrence and fruitfulness, only from their after-effects, although this indirect proof will, in each case, be of