[5] The reader may recognise in this argument that of Driesch’s _Three Windows into the Absolute_. Even if we do surrender ourselves to phenomenalism and try to believe that all that exists is our own consciousness, the fact of our duration would suggest to us that this present consciousness is not all. Our reality is not only that which is present in our minds now, but all that was ever present in our mind. All that we have ever thought and done persists and forms our conscious and unconscious experience. This past of ours is something that is ever being added to, or becoming incorporated with, our present state of consciousness; and if it is something other than that which we now perceive and conceptualise, it is something that has an existence of its own. We must believe that there is something that we perceive, and not that we merely perceive. For the phases of our immediate givenness, that is, those things which were present in our minds from moment to moment of the past were connected together and had direction, and this direction was something that could not be influenced by our will, and may even have been contrary to our will. Something that is very hot always cools, a wheel that is revolving of itself always comes to a stop, a pendulum ceases to swing, a stone that is rolling down a hill continues to roll. Let us look back at a fire that was going out: it is now nearly dead; let us start a pendulum to swing and then go away: when we come back the pendulum is still swinging but the amplitude of its vibrations is now less than it was; let us look away from the stone that was falling: when we look again it is still falling but it is not where it was. In all our givenness, in all the phenomena that we perceive, there is something that is determined and unequivocal, something that goes its own way apart from our consciousness of it. Above all, we have the conviction of absoluteness in our sense of personal identity. We, that is our Ego, are something that endures, and we can trace no beginning to our identity, and we have no intuition that it will cease to exist. Our Ego is now the same Ego that it was in the past, and round it something has accumulated--the memories of our former perceptions, and the habits that these have engendered. Did our Ego create this from itself? Was it not rather a centre of action which, residing in an existence other than itself--the absolute which we call the universe--modified that existence and continually acquired new relationships to it? CHAPTER II THE ORGANISM AS A MECHANISM