No point can be fixed either in the flux of time or in the imaginary process from ‘without’ to ‘within’ the mind, on the one side of which can be placed ‘real existence,’ on the other the ‘mere idea.’ It is only because Locke unawares defines to himself the ‘actual sensation’ as representative of a real essence, of which, however, according to him, as itself unknown, the presence is merely inferred from the sensation, that the ‘actual sensation’ itself is saved from the limbo of nominal essence, to which ideas, as abstract or in the mind, are consigned. Only, again, so far as it is thus illogically saved, are we entitled to that distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘things of the mind,’ which Locke once for all fixed for English philosophy. ... which is to make the real an abstract residuum of consciousness. 86. By this time we are familiar with the difficulties which this antithesis has in store for a philosophy which yet admits that it is only in the mind or in relation to consciousness--in one word, as ‘ideas’--that facts are to be found at all, while by the ‘mind’ it understands an abstract generalization from the many minds which severally are born and grow, sleep and wake, with each of us. The antithesis itself, like every other form in which the impulse after true knowledge finds expression, implies a distinction between the seeming and the real; or between that which exists for the consciousness of the individual and that which really exists. But outside itself consciousness cannot get. It is there that the real must, at any rate, manifest itself, if it is to be found at all. Yet the original antithesis between the mind and its unknown opposite still prevails, and in consequence that alone which, though indeed in the mind, is yet given to it by no act of its own, is held to represent the real. This is the notion which dominates Locke. He strips from the formed content of consciousness all that the mind seems to have done for itself, and the abstract residuum, that of which the individual cannot help being conscious at each moment of his existence, is or ‘reports’ the real, in opposition to the mind’s creation. This is Feeling; or more strictly--since it exists, and whatever does so must exist as one in a number (Book II. chap. vii. sec. 7)--it is the multitude of single feelings, ‘each perishing the moment it begins’ (Book II. chap, xxvii. sec. 2), from which all the definiteness that comes of composition and relation must be supposed absent. Thus, in trying to get at what shall be the mere fact in detachment from mental accretions, Locke comes to what is still consciousness, but the merely indefinite in consciousness. He seeks the real and finds the void. Of the real as outside consciousness nothing can be said; and of that again within consciousness, which is supposed to represent it, nothing can be said. Ground of distinction between actual sensation and ideas in the mind is itself a thing of the mind.