imply lifts his eyebrows.
The fact has no business to be there! It signifies nothing!

Why this reversal of position? First, because, if consciousness be
allowed, free-will must be admitted; since the universal consciousness
is that of freedom to choose. But there is a larger reason. In
accordance with his general notions, personality must be degraded,
denuded, impoverished,--that so the individual may lie passive in the
arms of that society whose laws he is ambitious to expound. Having
robbed the soul of choice, he now deprives it of sight; having denied
that it is an originating source of will, he now makes the complementary
denial, that it is a like source of knowledge; having first made it
helpless, he now proceeds to make it senseless. And, indeed, the two
denials belong together. If it be true that the soul is helpless, pray
let us have some kind drug to make it senseless also. Nature has dealt
thus equally with the stone; and surely she must design a like equality
in her dealings with man. Power and perceiving she will either give
together, or together withhold.

But how does our author support this denial? By pointing to the great
varieties in the outcome of consciousness. There is no unity, he says,
in its determinations: one believes this, another that, a third somewhat
different from both; and the faith that one is ready to die for, another
is ready to kill him for. And true it is that the diversities of human
belief are many and great; let not the fact be denied nor diminished.

But does such diversity disprove a fundamental unity? All modern science
answers, No. How much of outward resemblance is there between a fish
and a philosopher? Is not the difference here as wide as the widest
unlikenesses in human belief? Yet Comparative Anatomy, with none to deny
its right, includes philosopher and fish in one category: they both
belong to the vertebrate sub-kingdom. See what vast dissimilarities are
included in the unity of this vertebrate structure: creatures that swim,
creep, walk, fly; creatures with two feet, with four feet, with no feet,
with feet and hands, with hands only, with neither feet nor hands;
creatures that live in air only, or in water only, or that die at once
in water or air; creatures, in fine, more various and diverse than
imagination, before the fact, could conceive. Yet, throughout this
astonishing, inconceivable variety, science walks in steady perception
of a unity extending far toward d