or we have it not in our power to ascertain, by any direct
process, what Consciousness told us at the time when its
revelations were in their pristine purity. It only offers
itself to our inspection, as it exists now, when those
original revelations are overlaid and buried under a
mountainous heap of acquired notions and perceptions.

'It seems to M. Cousin, that if we examine with care and
minuteness our present states of Consciousness,
distinguishing and defining every ingredient which we find
to enter into them--every element that we seem to recognize
as real, and cannot "by merely concentrating our attention
upon it analyze into anything simpler--we reach the ultimate
and primary truths, which are the sources of all our
knowledge, and which cannot be denied or doubted without
denying or doubting the evidence of Consciousness
itself--that is, the only evidence that there is for
anything. I maintain this to be a misconception of the
condition imposed on inquirers by the difficulties of
psychological investigation. To begin the inquiry at the
point where M. Cousin takes it up is, in fact, to beg the
question. For he must be aware, if not of the fact, at least
of the belief of his opponents, that the laws of the
mind--the Laws of Association, according to one class of
thinkers, the Categories of the Understanding, according to
another--are capable of creating, out of those data of
Consciousness which are uncontested, purely mental
conceptions, which become so identified in thought with all
our states of Consciousness, that _we seem, and cannot but
seem, to receive them by direct intuition_. For example, the
belief in matter in the opinion of these thinkers is, or at
least may be, thus produced:--

'"The proof that any of the alleged Universal Beliefs, or
Principles of Common Sense, are affirmations of
Consciousness--supposes two things: that the beliefs exist,
and that they cannot possibly have been acquired. The first
is, in most cases, undisputed; but the second is a subject
of inquiry which often taxes the utmost resources of
psychologists. Locke was therefore right in believing that
'the origin of our ideas' is the main stress of the problem
of mental science, and the subject which must be first
considered in formi