t sentience is a
sort of absolute; it is something which certainly exists. The first
Cartesian axiom applies to it, and to feel, even doubtfully, that
feeling existed would be to posit its existence. The science that
describes sentience describes at least a part of existence. Yet this
self-grounding of consciousness is a suspicious circumstance: it renders
it in one sense the typical reality and in another sense perhaps the
sorriest illusion.

[Sidenote: Sentience is representable only in fancy]

"Reality" is an ambiguous term. If we mean by it the immediate, then
sentience would be a part if not the whole of reality; for what we mean
by sentience or consciousness is the immediate in so far as we contain
it, and whatever self-grounded existence there may be elsewhere can be
conceived by us only mythically and on that analogy, as if it were an
extension or variation of sentience. Psychology would then be knowledge
of reality, for even when consciousness contains elaborate thoughts that
might be full of illusions, psychology takes them only as so much
feeling, and in that capacity they are real enough. At the same time,
while our science terminates upon mere feeling, it can neither discover
nor describe that feeling except in terms of something quite different;
and the only part of psychology that perhaps penetrates to brute
sentience is the part that is not scientific. The knowledge that science
reaches about absolute states of mind is relative knowledge; these
states of mind are approached from without and are defined by their
surrounding conditions and by their ideal objects. They are known by
being enveloped in processes of which they themselves are not aware.
Apart from this setting, the only feeling known is that which is
endured. After the fact, or before, or from any other point of vantage,
it cannot be directly revealed; at best it may be divined and
re-enacted. Even this possible repetition would not constitute knowledge
unless the imaginative reproduction were identified with or attributed
to some natural fact; so that an adventitious element would always
attach to any recognised feeling, to any feeling reported to another
mind. It could not be known at all unless something were known about it,
so that it might not pass, as otherwise it would, for a mere ingredient
of present sentience.

It is precisely by virtue of this adventitious element that the
re-enacted feeling takes its place in nature and becomes a