m receives an illusive aid
from language; and both in philosophy and religion the imaginary figure
or association easily takes the place of real knowledge.

Again, there is the illusion of looking into our own minds as if our
thoughts or feelings were written down in a book. This is another figure
of speech, which might be appropriately termed 'the fallacy of the
looking-glass.' We cannot look at the mind unless we have the eye
which sees, and we can only look, not into, but out of the mind at
the thoughts, words, actions of ourselves and others. What we dimly
recognize within us is not experience, but rather the suggestion of an
experience, which we may gather, if we will, from the observation of the
world. The memory has but a feeble recollection of what we were saying
or doing a few weeks or a few months ago, and still less of what we
were thinking or feeling. This is one among many reasons why there is
so little self-knowledge among mankind; they do not carry with them
the thought of what they are or have been. The so-called 'facts of
consciousness' are equally evanescent; they are facts which nobody ever
saw, and which can neither be defined nor described. Of the three laws
of thought the first (All A = A) is an identical proposition--that is to
say, a mere word or symbol claiming to be a proposition: the two others
(Nothing can be A and not A, and Everything is either A or not A) are
untrue, because they exclude degrees and also the mixed modes and double
aspects under which truth is so often presented to us. To assert that
man is man is unmeaning; to say that he is free or necessary and cannot
be both is a half truth only. These are a few of the entanglements which
impede the natural course of human thought. Lastly, there is the fallacy
which lies still deeper, of regarding the individual mind apart from
the universal, or either, as a self-existent entity apart from the ideas
which are contained in them.

In ancient philosophies the analysis of the mind is still rudimentary
and imperfect. It naturally began with an effort to disengage the
universal from sense--this was the first lifting up of the mist. It
wavered between object and subject, passing imperceptibly from one or
Being to mind and thought. Appearance in the outward object was for a
time indistinguishable from opinion in the subject. At length mankind
spoke of knowing as well as of opining or perceiving. But when the word
'knowledge' was found how was