No dogmatic teaching can ever, except by accident, fully explain to man the true nature of mind; and { 91} only in proportion as man becomes enlightened by extension of new scientific knowledge, especially in physiology, will he be able to view himself in a true aspect apart from his consciousness. Science penetrates deeper than metaphysical speculation, into the nature of mental action, chiefly because metaphysics deals only with old ideas, whilst science furnishes us with new experience and therefore with new conceptions and wider evidence.
Fallacies are very prevalent, every subject of human study is liable to a very large class of errors arising from the extremely imperfect state of our knowledge, and in very few subjects is our ignorance as great as in that of mental and moral phenomena. Every different subject of study also, has, in consequence of its special peculiarities, its own peculiar class of fallacies, into which the student of it is likely to be led, unless he is previously guarded against them. In accordance with this truth, the study of man's nature, especially the mental and moral portions, is particularly liable to a class of errors arising from the circumstance, that the phenomena to be observed and the observing power are intimately connected together, each influencing and disturbing the other. The obstacles to our arriving at truth in the study of mental and moral actions, are greater and more frequent, the more nearly and intimately related the phenomena to be observed and contemplated, are to the observing and contemplating faculty, or rather to the contemplative action. When the two mental { 92} actions are extremely intimate, as when attention is directed to the action of will (which is itself a conscious act of attention) undisturbed thought becomes very difficult; and when further, the contemplative faculty attempts to contemplate itself, as when consciousness attempts to observe consciousness, in order to define it, the attempt results in almost complete failure, probably because the two actions (observing and being observed) being opposite in kind, cannot coexist at the same time in the same structure. Knowledge of the exact nature of consciousness therefore, will probably only be arrived at by indirect means, when physiological and other knowledge is sufficiently advanced.