Now, if the consciousness of an "inscrutable power" is not the "inscrutable power" itself; if the existence of such a "power" does not mean simply its existence in consciousness; if the phenomena in which, it is assumed, a "power" is manifested, are to be kept separate in thought from the "power," so that we shall be in no danger of confounding a consciousness of certain phenomena with consciousness of an "incomprehensible power;" if our "consciousness of the unconditioned" is to be kept in mind as signifying merely our "unconditioned consciousness," and an "ever-present sense of real existence" as signifying only an ever-present sense of "raw material" in consciousness; then it is high time that these sentences and all such as these be re-written with some regard for lucidity, accuracy and consistency. How can a reader help confounding things when he is thus taught by the very man whose business it is to distinguish between them? The blind led by the blind is a cheerful spectacle compared with this.
Nothing can be more evident than that the man who has abandoned his original unreflective belief in the singleness of the perceived object, and has come to believe in it as having one or more "external" correlates, should keep distinctly in mind that an immediate and a mediate object are, by hypothesis, two distinct things: that he has never had any direct experience whatever save of the one; and that all distinctions that he makes with regard to the other, the very notions of its existence, reality, and externality, have been drawn from the sphere of the immediate and carried over to it in thought. And he should never allow himself to forget, that, when he says he has passed in thought from the immediate to the mediate object, he cannot mean literally that his thought is now occupied directly upon this "external" thing--that it is itself present to mind. He should remember that he can only mean that he has such an experience as the following:
He has in mind the immediate object, and a mental picture of a duplicate of this standing in a causal relation to it and represented by it; or, he has (if a Lockian), in addition to these two, a third highly vague and indefinite mental image (the idea of "substance"), which he connects with the image just described, as he has connected that with the immediate object; or (if a Kantian), he has in mind the immediate object, and, connected directly with that, such a vague image as has just been described. This is what he actually has in mind so far as _objects_ are concerned. He does not, however, merely recognize the existence in his mind of these different images in their relations to each other, but he looks upon this mental arrangement as somehow justified by experience and embodying truth.