Some Cardinal Points in Knowledge #251584

Places. It is the nature of 'consciousness to be a knowing; it is the genesis of consciousness that, in Man at any rate, is known, because discovered, to be dependent on real conditions of existence. And it is the analysis of the nature of consciousness which enables and compels us to draw this distinction, as well as that between the two orders, of knowledge and of existence, themselves. Man's conscious ness has not to provide for its own genesis; it is not known a priori as creative; it has only to provide, in its metaphysical department, for understanding, so far as it can, its own nature and genesis, these conceptions having been arrived at by experience. In its nature, philosophy is a knowing. That knowing and existing should follow opposite time-directions is no contradiction, even if they coincide in occupying the same empirical portions of time-duration, in which no time-direction, and therefore no difference of time-directions, is perceivable. We now see that, when we think of an empirical present member of the stream of consciousness as moving from past to present, we are thinking of it as an existent, and when we think of it as moving from present to past we are thinking of it as a knowing. The perception or thought of it as an existent is the subjective aspect of it as an existent; the perception or thought of it as a knowing is the perception or thought of it as the evidence, and the sole evidence, that is, the subjective aspect, of anything and everything whatever.