| For consciousness itself has always a degree, which may be lessened.* Consequently the faculty of being conscious may be diminished; and so with all other faculties. |
| The permanence of the soul, therefore, as an object of the internal sense, remains undemonstrated, nay, even indemonstrable. |
| Its permanence in life is evident, per se, inasmuch as the thinking being (as man) is to itself, at the same time, an object of the external senses. |
| But this does not authorize the rational psychologist to affirm, from mere conceptions, its permanence beyond life.*[2] |
| [*Footnote; Clearness is not, as logicians maintain, the consciousness of a representation. |
| For a certain degree of consciousness, which may not, however, be sufficient for recollection, is to be met with in many dim representations. |
| For without any consciousness at all, we should not be able to recognize any difference in the obscure representations we connect; as we really can do with many conceptions, such as those of right and justice, and those of the musician, who strikes at once several notes in improvising a piece of music. |
| But a representation is clear, in which our consciousness is sufficient for the consciousness of the difference of this representation from others. |
| If we are only conscious that there is a difference, but are not conscious of the difference--that is, what the difference is- the representation must be termed obscure. |
| There is, consequently, an infinite series of degrees of consciousness down to its entire disappearance.] |
| [*[2]Footnote; There are some who think they have done enough to establish a new possibility in the mode of the existence of souls, when they have shown that there is no contradiction in their hypotheses on this subject. |
| Such are those who affirm the possibility of thought--of which they have no other knowledge than what they derive from its use in connecting empirical intuitions presented in this our human life--after this life has ceased. |
| But it is very easy to embarrass them by the introduction of counter-possibilities, which rest upon quite as good a foundation. |
| Such, for example, is the possibility of the division of a simple substance into several substances; and conversely, of the coalition of several into one simple substance. |
| For, although divisibility presupposes composition, it does not necessarily require a composition of substances, but only of the degrees (of the several faculties) of one and the same substance. |
| Now we can cogitate all the powers and faculties of the soul--even that of consciousness--as diminished by one half, the substance still remaining. |
| In the same way we can represent to ourselves without contradiction, this obliterated half as preserved, not in the soul, but without it; and we can believe that, as in this case every. |
| thing that is real in the soul, and has a degree--consequently its entire existence--has been halved, a particular substance would arise out of the soul. |
| For the multiplicity, which has been divided, formerly existed, but not as a multiplicity of substances, but of every reality as the quantum of existence in it; and the unity of substance was merely a mode of existence, which by this division alone has been transformed into a plurality of subsistence. |
| In the same manner several simple substances might coalesce into one, without anything being lost except the plurality of subsistence, inasmuch as the one substance would contain the degree of reality of all the former substances. |
| Perhaps, indeed, the simple substances, which appear under the form of matter, might (not indeed by a mechanical or chemical influence upon each other, but by an unknown influence, of which the former would be but the phenomenal appearance), by means of such a dynamical division of the parent-souls, as intensive quantities, produce other souls, while the former repaired the loss thus sustained with new matter of the same sort. |