Excerpt from Some Cardinal Points in Knowledge 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. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.