observe ourselves observing, or observe ourselves reasoning: and if we
could, attention to this reflex operation would annihilate its object,
by stopping the process observed.

There is little need for an elaborate refutation of a fallacy respecting
which the only wonder is that it should impose on any one. Two answers
may be given to it. In the first place, M. Comte might be referred to
experience, and to the writings of his countryman M. Cardaillac and our
own Sir William Hamilton, for proof that the mind can not only be
conscious of, but attend to, more than one, and even a considerable
number, of impressions at once.[12] It is true that attention is
weakened by being divided; and this forms a special difficulty in
psychological observation, as psychologists (Sir William Hamilton in
particular) have fully recognised; but a difficulty is not an
impossibility. Secondly, it might have occurred to M. Comte that a fact
may be studied through the medium of memory, not at the very moment of
our perceiving it, but the moment after: and this is really the mode in
which our best knowledge of our intellectual acts is generally acquired.
We reflect on what we have been doing, when the act is past, but when
its impression in the memory is still fresh. Unless in one of these
ways, we could not have acquired the knowledge, which nobody denies us
to have, of what passes in our minds. M. Comte would scarcely have
affirmed that we are not aware of our own intellectual operations. We
know of our observings and our reasonings, either at the very time, or
by memory the moment after; in either case, by direct knowledge, and not
(like things done by us in a state of somnambulism) merely by their
results. This simple fact destroys the whole of M. Comte's argument.
Whatever we are directly aware of, we can directly observe.

And what Organon for the study of "the moral and intellectual functions"