We will pass by the utter incompatibility of such a law--if law it may
be called, which would itself be a slave of chances--with even that
appearance of rationality forced upon us by the outward phaenomena of
human conduct, abstracted from our own consciousness. We will agree to
forget this for the moment, in order to fix our attention on that
subordination of final to efficient causes in the human being, which
flows of necessity from the assumption, that the will and, with the
will, all acts of thought and attention are parts and products of this
blind mechanism, instead of being distinct powers, the function of
which it is to control, determine, and modify the phantasmal chaos of
association. The soul becomes a mere ens logicum; for, as a real
separable being, it would be more worthless and ludicrous than the
Grimalkins in the cat-harpsichord, described in the Spectator. For
these did form a part of the process; but, to Hartley's scheme, the
soul is present only to be pinched or stroked, while the very squeals
or purring are produced by an agency wholly independent and alien. It
involves all the difficulties, all the incomprehensibility (if it be
not indeed, os emoige dokei, the absurdity), of intercommunion between
substances that have no one property in common, without any of the
convenient consequences that bribed the judgment to the admission of
the Dualistic hypothesis. Accordingly, this caput mortuum of the
Hartleian process has been rejected by his followers, and the
consciousness considered as a result, as a tune, the common product of
the breeze and the harp though this again is the mere remotion of one
absurdity to make way for another, equally preposterous. For what is
harmony but a mode of relation, the very esse of which is percipi?--an
ens rationale, which pre-supposes the power, that by perceiving
creates it? The razor's edge becomes a saw to the armed vision; and