this disproves its having an origin. But this is an attempt to prove
something not proved by something else that is equally unproved;
comparable to a man blind from birth undertaking to guide another blind
man! You have no right to maintain the non-existence of the antecedent
non-existence of consciousness on the ground that there is nothing to
make us apprehend that non-existence; for there is something to make us
apprehend it, viz. consciousness itself!--But how can consciousness at
the time when it is, make us apprehend its own previous non-existence
which is contradictorily opposed to it?--Consciousness, we rejoin, does
not necessarily constitute as its objects only what occupies the same
time with itself; were it so it would follow that neither the past nor
the future can be the object of consciousness. Or do you mean that there
is an absolute rule that the Antecedent non-existence of consciousness,
if proved, must be contemporaneous with consciousness? Have you then, we
ask, ever observed this so as to be able to assert an absolute rule? And
if it were observed, that would prove the existence of previous
non-existence, not its negation!--The fact, however, is that no person
in his senses will maintain the contemporaneous existence of
consciousness and its own antecedent non-existence. In the case of
perceptive knowledge originating from sensation, there is indeed this
limitation, that it causes the apprehension of such things only as are
actually present at the same time. But this limitation does not extend
to cognitions of all kinds, nor to all instruments of knowledge; for we
observe that remembrance, inference, and the magical perception of Yogis
apprehend such things also as are not present at the time of
apprehension. On this very point there rests the relation connecting the
means of knowledge with their objects, viz. that the former are not
without the latter. This does not mean that the instrument of knowledge
is connected with its object in that way that it is not without
something that is present at the time of cognition; but rather that the