Chapter 22

Third psychological law: the absence of consciousness

1479. We know nothing except the object of thought (idea) or what our spirit says about the object of thought (word).When the object of thought is ourselves, or what is or what happens in us, we know ourselves, or what is or what happens in us. This kind of knowledge is called 'consciousness'.
Consciousness differs from feeling . The former is knowledge and has the duality proper to knowledge (the knower and the thing known, as separable entia). The latter is simple; it has only the duality, proper to itself, by which two correlative terms are distinguished, such that one cannot be thought of as an ens if separated from the other.

1480. As long as the object of the human spirit is ideal-infinite being alone, the spirit has no consciousness of itself because both it and what happens in it have not yet become an object of its attention.(283)
Consciousness therefore is produced by attention directed to oneself. The human principle, which is afterwards called myself , must attract its own attention to itself.

1481. But the human principle is moved to attend only through need , which we define as: 'The instinct to complete an action already begun, that is, the instinct for completing an activity already in motion.'

1482. All human activity begins to move by means of its real term, as I have said. Hence, only when a real term has been added to the intellective principle, can the principle be moved to focus on itself and form consciousness. Granted the conditions for forming consciousness, we can separate ourselves positively from the ideal object and know ourselves as a subject in contradistinction to the object.

1483. There is therefore this difference between our human initial state, anterior to all development, and the state in which we are conscious of ourselves - the difference, I mean, when we distinguish ideal being from self. In our initial state, we know only ideal being, not ourselves. We do not confuse ideal being with ourselves because we do not know OURSELVES; OURSELF is not yet formed. We cannot distinguish it, because one thing cannot be distinguished from another without knowledge of both.
In the state of consciousness, we know ideal being and know ourselves as a subject opposed to this object; we thus distinguish ourselves by a positive act.

1484. We can therefore assert that to know without consciousness is a psychological law of the spirit, and that consciousness originates in the spirit solely as a result of real stimuli which draw the spirit into action.

Notes

(283) Contrary to the truth of the fact, Spinoza and the German philosophers claim that human beings are always conscious to themselves of all that happens in them.