| But this degree of reality can become less and less through an infinite series of smaller degrees. |
| It follows, therefore, that this supposed substance--this thing, the permanence of which is not assured in any other way, may, if not by decomposition, by gradual loss (remissio) of its powers (consequently by elanguescence, if I may employ this expression), be changed into nothing. |
| For consciousness itself has always a degree, which may be lessened.* Consequently the faculty of being conscious may be diminished; and so with all other faculties. |
| The permanence of the soul, therefore, as an object of the internal sense, remains undemonstrated, nay, even indemonstrable. |
| Its permanence in life is evident, per se, inasmuch as the thinking being (as man) is to itself, at the same time, an object of the external senses. |
| But this does not authorize the rational psychologist to affirm, from mere conceptions, its permanence beyond life.*[2] |
| [*Footnote; Clearness is not, as logicians maintain, the consciousness of a representation. |
| For a certain degree of consciousness, which may not, however, be sufficient for recollection, is to be met with in many dim representations. |
| For without any consciousness at all, we should not be able to recognize any difference in the obscure representations we connect; as we really can do with many conceptions, such as those of right and justice, and those of the musician, who strikes at once several notes in improvising a piece of music. |
| But a representation is clear, in which our consciousness is sufficient for the consciousness of the difference of this representation from others. |
| If we are only conscious that there is a difference, but are not conscious of the difference--that is, what the difference is- the representation must be termed obscure. |
| There is, consequently, an infinite series of degrees of consciousness down to its entire disappearance.] |
| [*[2]Footnote; There are some who think they have done enough to establish a new possibility in the mode of the existence of souls, when they have shown that there is no contradiction in their hypotheses on this subject. |
| Such are those who affirm the possibility of thought--of which they have no other knowledge than what they derive from its use in connecting empirical intuitions presented in this our human life--after this life has ceased. |
| But it is very easy to embarrass them by the introduction of counter-possibilities, which rest upon quite as good a foundation. |
| Such, for example, is the possibility of the division of a simple substance into several substances; and conversely, of the coalition of several into one simple substance. |
| For, although divisibility presupposes composition, it does not necessarily require a composition of substances, but only of the degrees (of the several faculties) of one and the same substance. |
| Now we can cogitate all the powers and faculties of the soul--even that of consciousness--as diminished by one half, the substance still remaining. |
| In the same way we can represent to ourselves without contradiction, this obliterated half as preserved, not in the soul, but without it; and we can believe that, as in this case every. |
| thing that is real in the soul, and has a degree--consequently its entire existence--has been halved, a particular substance would arise out of the soul. |
| For the multiplicity, which has been divided, formerly existed, but not as a multiplicity of substances, but of every reality as the quantum of existence in it; and the unity of substance was merely a mode of existence, which by this division alone has been transformed into a plurality of subsistence. |