So the question naturally arises: if we can accept a purely inferential principle – which lacks any direct sensuous content – such as gravity, as a self-contained and self-sustaining principle, and accept it as science and the basis for scientific development, why can we not accept consciousness itself, the most intimate principle of experience, apparently both immediate and inferential, as even a basic principle, much less as self-contained, self-sustaining or independent, or as scientific in itself and a possible basis for scientific development? And yet, this is the pass we are in. We accept gravity, which has no immediate sensory content, as ‘hard’ science. But ‘consciousness’ lacks all inherent validity or standing from this supposedly ‘scientific’ perspective. We not only cannot accept consciousness as an independent principle, we basically cannot accept it at all, principle or no. We try to ascribe the function strictly to sensuous content at every turn.
            In other words, it would not only appear that we are confronting a bias, prejudice or prepossession masquerading as science, it is obvious that some form of essential bigotry is at work. And when we go back to the moment in history at which this fraudulent orientation begins, we can discover the cause. When we discuss the speculative presumption that science is based strictly on ‘sensory content’, we are harking back to the so-called English Empiricists. I would point out that there is no strict basis for the argument. Locke defines the sequence of sensation from the sensory nerve ending to the brain. But, like most subsequent ‘empiricists’, he makes a sudden leap from the brain to ‘the living and rational soul’ – his circumlocution for ‘consciousness’ – an alternate space for the world in which the sensations are assembled as ‘perceptions’ by a reactive – and therefore essentially passive – process. In fact, Locke assumes that the perceptions are, in essence, ‘reassembled’, as if the value were inherent in the sensory content itself. This last presumption is the key.
            This allows David Hume to play his shell game, a shell game logicians can apparently ignore, but legitimate empiricists cannot. On the one hand, he calls perceptions ‘representations’. On the other, he calls them ‘matters of fact’. But they cannot be both. Everything in consciousness is a ‘representation’. Thus, if perceptions of the external world are ‘representations’, they either have no more necessary validity than dreams or purely ideational forms, or the distinction in value between ‘perceptions’ and other ‘mind forms’ must be explained. But this is an arena Hume never enters into. In fact, Hume tells us at the outset what the prepossessions of his skepticism are. He says that he wants to determine whether ‘inference from experience’ can ever have the ‘validity’ of ‘numbers and matters of fact’, that is of mathematics and ‘direct’ perceptions of the world. He already assumes that ‘numbers and matters of fact’ have a distinct priority of value. And while we may have the ‘sense’ of that, it is incumbent on philosophy, precisely, to analyze that ‘sense’ and either establish it on a rational foundation or show its ersatz nature. He takes it for granted, largely on the ungrounded assumptions of his own skepticism, by which he aggressively edits Locke to suit his own purposes: Sensation as perception is immediate in consciousness, although consciousness itself does not exist. Therefore, consciousness is representation itself.
            Stated thus baldly, of course, the propositions would not stand, much less be considered as irrefutable. What he says is that ideas are the immediate offtakes of perceptual ‘representations’, which are therefore essentially immediate in consciousness. But consciousness has no standing. Therefore, consciousness is only the stream of representations. Where these representations are appearing is apparently not an issue to be considered. And thus there is essentially no such thing as ‘mind’ apart from this stream of representations. And while perceptions are immediate, and therefore ‘matters of fact’, we cannot impute an external ground upon which their validity is based, since the ‘external’ is an inference from experience and not a ‘matter of fact’. So we have the validity of the external, but no external. There is no ‘matter’.
            If Hume had been a true skeptic, he would have noticed the arbitrary prepossession inherent in his own ground. All he would have done, in that case, is refine the presentation of solipsism first articulated by George Berkeley. That is, if he had recognized that his assumption of the grounding or prior validity of ‘numbers and matters of fact’ could no more stand against his skeptical argument than any other aspect of experience, he would have taken us directly to a post-modernist nihilism. As it was, he replaced the religion of the church with the religion of science, which, in itself, is a highly non-scientific religion, whose primary content, apparently, is an aggressive atheism.

             The key is in Hume’s argument against consciousness. Hume shows himself to be the wonderfully sophomoric debater that he is by utilizing Locke’s language to achieve his point. Locke had spoken of consciousness as ‘the living and rational soul’. In his attack on ‘consciousness’, Hume never uses the word. He always uses a reduced reference to Locke. That is, rather than speaking of ‘consciousness’, Hume always refers to the function in terms of ‘soul’. ‘Who has ever seen the soul?’ he asks. (Silence in the room.) But if he had asked: ‘Who has ever seen consciousness?’ would he have been allowed the same lack of response?
            Somehow, at this moment, I am seeing my own consciousness. And it does not simply seem to be the reflection from which I am now writing this sentence. All of my present experience – which is simply to say all of my experience – seems fully imbued with my consciousness. And while to isolate and speak of consciousness, I necessarily have to step back in some sense to view both my experience and my witnessing as ‘my consciousness’, nevertheless that sense of consciousness permeates all I am and do.

             But consciousness is ‘soul’. That is, consciousness is the ambiguous principle as the ‘I’. At the time of Locke and Hume, the presumption was that the universe was strictly rational. Hume was willing to argue morality from emotion. But the subtext always was that God was largely unnecessary and therefore essentially irrelevant. Now legitimate scientists are willing to consider that the physical universe is wholly ambiguous, although the presumption is still that it can somehow be ‘rationalized’ in the global frame of its ambiguity. But the anti-religious or atheistic presumptive ground of ‘science’ remains. Because, if that ambiguity extended to the core of subjectivity, there is not only the possibility that the door opens once again toward the divine, there is an absolute likelihood. What is the nature of value? I do not create value; I experience it. Value is not in matter. And even if I could prove that ‘matter’ as a formal experiential mode were not in any sense determined by the function of consciousness, I could still not prove that matter is the source of value as I experience it. What objectivity shows is that matter and consciousness participate in value, but neither is the source.
            And this is a question that cannot go away in any ‘conscious mind’, that is, in the awareness of any reflective being. It is, in fact, the subtext of the subtext. ‘Science’ keeps trying to make it go away, because it always points to something ‘beyond science’. But it has never gone away. And it is quite clear that those who have persistently defined ‘science’ in this anti-religious way – who have consistently tried to deny consciousness itself in the name of ‘science’ – were fully conscious of the issue, if only in their attempts to so completely turn their backs on it that they had hoped to obscure it entirely from view.