Note note 4 — ANALYSIS OF THE PHENOMENA OF THE HUMAN MIND James Mill

4 The author is here endeavouring to express the most fundamental fact of the consciousness—the necessity of change, or transition from one state to another in order to our being conscious. He approaches very near to, without exactly touching, the inference that all consciousness, all sensation, all knowledge must be of doubles; the state passed from and the state passed to, are equally recognised by us. Opening the eyes to the light, for the first time, we know a contrast,—a present light, a past privation—but for the one we should not have known the other. Any single thing is unknowable by us; its relative opposite is a part of its very existence.

In a former page it is stated that relative names are one of the conveniences of epitomising. This is a narrow view to take of them. They are an essential part of language; they are demanded by the intrinsic relativity of all nameable things. If we have a thing called “light,” we have also another thing but for which light could not be known by us, “dark.” It is expedient to have names for both elements of the mutually dependent couple. And so everywhere. Language would be insufficient for its purposes if it did not provide the means of expressing the correlative (called also the negative) of every thing named.—B.