Clearly the present volume will not aim to be a system. But it does profess not to forget the initial quest of philosophy, and toward this goal it seeks to indicate some little way of advance. Its scope is limited, for it proposes only to give a consistent account, a definition, of one very common yet perplexing feature of the universe — consciousness. Of course, this has been defined many times before, and much discussed, yet so often without consistency and so strikingly without agreement that the last word, very obviously, has by no means been said.