To say this is not to materialise consciousness, but only to recognise the fact that the two primary opposites, consciousness and matter, are straightly bound together, are never apart, not even in the highest Being. Matter is limitation, and without limitation consciousness is not.
So far from materialising consciousness, it puts it as a concept in sharp antithesis to matter, but it recognises the fact that in an entity the one is not found without the other. The densest matter, the physical, has its core of consciousness; the gas, the stone, the metal, is living, conscious, aware. Thus oxygen becomes aware of hydrogen at a certain temperature, and rushes into combination with it.
Let us now look out of consciousness from within, and see the meaning of the phrase: “Matter is limitation”. Consciousness is the one Reality, in the fullest sense of that much-used phrase; it follows from this that any reality found anywhere is drawn from consciousness. Hence, everything which is thought, is.
That consciousness in which everything is, everything literally, “possible” as well as “actual” – actual being that which is thought of as existent by a separated consciousness in time and space, and possible all that which is not so being thought of at any period in time and any point in space—we call Absolute Consciousness.
It is the ALL, the ETERNAL, the INFINITE, the CHANGELESS. Consciousness, thinking time and space, and of all forms as existing in them in succession and in places, is the Universal Consciousness, the ONE, called by the Hindu the Saguna BRAHMAN—the ETERNAL with attributes—the PRATYAG-ATMA—the INNER SELF;—by the Christian, God; by the Parsi, HORMUZD; by the Musulman, ALLAH.
***Excerpt from Annie Wood Besant. A Study in Consciousness: A Contribution to the Science of Psychology