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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



the headquarters of the Arab — Egypt and Zan- 

 zibar. The opinion that the interior of Africa 

 has been thrown open to civilization and trade 

 by Mr. Stanley's daring navigation and descent 



of the Congo River, is one which requires to be 

 supported by much stronger evidence than we at 

 present possess before it can be adopted. — Edin- 

 burgh Review. 



ON THE NATUBE OF THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES. 



By W. KINGDON CLIFFOED. 



I. — MEANING OF THE INDIVIDUAL OBJECT. 



MY feelings arrange and order themselves in 

 two distinct ways. There is the internal 

 or subjective order, in which sorrow succeeds the 

 hearing of bad news, or the abstraction "dog" 

 symbolizes the perception of many different dogs. 

 And there is the external or objective order, in 

 which the sensation of letting go is followed by 

 the sight of a falling object and the sound of its 

 fall. The objective order, qua order, is treated 

 by physical science, which investigates the uni- 

 form relations of objects in time and space. Here 

 the word object (or phenomenon) is taken merely 

 to mean a group of my feelings, which persists as 

 a group in a certain manner ; for I am at present 

 considering only the objective order of my feel- 

 ings. The object, then, is a set of changes in 

 my consciousness, and not anything out of it. 

 Here is as yet no metaphysical doctrine, but only 

 a fixing of the meaning of a word. We may 

 subsequently find reason to infer that there is 

 something which is not object, but which corre- 

 sponds in a certain way with the object ; this will 

 be a metaphysical doctrine, and neither it nor its 

 denial is involved in the present determination of 

 meaning. But the determination must be taken 

 as extending to all those inferences which are 

 made by science in the objective order. If I 

 hold that there is hydrogen in the sun, I mean 

 that if I could get some of it in a bottle, and 

 explode it with half its volume of oxygen, I 

 should get that group of possible sensations 

 which we call " water." The inferences of phys- 

 ical science are all inferences of my real or pos- 

 sible feelings; inferences of something actually 

 or potentially in my consciousness, not of any- 

 thing outside it. 



II. — DISTINCTION OF OBJECT AND EJECT. 



There are, however, some inferences which 

 are profoundly different from those of physical 

 science. When I come to the conclusion that 



you are conscious, and that there are objects in 

 your consciousness similar to those in mine, I am 

 not inferring any actual or possible feelings of 

 my own, but your feelings, which are not, and 

 cannot by any possibility become, objects in 

 my consciousness. The complicated processes 

 of your body and the motions of your brain and 

 nervous system, inferred from evidence of an- 

 atomical researches, are all inferred as things 

 possibly visible to me. However remote the in- 

 ference of physical science, the thing inferred is 

 always a part of me, a possible set of changes in 

 my consciousness bound up in the objective order 

 with other known changes. But the inferred ex- 

 istence of your feelings, of objective groupings 

 among them similar to those among my feelings, 

 and of a subjective order in many respects 

 analogous to my own — these inferred existences 

 are in the very act of inference thrown out of my 

 consciousness, recognized as outside of it, as not 

 being a part of me. I propose, accordingly, to 

 call those inferred existences ejects, things thrown 

 out of my consciousness, to distinguish them 

 from objects, things presented in my conscious- 

 ness, phenomena. It is to be noticed that there 

 is a set of changes of my consciousness symbolic 

 of the eject, which may be called my conception of 

 you ; it is (I think) a rough picture of the whole 

 aggregate of my consciousness, under imagined 

 circumstances like yours ; qua group of my feel- 

 ings, this conception is like the object in sub- 

 stance and constitution, but differs from it in im- 

 plying the existence of something that is not 

 itself, but corresponds to it, namely, of the eject. 

 The existence of the object, whether perceived 

 or inferred, carries with it a group of beliefs ; 

 these are always beliefs in the future sequence of 

 certain of my feelings. The existence of this 

 table, for example, as an object in my conscious- 

 ness, carries with it the belief that if I climb up 

 on it I shall be able to walk about on it as if it 

 But the existence of my con- 



were the ground 





