540 Transactions. 



material world is resolved, is interpreted, in the hypothesis, as 

 the communication of states of consciousness from being to 

 being, or spirit to spirit. 



It is impossible within the limits of a short note to attempt 

 to work out the application of the hypothesis in further detail, 

 but enough has perhaps been stated to indicate the kind of 

 interpretation which it would give in each case to the detailed 

 results of physical science. 



The hypothesis is, it is believed, equally consistent with all 

 the results of mental science or psychology. The manner in 

 which it deals with the subject of personal identity has been 

 already very briefly indicated, and cannot be further gone into 

 in this note. The hypothesis, as a monistic one, in which all 

 the constituent elements of the brain are themselves seats of 

 consciousness and are in themselves beings of precisely the same 

 nature as that which is for the moment the principal seat of 

 consciousness, has, of course, an immense advantage over any 

 form of dualism, in which the substance of the brain is supposed 

 to be of a wholly different order of being from, and wholly in- 

 commensurable with, the substance or being of the soul. In 

 the monistic hypothesis here suggested the different elements 

 of consciousness may be supposed to be separately experienced 

 by elements of the ether within the different regions of the 

 cortex, and to be communicated through the intervening ele- 

 ments to the seat for the time being of the principal conscious- 

 ness, where they are together experienced as a whole. The 

 unity and co-ordination of the different elements of conscious- 

 ness, and the possibility of their being experienced in the princi- 

 pal seat of consciousness as a coherent whole, would be secured 

 by the communications taking place between the different regions 

 of the cortex through the nervous arcs of the higher levels. 



Speaking generally, the hypothesis is a monadology in which 

 the elements of the ether are the monads. They are not. how- 

 ever, cut off from one another as in the monadology of Leibniz. 

 On the contrary, every one of them is in immediate or mediate 

 communication with every other. The hypothesis may also be 

 said to be, in some sort, a unification of idealism and realism: 

 it is idealistic in that it supposes the existence of only one kind 

 of being — namely, conscious being or spirit; it is realistic in 

 that it supposes every single element of the (so-called) material 

 world to lie self-subsisting, to the same extent and in the same 

 si use, at all events, as the soul of man is self-subsisting — 

 the soul of man being, indeed, itself an element or elements of 

 the (so-called) material world. To what extent and in what 

 sense i iiv finite being can be said to be self-subsisting is a ques- 

 tion which the hypothesis leaves untouched. 



