276 REALITY 



Mind-Stuff. I will try to be as definite as I can as to the 

 glimpse of reality which we seem to have reached. Only 

 I am well aware that in committing myself to details 

 I shall probably blunder. Even if the right view has 

 here been taken of the philosophical trend of modern 

 science, it is premature to suggest a cut-and-dried 

 scheme of the nature of things. If the criticism is made 

 that certain aspects are touched on which come more 

 within the province of the expert psychologist, I must 

 admit its pertinence. The recent tendencies of science 

 do, I believe, take us to an eminence from which we 

 can look down into the deep waters of philosophy; and 

 if I rashly plunge into them,, it is not because I have 

 confidence in my powers of swimming, but to try to 

 show that the water is really deep. 



To put the conclusion crudely — the stuff of the world 

 is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, 

 I shall have to explain that by "mind" I do not here 

 exactly mean mind and by "stuff" I do not at all mean 

 stuff. Still this is about as near as we can get to the idea 

 in a simple phrase. The mind-stuff of the world is, of 

 course, something more general than our individual 

 conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not 

 altogether foreign to the feelings in our consciousness. 

 The realistic matter and fields of force of former 

 physical theory are altogether irrelevant — except in so 

 far as the mind-stuff has itself spun these imaginings. 

 The symbolic matter and fields of force of present-day 

 theory are more relevant, but they bear to it the same 

 relation that the bursar's accounts bear to the activity 

 of the college. Having granted this, the mental activity 

 of the part of the world constituting ourselves occasions 

 no surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge, 

 and we do not explain it away as something other than 



