302 NATURAL SCIENCE. 



JUNE, 



different plane of investigation from that which deals with the 

 phenomena themselves. And the introduction of results obtained 

 on one plane of investigation among the results obtained on other 

 planes is apt to be confusing, if not misleading. 



We pass now from the object to the " eject." To some of our 

 readers the term " eject " may be unfamiliar. Suppose that my 

 neighbour and I are both looking at some object, say my Ammonite 

 letter-weight. I have a percept ; and I have every reason to suppose 

 that he too has a similar percept. But his percept can never be an 

 object to me ; nor my percept an object to him. His states of con- 

 sciousness are for me, as mine are for him, in Clifford's phrase 

 " ejects." Clifford himself puts it shortly thus : " When I come to 

 the conclusion that yoii 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." 

 This, of course, was no new discovery of Clifford's, but he coined the 

 convenient word " eject," by which each of us may denote our 

 neighbour's consciousness. Whether we use Clifford's word or not 

 matters comparatively little ; but few deny the fact which suggested 

 to him the necessity for such a word, namely, that my neighbour's 

 consciousness can never be to me an object of perception or produce 

 in me a direct sense-impression. That is reserved for Professor 

 Pearson. " To this [the statement I have quoted from Clifford] 

 it may be replied," he says, " that were our physiological know- 

 ledge and surgical manipulation sufficiently complete, it is con- 

 ceivable that it would be possible for me to be conscious of 

 your feelings, to recognise your consciousness as a direct sense- 

 impression ; let us say, for example, by connecting the cortex of your 

 brain with that of mine through a suitable commissure of nerve- 

 substance." Mr. Pearson refutes himself, however, on the very next 

 page, when he says : " Psychical effects are, without doubt, excited 

 by physical action, and our only assumption is the not unreasonable 

 one that a suitable pliysical link might transfer an appreciation of 

 psychical activity from one psychical centre to another." In other 

 words, the recognition of one's neighbour's consciousness, in the 

 supposed case, is not direct but through the intervention of a physical 

 nexus. But there is no difference in principle between the excitation 

 of the sensorium through such a supposed physical link and the 

 excitation of the sensorium through the known physical links involved 

 in oral communication. No one questions that the molecular vibra- 

 tions of one brain may, through physical links, give rise to similar 

 molecular vibrations in another brain, and that the consciousness 

 which accompanies the one may run parallel with the consciousness 

 which accompanies the other. But this is something wholly different 

 from my recognising your consciousness "as a direct sense- 

 impression." 



