THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE UNIVERSE 331 



external objects. In other words unless groups of my feelings had 

 draped themselves about a supposed material wall, and others about 

 a supposed material nurse, and so on, they would not have cohered at 

 all. It was the hypothesis, which gradually and inevitably, owing 

 to the constitution of my mind, I formed of the existence of external 

 objects that gave them meaning and order, and, therefore, coherence. 

 Otherwise my memory could no more have held them together 

 than it now can the shifting colours of a kaleidoscope. Though 

 all the evidence indicates that our memories are particularly re- 

 tentive when we are young, 1 yet I can remember nothing of what 

 happened to me during early infancy. It is hard to explain this 

 fact except by the hypothesis that my world was then for me a 

 very complex kind of kaleidoscope that furnished not only 

 sensations of sight, but multitudes of other sensations as well, which, 

 because they were then incoherent, could not be remembered. It is, 

 therefore, the coherence of my sensations about supposed external 

 objects that has rescued me from chaos. 



560. To illustrate by an example how my * material ' world was 

 created : a little while ago I linked together a group of entirely 

 dissimilar feelings (visual, tactile, etc.), by conceiving them as 

 properties of a sheet B of paper. This group I then linked with 

 other groups, other sheets of paper, the recollection of which had 

 dwelt more or less vaguely in memory, and by thinking about 

 which I had reached the general conception of a sheet of paper as 

 distinguished from perceptions and recollection of particular sheets 

 of paper. The economy of thought achieved by means of such 

 general conceptions is very great; thus I do not now need to 

 remember thousands of individual sheets of paper, but only a con- 

 ceptual one which is my notion of that kind of object. Now, again, 

 as I sit thinking, I link up the group of feelings which represents 

 to me the sheet of paper with another group which represents the 

 table on which it is lying. The compound group thus constituted, 

 forms part of a more highly compounded group which represents 

 the room in which I am. That, yet again, is linked with memories 

 of the room, with memories of the house and its inmates, the street, 

 the town, the surrounding country, the whole of my world. So 

 the universe as conceived by me was constructed. Very early a 

 division was made between feelings which were recognized as feel- 

 ings (e.g. emotions and recollections) and groups of feelings which 

 were supposed to be material objects in the external world. Only 

 long after manhood was reached did I begin to suspect that I 



1 See 652. 



