96 THE DOCTRINE OF ENERGY 



suggested to me primarily in my experience of my 

 own activity in which I recognise my power of 

 doing work a quantifiable and measurable thing, 

 homogeneous with the Energy in respect of which 

 Science states the relations and conditions of all 

 physical phenomena. My most incessant mental 

 act is that by which, on the analogy of my own 

 active experience, I refer all phenomena to the 

 underlying energetic system. This reference it is 

 which transforms sensation into perception ; and 

 the constant affirmation of this reference is the 

 great function of the synthetic mental activity 

 of the understanding, and is at once the origin 

 and explanation of that imperative mental tendency 

 which metaphysicians call the law of Causality. 



How, then, does this doctrine affect the theory 

 of the nature of Space ? 



If it be true that the world as my Presentment 

 consists in the transmutations occurring in that 

 particular part of the energetic system which 

 constitutes the real substratum of the brain, then 

 phenomena as a whole must arise in transmutation, 

 in a process of Becoming rather than in a state of 

 Being, and Space must be the content, the con- 

 dition, in which that process proceeds. The laws 

 of Space, therefore, are laws, so to speak, of motion, 

 not of position. The most absolutely still and 



