290 NATURE AND MAN. 



kind in general is in accord, can be disproved, save by the con- 

 tradiction afforded by some other primary cognition of superior 

 validity. For, as has been truly said by John S. Mill, "feeling 

 " and thought are much more real than anything else ; they are 

 " the only things which we directly know to be real." * We know 

 nothing about matter, as Berkeley demonstrated, except by inference 

 from the manner in which its states affect our consciousness ; 

 " itself we do not perceive ; we are not conscious of it." And 

 hence those so-called "experiences," on the basis afforded by 

 which the whole fabric of physical science is built up, being really 

 nothing else than " assumptions to account for our sensations " 

 (Mill), can only be accepted as valid, in so far as they accord with 

 those primal cognitions which we cannot dissociate from our own 

 consciousness of personal agency. Thus, for example, when 

 Professor Clifford affirms (loc. cit.) that no interaction can possibly 

 take place between bodily and mental states, the physical facts 

 going along by themselves, and the mental facts going along by 

 themselves, on two utterly different platforms, — he calls upon us 

 to receive as the indubitable teaching of science, the result of a 

 process of reasoning based upon one set of experiences alone ; 

 notwithstanding that this is completely contradicted by another 

 set, which, as appealing much more directly to our own conscious- 

 ness, has a stronger claim upon our acceptance. For all mankind 

 — except philosophers of Professor Clifford's school — accept it as 

 a fact, " based on the normal experience of healthy men," that, 

 running a pin into one's flesh is the cause of that mental state 

 which we call pain (Huxley, op. cit. p. 574) ; a certain neurosis, or 

 molecular change in the nervous system, producing a corresponding 

 psychosis, or affection of the consciousness. And, conversely, since 

 all mankind — except the followers of Professors Huxley and 

 Clifford — accept it as a fact, " based on the normal experience of 

 healthy men," that the state of mind which we term volition is 

 the cause of the muscular movement that gives expression to it — 

 a psychosis producing the neurosis which calls forth muscular con- 

 traction — I cannot see that this conviction can be nullified by any 

 inference drawn from an order of facts that is capable of an entirely 

 different interpretation. The doctrine propounded by Professor 

 * *' Posthumous Essays," p. 202. 



