28o ESSAYS nV PHILOSOPHY 



conscious of a certain feeling of insufficiency left by 

 the method he took to relieve them. Probably, too, 

 many of you wished, as I did, that we might be 

 supplied in some way with something more posi- 

 tive, something more satisfyingly affirmative, than 

 the mere opening of a chance to pull ourselves 

 together and seize upon immortal life by a toui' 

 de force of resolute belief. For this was all that 

 our essayist could achieve by simply replying to 

 objections, though it was no doubt all that he aimed 

 at achieving. 



Many others of you, I moreover suspect, wondered 

 in particular if there might not be some course 

 of thought in which that idealistic theory of our 

 existence, suggested by his transmission-view of 

 the functional relation between our conscious ex- 

 periences and the brain, would be carried up above 

 the region of mere hypothesis into the world of 

 real fact. I mean the theory, that, as Professor 

 James himself expresses it, " the whole universe 

 of material things — the furniture of earth and 

 choir of heaven — should turn out to be a mere 

 surface-veil of phenomena, hiding and keeping back 

 the world of genuine realities ; . . . the whole world 

 of natural experience, as we get it, to be but a 

 time-mask, shattering or refracting the one infinite 

 Thought which is the sole reality of those millions 

 of finite streams of consciousness known to us as 



