292 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



there is but one possible remedy, — - 1 am sure you 

 will agree with me in this, — and that is, to adopt the 

 hypothesis, not simply that there are many minds 

 behind the scenes, but that these minds are our 

 minds — our veritable and genuine selves; and that 

 the summaries of sense-coloured experiences which 

 Professor James, following the empiricist tradition of 

 the English school of philosophy, especially as voiced 

 by Hume and Hartley and Mill, is led to call the only 

 verifiably real meaning of our self, or our mind, are 

 but the more or less dimmed and darkened expres- 

 sions of those our real spirits, inhabitants of eternity. 

 Short of this identification, short of this close union 

 of the soul and its experiences in a single identity 

 belonging to the eternal world, and enclosing the 

 world of time, there can be no assurance of our 

 continuing in spite of death. Short of showing that 

 upon some admissible interpretation of the functional 

 relation between the brain and phenomenal conscious- 

 ness a chance remains for this identification, we can- 

 not even keep open the chance that we may be 

 immortal, and so cannot set the objection drawn from 

 cerebralistic materialism finally aside. 



II 



But what admissible interpretation is there of the 

 relation between brain-function and conscious experi- 

 ence that will really dispose of the cerebral objection 



