296 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



of power behind it, any more than that psychic experi- 

 ence transmits to the brain some power behind the 

 experience. Concomitance simply means, at last, 

 that both series of changes are connected with some 

 cause, distinct from either, which is the secret of 

 both. To use a common phrase, it means that the 

 two are "joint effects" of some single higher cause, 

 for the time being undiscovered. It points our in- 

 vestigation at once to the problem of searching for 

 and determining this unknown cause, of converting 

 it from being unknown into being known. 



The second step is, to connect these two streams 

 of concomitant or joint effects with our own true 

 primordial and actively conscious self as their real 

 cause, though it is at first unrealised and unknown 

 as such. This step is doubtless impossible for a phi- 

 losophy which halts, as Professor James's does, with 

 a dogmatic disbelief in a priori knowing, or self-active 

 consciousness, and which insists that no knowing is 

 intelligibly real except the contingent and tentative 

 knowing supplied to us "from elsewhere," and as if 

 inch by inch, in sensible experience. But the clear 

 and scientific connecting of the two " parallel " 

 streams of effects, one physical, the other psychic, 

 with the one organising soul or mind, becomes pos- 

 sible enough, and indeed easy, when once we pene- 

 trate the too superficial theory of empirical philosophy, 

 and settle upon the a priori or self-active character 



