250 Heredity. 



terms of those, or those in terms of these a question scarcely 

 worth deciding, since either answer leaves us as completely out- 

 side of the reality as we were at first. 



' Nevertheless, it may be as well to say here, once for all, 

 that were we compelled to choose between the alternative of 

 translating mental phenomena into physical phenomena, or of 

 translating physical phenomena into mental phenomena, the latter 

 alternative would seem the more acceptable of the two. Mind, 

 as known to the possessor of it, is a circumscribed aggregate of 

 activities ; and the cohesion of these activities one with another, 

 throughout the aggregate, compels the postulation of a something 

 of which they are the activities. But the same experiences which 

 make him aware of this coherent aggregate of mental faculties, 

 simultaneously make him aware of activities that are not included 

 in it outlying activities which become known by their effects on 

 this aggregate, but which are experimentally proved to be not 

 coherent with it, and to be coherent with one another. As, by 

 the definition of them, these external activities cannot be brought 

 within the aggregate 01 activities distinguished as those of mind, 

 they must for ever remain to him nothing more than the unknown 

 correlatives of their effects on this aggregate, and can be thought 

 of only in terms furnished by this aggregate. Hence, if he re- 

 gards his conceptions of these activities lying beyond mind, as 

 constituting knowledge of them, he is deluding himself; he is but 

 representing these activities in terms of mind, and can never do 

 otherwise. Eventually, he is obliged to admit that his ideas of 

 matter and motion, merely symbolic of unknowable realities, are 

 complex states of consciousness built out of units of feeling. 

 But if, after admitting this, he persists in asking whether units of 

 feeling are of the same nature as the units of force distinguished 

 as external, or whether the units of force distinguished as external 

 are of the same nature as units of feeling; then the reply, 

 still substantially the same, is, that we may go further towards 

 conceiving units of external force to be identical with units of 

 feeling, than we can towards conceiving units of feeling to be 

 identical with units of external force. Clearly, if units of external 

 force are regarded as absolutely unknown and unknowable, then 

 to translate units of force into them is to translate the known 



