MIND IS FUNCTION 169 



what is called self-feeling, or the kinaesthetic. There 

 can be nothing in all phenomena, but what matter and 

 motion, in the form of energy, produces. Feeling is 

 the observation of the effect by the organism. This is 

 consciousness, or awareness ; or a relation between cer- 

 tain objects, the number being limited by the capacity, 

 .for impression, of the neural structure. Or conscious- 

 ness is the power of choice of several methods or paths. 

 "No state of consciousness can be dissociated from its 

 physical conditions. ' ' It does not appear to the ordinary 

 observer that the energy exhibited by the daily and 

 nightly phenomena of nature could be naturally pro- 

 duced. Of course, mental phenomena are still more 

 mysterious to him, because they have an entirely dif- 

 ferent relation to him from those in the inorganic king- 

 dom. But after scientists adopted, by empirical obser- 

 vation, the theory that atoms are mere centers of cosmic 

 energy, the same that runs the universe, there seems 

 to be no difficulty in neglecting former mysterious cause 

 for these effects; an angel, for instance, at each star 

 to support it in position, was not a necessary assump- 

 tion, after the discovery of the attraction of gravitation. 

 All human phenomena, physical or psychical, are a 

 part of natural force, called cosmic energy, or the per- 

 sistence of force, a part of the physical universe, the 

 same as matter. The peculiar phenomena called vital, 

 and those vital phenomena called psychical, cannot 436 

 separated from the mental conception of the universal 

 postulate. They are natural, and governed by natural 

 laws only. The mind, or consciousness, of man, is im- 

 possible without the neural structure, always accom- 

 panying it, and the neural structure without its func- 

 tion, or without its genetic correspondence with cosmic 

 energy; in other words, without its excitation by the 



