Relations between the Physical and the Moral. 233 



subject, and to realize the unity of the subject in a phenomenal 

 plurality. Every act of thinking is definitely reducible to a per- 

 ception of either differences or resemblances, that is to say, it 

 resolves one into many, or reduces many into one. This double 

 process of analysis and synthesis can be infinitely repeated and 

 complicated, but it underlies all our intellectual operations, what- 

 ever they may be. Contemporary psychologists have well shown 

 that on comparing the phenomena of intelligence we find a true 

 unity of composition, and that this essential unity of all intel- 

 lectual phenomena consists in this, that always and everywhere we 

 are integrating or disintegrating something. Their studies, which 

 we need not detail here, enable us to pass from these rather vague 

 considerations to a more precise knowledge of the fact of con- 

 sciousness in its ultimate form. 



Since in every act of thinking there are necessarily two ele- 

 ments, plurality and unity, we will examine these in order that 

 we may see to what they are ultimately reducible. 



i. We will begin with the dividing element of thought. Every 

 one will readily admit that if we start from some very composite 

 mental state for instance, from the idea of a certain social 

 system, or of a certain form of government and then proceed 

 by continuous analysis, constantly passing from the more to the 

 less complex, from the less complex to the simple, from the 

 simple to the most simple, we must, in traversing this descending 

 series, finally arrive at primitive elements. Thus we are able to 

 resolve our system into a sum of ratiocinations and relations, each 

 ratiocination into a sum of judgments and relations, each judg- 

 ment into a sum of ideas and relations, each idea into a number 

 of images or of concrete forms from which it is drawn, and each 

 image and concrete form into internal or external, subjective or 

 objective, sensations. Sensation, therefore, would appear to be the 

 primitive element upon which all rests, the molecule to which this 

 complicated diversity may be reduced. 



The researches of physicists and of physiologists, however, have 

 led some psychologists to ask whether sensation is indeed, as it 

 appears to be, an irreducible phenomenon, and the reply has been 

 in the negative. When treating of the so-called simple sensations 

 of sound, colour, taste, smell, they found themselves in the same 



