20 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [ft. i 



ing up that vague organic feeling of bien-ttre or pleasurable 

 existence, which is in part due to the indirect effects of the 

 Ritteric portion of the solar rays upon the chemical actions 

 going on throughout our bodies. Here, then, we have one 

 and the same external agency — vibrations among particles of 

 matter — producing in us feelings so different as those of sound, 

 heat, and light. And when it is asked which of these feelings 

 the external cause resembles, is not the answer sufficiently 

 obvious that in all probability it resembles none of them, 

 and is comparable with none of them ? May we not clearly 

 see that what appears to us as a series of widely-distin- 

 guished phenomena may after all correspond to a set of 

 objective realities between which there is no such wide 

 distinction ? And do we need any more evidence to convince 

 us that phenomena — by which I mean the effects produced 

 upon our consciousness by unknown external agencies — are 

 all that we can compare and classify, and are therefore all 

 that we can know ? 



Perhaps, however, it may still appear that, in the illustra- 

 tion just cited, we have assumed a knowledge of the external 

 cause, to a certain extent. In asserting that the feelings of 

 sound, of heat, and of light, are alike caused by vibrations 

 among particles of matter, we may perhaps seem to imply 

 that we do know these vibrations, and we may be suspected 

 of formulating the various states of consciousness in question, 

 in terms of the objective reality. 1 But a moment's reflection 

 will convince us that this is not the case. After the illustration 

 with which this chapter opened, it is hardly necessary to say 

 that the knowledge of a vibration of particles as an objective 

 reality, is utterly unattainable by us. We reach the concep- 



1 In his paper on " Hibemicisms in Philosophy" (Contemporary Review, 

 January 1872, p. 147), the Duke of Argyll himself commits the following 

 exquisite bull : — " We now know what light is ' in itself — that is to say, we 

 know the nature and constitution of it, not in terms of the sensation it gives 

 to us, but in terms of a wholly different order of conception." The italics art 

 mine. 



