208 W. L. COURTNEY, M.A., LL.D., 
that it is not merely the power of secing or listening to one thing 
oranother, but at the same moment different people may be, with 
exactly the same sounds reaching their ears, attending, at their 
will, to totally different things. Take the case of a string quartet 
—four people are sitting together at an equal distance from the 
performers, and therefore the actual physical impressions on their 
ears must be exactly identical, and those four may each of them 
attend to each of the parts and at a given moment they may agree 
to attend to other parts—all of them with the same physical 
cause of hearing of one or another of the parts. That is merely 
one example of the problem of Attention which those who 
maintain the merely materialistic view of the mind have to get 
over. 
The points raised in the Paper are all very clearly and ad- 
mirably put, and it does seem to me to be a subject that we cannot 
too boldly face. The mind is so intimately connected with the 
brain that it is absurd to ignore the connection, but on the 
other hand we cannot too clearly bear in mind that all that has 
been offered us by physiologists does not bring us one atom 
nearer the understanding of self than the perplexities of Buddha, 
on the one hand, or the arguments of Descartes on the other. 
There are a good many here who have thought on and studied 
the subject, and I hope they will give us the benefit of their 
experience. 
Mr. A. H. Etwin.—lIt is not my intention to criticise the Paper, 
but I would like to call attention to an important theory that has 
not been fully touched on this evening; I have heard it called one of 
Professor Huxley’s theories of thought-molecules. It so happens that 
I have very good reason to know that this thought-molecule idea 
was in vogue over forty-six years ago, but of course in a different 
form. We had not got sa far at that timeas to put it into present- 
day scientific language, but if I understand the thought-molecule 
idea rightly, or what I prefer to call the sensation-molecule idea, 
for that is more comprehensive ; it means that for every sensation 
which is received, whether by the ears, eyes, or feeling, some kind 
of image (not necessarily a picture), but some little thing 1s formed 
in the brain somewhere, or connected with the brain, and not so 
material as the brain itself, and perfectly indestructible, that forms 
a record. I think in that idea we get an explanation of memory, 
in fact, of all the phenomena referred to this evening. 
