116 STONEY-——UNIVERSE OF REAL EXISTENCES. [April 3, 
To prevent misapprehension, it may be well, before going farther, 
to invite attention to the guarded statements that have been made, 
which, while embodying the whole of what may, up to the present, 
be legitimately inferred from the six postulates upon which we con- 
struct our argument, do not include the further illegitimate state- 
ment, which is usually added, that the aition, or source from which 
the messages have been transmitted to our mind, is a ‘ material 
substance’ occupying that portion of space which is apparently 
occupied by the phenomenal object. This mistake, so often made, 
seems to have its source in an impression that the cause (the aition) 
- will resemble its effects (the perceptions which, when synthetized, 
build up the phenomenal object). The presumption is quite the 
other way; notwithstanding which, when men are forming their 
ontological judgments (and all men have to form ontological judg- 
ments of one kind or another), they often tacitly assume that causes 
are like their effects, or suppose that the relations between the 
causes are of the same kind as those which they find prevailing 
among the effects. We should be very carefully on our guard 
against these errors. 
What may legitimately be stated is that some of the auta of the 
sense-compelling universe have been operating upon one another 
and have produced extensive changes—changes which may have 
affected the auta themselves or their relations and operations. Of 
this widespread effect, some small—excessively small—outlying 
portions have filtered as far as to my mind, to my little group of 
auta, through a chain of intermediate effects within certain narrow 
and tortuous channels, my [organs of sense]. In the form in which 
they ultimately reach me they are ¢ekmeria, signs to me that events 
_are occurring beyond my own mind, 
CHAPrER 9. Or My MInp anp Irs SyNERGOs. 
In ontology we are confronted with a difficulty bearing some 
relation to that experienced by biologists in their attempts to 
arrange the genera and species of plants or animals in a satisfactory 
natural order. In their floras and faunas they are obliged to 
adopt a linear arrangement ; whereas the progress of the events that 
brought about the morphology with which they are dealing did not 
follow any such single line. So, in ontology, expositions, like that 
here attempted, must proceed, chapter after chapter, in a linear pro- 
ee 
