i, Al a 
~* 
* 
1903.] STONEY—UNIVERSE OF REAL EXISTENCES. 139 
find in nature. For this, it would be only necessary that percep- 
tions should be caused in us not by individual events in the mighty 
Autos, but by vast swarms of such events operating together and 
producing in us an average effect. And this, on other accounts, 
seems to be the case (compare, for example, the significant slowness 
of human thoughts with the swiftness of molecular [events]’). If 
this view be correct, what are known to us as the [ Laws]’ of Nature 
are an outcome from [Laws] of averages among auta. To attempt to 
penetrate farther lies beyond the scope of the present essay. We 
must not be tempted to engage here in the study of the little that 
man is competent to learn about the individual events that are in 
progress amongst the auta of the sense-compelling part of the uni- 
verse, or the efficient causes that operate there. 
CHAPTER 19. RECAPITULATION. 
What has been chiefly learned in the foregoing pages is: 1. That 
the objects of nature are syntheta of perceptions; and 2. That 
there is no warrant for our assuming that the true autic cause of 
human perceptions, or of the events that occur among the objects of 
nature, are in the least like those objects. On the contrary, every 
evidence that we can collect points to the conclusion that the true 
source of the perceptions of our egoistic minds, and of those events 
in nature which are usually attributed to an interaction of the 
objects of naturé upon one another, is in reality as utterly unlike 
those objects of nature as the thoughts of a man are unlike the 
events within his brain associated with those thoughts. 
These considerations when followed up lead us to reject the com- 
mon belief in ‘ material substances’ as erroneous, and it is more- 
over found to be misleading. It is an error which blinds the minds 
of those who entertain it to the stupendous Autic Universe, which 
is what really exists, and which transcends the supposed material 
universe as much as do the boundless range and vast variety of the 
thoughts of a human mind altogether differ from and infinitely 
transcend that selection of movements within the brain which 
accompanies those thoughts. 
A theory of existence, such as that which we have sought to 
expound in this essay, is to be judged, not by the use we are able to 
make of it, but by its truth. At the same time this theory is far 
from being useless to the thoughtful student of nature. It becomes 
