Stoney — On Reversal throughout the Universe. 451 



at by a spectator who was himself unaffected by the change. But 

 we are all ourselves parts of this universe, and the series of 

 thoughts that occur in our minds are quite as much events that 

 happen in the universe as the motions we see around us. Such a 

 reversal of all the velocities of the universe as I have supposed, if 

 it really took place, would affect us and the motions in our brains 

 as well as everything else in the universe ; and we have now to 

 consider what the effect of this would be, and how it would modify 

 our observation of what is going on around us. From the instant 

 of the supposed reversal, the thoughts which had occupied our 

 minds previous to it will recur, repeating themselves backwards,, 

 just like every other event in the universe. The memory of 

 having eaten our breakfast will present itself first ; the sensation 

 that we are eating it will come on afterwards : at least this is the 

 order in which we must as yet describe these thoughts in our mind 

 as occurring ; it is the order in which they would appear to that 

 outsider whom we before supposed to be surveying the universe. 

 But the relation of the one thought to the other in our own mind 

 — of the memory to the sensations remembered — will be after the re- 

 versal exactly the same 1 as it was when these same thoughts occurred 

 before in their right order. Now, time is only an abstract term 

 referring to all such relations, just as mankind is an abstract 

 term referring to the individuals that are men. And just as it is 

 individual men who have a real existence, and not mankind in the 

 abstract, so is it the individual time-relations occurring between 

 real thoughts or real events that have a real existence, and not 

 time itself, which is a mere word. But as we have found that the 

 time-relations between our thoughts after the supposed reversal 

 are absolutely the same as the time-relations between these same 

 thoughts when they occurred before the reversal, then to us, if we 

 share in the reversal, our thoughts and the events in the world 

 about us will seem to occur in the same order of time as they did 

 before the reversal, and the moment of reversal will in both cases 

 appear to us to occur last in point of time. In other words, our sup- 

 position of the reversal of all the motions of the universe, when it 



1 In fact, the time-relation between the two states of mind amounts to this, that a 

 part of the one state of mind is a memory of the whole, or of a part, of the other state 

 of mind ; and this is equally the case after as before the reversal. 



