Stoney — Natural Science and Ontology. 495 



tion there may be intermediate repeating stations at which the 

 message is received and then transmitted forward. This I find to 

 be also the case with the messages that come to me from sense- 

 compelling auta. The fire that I am looking at acts upon the 

 aether, 1 and thereby originates and maintains in it an extensive un- 

 dulation of rapidly alternating electro-magnetic stresses. This is 

 the form in which the message was despatched from the transmitting 

 station. A very little of the enormous effect produced by the 

 originating auto gets into my eyes through the pupils. This is the 

 fragment of the message which the intermediate station — my eye — 

 succeeds in catching. Here the small portion of this fragment of 

 the undulation which falls between certain limiting wave-lengths 

 is supposed to act on photo-sensitive matter in the pigment cells at 

 the back of the eye, and produces there chemical changes. This is 

 the way the message is recorded at the intermediate station : in being 

 recorded it is translated into an entirely new language. It has next to 

 be transmitted forwards. This is accomplished by the new chemical 

 compounds that have been called into existence being such as 

 stimulate the outer end of the optic nerve, which is part of the tele- 

 graphic conductor between the eye and the mind. Ultimately the 

 message reaches the onto-brain, the terminal receiving station, and 

 is here worked up with other materials and transformed from crude 

 sensations into perceptions. The message in its final form 2 is, as it 



1 Tli at is, the onto -fire, not the phenomenal object, acts on the onto-sether, and 

 maintains in it whatever is the autic antitheton of the objective undulation. In 

 fact, throughout the entire paragraph it is of the autic antitheta and their behaviour 

 that we are speaking, and the reader is requested to understand such names as eye, 

 wave-length, photo-sensitive matter, new chemical compound, optic nerve, in their 

 autic not their phenomenal (or objective) meaning. (See foot-note, p. 490, and Dia- 

 gram III., p. 486.) 



2 It appears then that what reaches the mind is only a message from the origina- 

 ting auto ; and not even the direct message, but a message which takes its final form 

 quite as much, or perhaps more, from what has happened to it in transmission than 

 from anything that the originating auto did. It is very plain then that I am not 

 justified in regarding the tekmerion which is called into existence within my mind as 

 being in any sense an image or copy of the originating auto. And yet this is so 

 generally assumed to be the case, that the supposition underlies many common forms 

 of speech. The source of the error is that the phenomenal object {which our percep- 

 tions do resemble) has in the popular apprehension been, by a natural confusion, 

 identified with the originating auto, to which, on the contrary, it really bears a 

 relation somewhat similar to that between an effect and its cause — a relation of 

 antithesis, not of resemblance. 



