Stoney — Natural Science and Ontology. 497 



and which are to be attributed to mere changes in the channel of 

 communication . 



This remarkable power of discrimination, so easy to me now, 

 is intimately associated with the transformation spoken of above, 

 of sensations and other materials into perceptions; and, however 

 easy I now find it, must have been acquired by my ancestors 

 gradually, and after the correction of many mistakes. 



Synthesis does not mean merely the act of collecting materials 

 together. It means that and much more, viz. the building up of 

 a definite structure {avvriOnfii includes the meaning of the Latin 

 verb construere as well as of colligere~\. The completed structure 

 may be conveniently called the syntheton [avvderov, the 

 structure resulting from synthesis]. Moreover, in the cases we 

 are concerned with the syntheta have not been formed by merely 

 fitting the materials themselves together : they consist of some of 

 these materials brought into combination, not directly with the rest 

 of the materials, but with effects produced by them. For example, 

 all the perceptions which come into existence within my mind 

 while sense-compelling auta are acting on me through my senses, 

 are syntheta of this more complex kind. 



It is to be noted that these syntheta, my perceptions, while 

 they last, are auta, real existences : they are thoughts, parts of my 

 mind. In fact up to the present we have been dealing exclusively 

 with auta, things that really exist, some of them non-egoistic, 

 others of them parts of my own little group of thoughts. 



But in the next step which the mind takes — a very important 

 step — it transcends these limits. It forms a further syntheton, 

 namely, the phenomenal object. By an object is to be 

 understood a supposed non-egoistic existence. The supposition 

 that the phenomenal object has a non-egoistic existence, if con- 

 fidently believed in, as it is by men untrained in inquiries relating 

 to the mind, may be correct or may be an error ; and on careful 

 scrutiny is found to be an error. By persons trained in mental 

 philosophy, the supposition is usually put clearly before their own 

 minds as an hypothesis ; i. e. it is entertained with good 

 reason and for useful purposes, but in so guarded a way that the 

 mind is not misled into concluding that in dealing with the phe- 

 nomenal object it is dealing with an auto. (See Diagram I., p. 484.) 



