506 Scientific Proceedings, Royal Dublin Society. 



specially of them. Many slight muscular and other feeble sensa- 

 tions accompany the use of my visual and tactual organs of sense. 

 These obscure sensations are constantly changing while I am using 

 those senses, and in an excessively complicated way. That out of 

 such tangled materials synthesis has been able to evolve so simple 

 a result as my judgments about space relations, is because, amid all 

 the apparent disorder, there do exist real relations between those 

 much varying sensations ; and the syntheton which can be produced 

 depends on what these relations are. They in turn depend on what 

 relations exist between my organs of sense * and the various parts of 

 the auto I am examining : for it is while varying these that the 

 sensations in question arise. Hence, finally, the synthesis which 

 can be effected depends on what relations prevail between my 

 organs of sense 1 and other parts of the autic universe. We have 

 no reason to suppose that these onto-relations are in the least like 

 space relations, these being syntheta constructed out of all the 

 obscure sensations that are indirectly occasioned by the onto- 

 relations. But whatever the onto-relations may actually be, they 

 are at all events a part of the conditions which determine 

 in the sense-compelling universe whether auta can act 

 on auta. I have to adapt my organs of sense to them in order 

 to get tekmeria; and it is in doing this that I experience the com- 

 plicated sensations which have come, by reason of what has occurred 

 in my long line of ancestors, to be synthesised for me into instinc- 

 tive judgments of space relations between my sensations. It is 

 evident then that my judgments about space relations are the result of 

 a synthesis of materials which are themselves consequences of the onto- 

 relations — of relations that prevail in the sense-compelling part of 

 the universe. 



These judgments about space relations are thoughts, a part of 

 my little group of thoughts. They are accordingly auta, so long 

 as they last. But the space relations to which they seem to refer 

 have only an objective existence, i. e. their essence is to be the object 

 of these thoughts, not to be themselves auta. They are, in fact, a 

 part of Nature, the great Phenomenal Hypotheton ; and like other 

 parts of that hypotheton are entitled to be regarded as real, as 



1 Here the term " organs of sense "is to be understood in its autic, not its objec- 

 tive sense. See Diagram III., p. 486. 



