510 Scientific Proceedings, Royal Dublin Society. 



bodying forth in a collected form the information sent us by the 

 real auta of the actual sense-compelling universe, and which, 

 owing to their simplicity, stand in a closer 1 relation to those auta 

 than the more complex objects of Phenomenal Nature. Pheno- 

 menal objects are bright, warm, hard or soft, coloured, sweet or 

 bitter, and so on ; as well as moving or at rest. In Diacrinomenal 

 Nature motions take the place of all these. I attempted to give a 

 summary of the results of this hypothesis in a Friday Evening 

 Discourse, delivered before the Royal Institution in 1885, and 

 printed in the Journal of that Society, so that it is the less necessary 

 to dilate upon them here, even if it had been appropriate to do so. 

 We may therefore pass on at once to the consideration of the last 

 circumstance which it seems necessary to make clear in order that we 

 may at length be in a position to understand how the scientific study 

 of Nature stands related to the real existences of which the universe 

 actually consists, which is the problem we proposed to investigate. 



For we have now reached the point at which the very important 

 observation obtrudes itself upon our attention, that causation 

 in the full sense of that term implying efficiency in the cause can 

 only prevail in the operations of auta. 



When a change takes place in the sense-compelling universe 

 owing to some cause having operated in its own definite way, the 

 sense-compelling universe, the mighty machine, will produce one 

 shadow before the change and another after. 2 The second shadow 

 will accordingly succeed the first in orderly sequence, but the rela- 

 tion between the shadoios is not the relation of cause and effect. Accord- 

 ingly, in the laws of Nature which have been discovered by scientific 

 investigation, we find abundant instances of unfailingly concomitant 

 events and of uniformities of sequence, but not one single instance 



1 The Phenomenal Hypotheton is but a blurred shadow of the Autic Universe, when 

 compared with the much more searching Diacrinomenal Hypotheton. All molecular 

 motions, and motions finer than molecular motions are blurred together in the objects of 

 Phenomenal Nature (which hereby acquire their appearance of being rigid), or are equally 

 lost to view in the apparently empty spaces between. These omissions are supplied in 

 the Diacrinomenal Hypotheton. 



2 That is, the sense-compelling universe is capable of producing one set of effects 

 within human minds before the change, and becomes such as to be capable of producing 

 another set of effects after. The syntheton made by putting together all the former set 

 of possible effects is Nature, as it exists (objectively) before the change ; and the syn- 

 theton of all the latter set of possible effects is Nature as it exists after the change. 

 These are the two shadows of the great machine. 



