518 Scientific Proceedings, Royal Dublin Society. 



But the only satisfactory account is that which is couched in 

 the language of the student who tries to describe what it is that 

 has actually occurred in the universe of real existences. He would 

 say — The food I consumed yesterday consisted from the diacrino- 

 menal standpoint of certain motions. These motions had only an 

 objective existence; what were in real existence yesterday were 

 their antitheta. These antitheta were auta and autic events which 

 were part of the universe as it existed yesterday. The auta and 

 autic events of the universe are causes acting upon and effecting 

 changes in one another, and the changes which those particular 

 auta have in consequence undergone since yesterday have made 

 them become to-day thoughts in my mind, have altered them and 

 their causal relations, so that they have now taken the form of 

 being a part of a certain very special little group of auta, viz. my 

 mind as it exists to-day. 



When to facts of this kind (of which many of great weight 

 can be brought together) we add considerations pressed upon us by 

 the relations between the mind and its synergos, and by the 

 fluctuations of the boundary between them which are brought 

 prominently to light in cases where we are more or less imperfectly 

 conscious of what is going on ; and when with these we combine 

 the further fact that thought to exist need not be any part of my 

 thought : 1 we are led to see that the most probable hypothesis that 

 can be made is that what we have found to be true in some 

 cases is always true, and that in every case it is thought (or 

 rather a change in the causal relation in which thought stands to 

 thought) which is the antitheton of motion ; so that the totality 

 of all actual existences, the universe, is in fact identical with the 

 totality of existing thoughts. Of course all this thought, with the 

 exception of the tiny group that is my mind, is as much outside 

 my consciousness, as are the thoughts of my fellow-men and of the 

 lower animals. 



Under this view the minds of men and of other animals are 

 specialised specks, as it were, in a vast ocean of thought, to which 

 they bear a like inconspicuous proportion as that borne by the few 

 brain motions of which they are the antitheta, to the totality of 



1 As is evidenced by the fact that the thoughts of all my fellow-men and of other 

 animals are in this predicament. 



