Stoney — Natural Science and Ontology. 519 



motions throughout Nature. Even of the motions going on in my 

 brain, these special motions are but a small part ; from which we 

 may perhaps justly infer that my mind is but a small thing even 

 when compared with the synergos that acts as its coadjutor. 



If this noumenal hypothesis is the true theory of autic exist- 

 ence, it will follow that the laws of the universe are the laws of 

 thought. This is a very different thing from saying that they are 

 the laws of human thought. The laws of human thought bear to 

 them the same small proportion which the laws of the action of the 

 wheels of a watch upon one another bear to the entire science of 

 dynamics. The science of dynamics could never be evolved from 

 a study of these laws. But perhaps it may not be hopeless for man 

 to attain to some sound knowledge of the laws of cosmic thought, 

 inasmuch as we have some few instances of the way thought acts 

 upon thought open to our investigation in our own minds, and since 

 this is supplemented by our knowledge of the physical laws of nature, 

 which are a shadow, a probably complete shadow, of all the laws of 

 causation which operate throughout the universe, throughout the 

 all-embracing mind of the great Autos. 



The real laivs of the universe are those which govern the ad- 

 vance of events throughout the autic universe. And it appears as 

 the issue of our inquiry that the study of Nature in ultimate 

 analysis is the study of the changes which that great progress 

 induces within certain very special and very secluded portions of 

 the universe, viz. within the minds of animals, our little groups of 

 auta. Natural Science is thus, as it were, the study of an ever- 

 changing shadow cast in a special and very indirect way by the 

 mighty march of actual events. 



This then is the relation in which the knowledge we acquire by 

 the scientific study of Nature stands to the real laws of the universe : 

 and although, in order to give definiteness to our treatment of 

 the subject, I have ventured to use that particular noumenal hypo- 

 thesis which, as I think, we are entitled to regard as probably the 

 true theory of existence, nevertheless the relationship we have been 

 led to recognise is quite independent of that particular hypothesis, 

 and can easily be stated in terms that do not involve it. To do this 

 it is only necessary to substitute the word auto for thought through- 

 out the last few pages — the name auto being one which avoids in- 

 volving any hypothesis. 



