544 Scientific Proceedings, Royal Dublin Society. 



another ; and, in particular, the time relations between tliem and 

 between them and my thoughts are the same as the time relations 

 of the physical events that, as a consequence, go on in my brain. 

 This body of events in the Autic Universe, and the thoughts or other 

 auta between which they occur, may suitably be spoken of as a 

 synergos {(rwepyog, a fellow-worker) which is ever on the alert to 

 work along with my mind, and on which the thoughts that are my 

 mind as much depend (in the autic sense of that word), as do those 

 few physical events in my brain which are associated with my 

 thoughts depend (in the physical sense of the word) upon the vast 

 multitude of other physical events also going on in my brain. 

 The one cannot even exist without the other. 



The lesson to be learned from all this is that psychology and 

 the other branches of metaphysics as presented by the ablest men 

 who were unaware of the existence of this synergos and of the 

 large degree in which it intervenes in all that happens in the mind, 

 will now have to be rewritten. In memory ; in the association of 

 ideas ; and in the other miscalled " faculties and operations of the 

 human mind," it is little we do : it is much that is done for us.^ 



^ Take, for example, some particular instance of memory. I remember where I sat 

 at breakfast this morning, where my companions sat, also several particulars of what 

 was said during breakfast, of the gestures of my companions, of my own motions, of 

 what I ate, of the equipage on the table, and so on. None of these things have occu- 

 pied my thoughts since breakfast, till I sat down to write these lines ; since when they 

 have all come into my mind. 



Now what does all this mean ? It means that the group of thoughts which I call 

 myself, my mind — and which at each instant is a group the several parts of which are 

 connected and interacting in that way that we call being within one consciousness — is 

 a group of thoughts that has undergone change ; that one instance of this change has 

 been the discontinuance of the above-recited perceptions that formed part of the group 

 at breakfast-time, and that another instance has been the occurrence now within the 

 group of thoughts of what are more or less an imperfect and modified repetition of some 

 of those perceptions, accompanied by the additional thought which we call being aware 

 that they had at breakfast-time occupied a place -within the group in the fuller form of 

 complete perceptions. During the intervening hours none of these occupied any place in 

 the group either in their fuller or in their modified form : nevertheless, there must have 

 heen, somewhere in the autic universe, a chain of causation connecting the original 

 perceptions and the memory of them. Of this chain the first link tvas a part of my 

 mind, the last link is a part of my mind, but the connecting links have been in the 

 synergos. 



This becomes clearer when we turn to the objective or phenomenal world, which is 

 a kind of shadow thrown in a special way by the succession of events that occur in the 

 autic universe (see Stoney, " On the Eolation between Science and Ontology," Scientific 



