Stoney — Appreciation of Ultra- Visible Quantities. 545 



Man's mind — the little changeful group of interwoven thoughts 

 that is himself — is a very small part of the great Autic Universe. 

 We must shift our centre, and exchange the metaphysician's 

 narrow Ptolemaic for a broad Copernican view of existence. 



Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, vol. vi. pp. 502, 503, 504). My thoiiglits, 

 ■which are a part of the autic universe, are shadowed by certain objective changes in 

 my brain ; and the term synergos means that other portion of the autic universe which 

 is shadowed by all the other events that happen objectively in my brain. It appears 

 from physical considerations that the particular stream effects or other changes in the 

 brain that were the shadows of the perceptions I had at breakfast-time, cannot have 

 occurred alone, but were accompanied by more subtile motions or changes in the brain 

 which were the shadow of, and thus betokened, certain closely associated events then 

 going on in my synergos. These again were succeeded by motions, changes, or states 

 of strain in the brain during the intervening hours, all of which were a part of the 

 varying shadow of the synergos as it underwent whatever changes took place in it during 

 that interval. Moreover, these intervening events in the brain were of such a kind, as 

 the result has proved, that they have been now followed up by motions or changes in 

 the brain which resemble those that were the shadow of my thoughts at breakfast-time, 

 and which are a part of the group of events now going on in my brain that is the 

 shadow of the group of thoughts that constitute my mind as it exists at present. 



Softening of the brain is the shadow cast within the objective world when very 

 unfortunate events have happened in the autic universe — events which have included a 

 weakening of the power which the synergos and the mind previously had of mutually 

 acting on one another, or else which have prevented the full formation within the 

 synergos of some of the intermediate links of causation spoken of above. Either of 

 these would involve a partial loss of memory. 



