THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. I53 



sweep away all cliance of ' passing witliout break ' either 

 from the material to the mental, or from the lower to the 

 higher mental ; and they thrust us back into a pluralism of 

 consciousnesses — each arising discontiuuously in the midst 

 of two disconnected worlds, material and mental — which is 

 even worse than the old notion of the separate creation of 

 each particular soul. But the malcontents will hardly try 

 to refute our reasonings by direct attack. It is more prob- 

 able that, turning their back upon them altogether, they 

 will devots themselves to sapping and mining the region 

 roundabout until it is a bog of logical liquefaction, into the 

 midst of which all definite conclusions of any sort may be 

 trusted ere long to sink and disappear. 



Our reasonings have assuTued that the ^ integration ' of 

 a thousand psychic units must be either just the units over 

 again, simply rebaptized, or else something real, but then 

 other than and additional to those units , that if a certain 

 existing fact is that of a thousand feelings, it cannot at the 

 same time be that of one feeling ; for the essence of feeling 

 is to be felt, and as a psychic existent feels, so it must he. 

 If the one feeling feels like no one of the thousand, in what 

 sense can it be said to be the thousand ? These assumptions 

 are what the monists will seek to undermine. The Eegelizers 

 amongst them will take high ground at once, and say 

 that the glory and beaut}' of the psychic life is that in it all 

 contradictions find their reconciliation ; and that it is just 

 because the facts we are considering are facts of the self 

 that they are both one and many at the same time. With 

 this intellectual temper I confess that I cannot contend. 

 As in striking at some unresisting gossamer with a club, 

 one but overreaches one's self, and the thing one aims at 

 gets no harm. So I leave this school to its devices. 



The other monists are of less deliquescent frame, and 

 try to break down distinctness among mental states by 

 making a distinction. This sounds paradoxical, but it is 

 only ingenious. The distinction is that betiueen the uncon- 

 scious and the conscious being of the mental state. It is the 

 sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, 

 and of turning what might become a science into a tum- 

 bling-ground for whimsies. It has numerous champions, 



