178 PSYCHOLOGY. 



In the first place, it ignores analogies on which certain 

 critics will insist, those, namely, between the composition 

 of the total brain-process and that of the object of the 

 thought. The total brain-process is composed of parts, 

 of simultaneous processes in the seeing, the hearing, the 

 feeling, and other centres. The object thought of is also 

 composed of parts, some of which are seen, others heard, 

 others perceived by touch and muscular manijDulation. 

 " How then," these critics will say, " should the thought 

 not itself be composed of parts, each the counterpart 

 of a part of the object and of a part of the brain-pro- 

 cess?" So natural is this way of looking at the matter 

 that it has given rise to what is on the whole the most 

 flourishing of all psychological systems — that of the Lock- 

 ian school of associated ideas — of which school the mind- 

 stuff theory is nothing but the last and subtlest offshoot. 



The second difficulty is deeper still. The ' entire brain- 

 process ' is not a physical fact at all. It is the appearance to 

 an onlooking mind of a multitude of physical facts. ' En- 

 tire brain ' is nothing but our name for the way in which a 

 million of molecules arranged in certain positions may 

 affect our sense. On the principles of the corpuscular or 

 mechanical philosophy, the only realities are the separate 

 molecules, or at most the cells. Their aggregation into 

 a * brain ' is a fiction of popular speech. Such a fiction 

 cannot serve as the objectively real counterpart to any 

 psychic state whatever. Only a genuinely physical fact can 

 so serve. But the molecular fact is the only genuine physi- 

 cal fact — whereupon we seem, if we are to have an elemen- 

 tary psycho-physic law at all, thrust right back upon some- 

 thing like the mind-stuff theory, lor the molecular fact, 

 being an element of the ' brain,' would seem naturally to 

 correspond, not to the total thoughts, but to elements in 

 the thought. 



What shall we do? Many would find relief at this 

 point in celebrating the mystery of the Unknowable and the 

 * awe ' which we should feel at having such a principle to 

 take final charge of our perplexities. Others would rejoice 

 that the finite and separatist view of things with which we 

 started had at last developed its contradictions, and was 



