21 2 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



Now it is my ambition to follow out the line of thought here indicated. 

 It would be impossible to do so fully within the limits of a single paper, but 

 a begiuning may be made. Li the first place I desire to supply what I 

 conceive to be a serious omission in Professor Clifford's enumeration of the 

 data respL'cting Mind-Stuff which the "future theorist" has at his disposal. 

 Feelings not only have relations of contiguity or nextness in space, and of 

 sequence in time, but they also have two other quantitative aspects of very 

 great importance, namely degrees of intensity and differences of volume. We 

 are conscious that sensations differ in intensity; thus an acute pain is 

 felt to be a more intense sensation than a faint smell. Also, we are con- 

 scious that sensations of about equal intensity differ in something we call 

 volume or massiveness: thus a sensation of general weariness, though perhaps 

 felt to be of about equal intensity with a particular ache, is distinguished 

 (apart from its qualitative difference) as possessing greater mass or volume. 

 Lastly, we know that there exist causal relations among our feelings. Thus 

 the group of ideas* characterized as the realization of a danger is followed 

 by the emotion of terror, and the constancy of the sequence indicates that 

 we have here to deal with a causal relation. Hence the data we possess 

 are these : — a complex of feelings perpetually undergoing transformations, 

 causal relations between successive feelings, relations of contiguity or next- 

 ness among a few of the synchronous ones (though this appears to be an 

 exceptional phase of psychic structure, only to be found, as far as I am 

 aware, among simultaneous visual impressions which co-exist in a space or 

 manifoldness of two dimensions), qualitative resemblances and differences, 

 variations in intensity, and variations in volume or mass. These are the 

 materials from which we must construct our conception, save as to certain 

 spots necessarily a very dim one, of the noumenal world. And these are 

 the materials which we must connect, in the best way we can, with the 

 elementary factors of om* conception of the world of phenomena. We 

 must endeavour to establish a correspondence between feelings, their causal 

 and tojjical relations, their intensities and volumes, on the one hand, and 

 the dynamical conceptions of mass, momentum, force, energy, etc., on the 

 other. Now, as a preliminary to the working out of this correspondence it 

 will perhaps be advisable to take a brief survey of the ultimate dynamical 

 conceptions, and of their relations to one another. 



see, that space may be not only not homogeneous in ultimate structtire, but not even 

 infinitely divisible. It may consist of indivisible units. In that case there wovild be such 

 a thing as absolute magnitude, and measuring would be reduced to counting. The space- 

 unit would then be the analogue of the Mind- Stuff unit. 



* An idea is merely a combination of derivative feelings which are severally faint 

 copies of more vivid primary feelings. In the present case there is included also an unique 

 element called belief alluded to in an earlier portion of this paper. 



