342 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



things as a community of selves, as, for instance, 

 a college or other similar society. To him the 

 unity is merely in the conception or idea of the 

 society. It seems quite conceivable to us somehow 

 that there should be one self as a nucleus amongst 

 the many selves and one that would act and react 

 on them, so that if almost infinitely superior to the 

 rest it should act as the unifying principle be- 

 tween them. This, we think, is possible without 

 having recourse to the apparently self-contradictory 

 notion of selves within selves. 



On this view the constituent selves are merely 

 " reflections," so to speak, of the original ; like so 

 many images of the same man in a number of 

 mirrors ; or of the multiple images in any one of 

 them. It cannot be said that one is within the 

 other, although they all reflect and are dependent 

 on the central figure, which constitutes the unifying 

 principle between them all. 



So also is it with the world of mind. Those 

 dim self-conscious units, ourselves, can scarcely be 

 units of very much importance to the universe as a 

 whole. The conviction is deeply rooted in our 

 minds that such units are insignificant compared 

 with that greater and far more important unit 

 which unites the whole. Nay, the very existence 

 of that permanent source of possible sensation which 

 we call the universe on idealistic principles thus 

 involves a universal mind. 



If we denied the reality of that permanent 

 source of possibility of sensation then as idealists, 



