42B On the Appreciation of Ultra-visible Quantities, 



degree resemble one another ; and, in particular, the time 

 relations between them and between them and my thoughts 

 are the same as the time relations of the physical events that, 

 as a consequence, go on in my brain. This body of events in 

 the Autic Universe and the thoughts or other auta between 

 which they occur, may suitably be spoken of as a synergos 

 {o-vvepyos, a fellow- worker) which is ever on the alert to work 

 along with my mind, and on which the thoughts that are my 

 mind as much depend (in the autic sense of that word), as 

 do those few physical events in my brain which are associated 

 with my thoughts depend (in the physical sense of the word) 

 upon the vast multitude of other physical events also going 

 on in my brain. The one cannot even exist without the 

 other. 



The lesson to be learned from all this is that psychology 

 and the other branches of metaphysics, as presented by the 

 ablest men who were unaware of the existence of this synergos 

 and of the large degree in which it intervenes in all that 

 happens in the mind, will now have to be rewritten. In 

 memory ; in the association of ideas ; and in the other mis- 

 called " faculties and operations of the human mind,' ? it is 

 little we do : it is much that is done for us*. Man's mind — 



* Take, for example, some particular instance of memory. I remember 

 where I sat at breakfast this morning, where my companions sat, also 

 several particulars of what was said during breakfast, of the gestures of 

 my companions, of my own motions, of what I ate, of the equipage on the 

 table, and so on. None of these things have occupied my thoughts since 

 breakfast, till I sat down to write these lines ; since when they have all 

 come into my mind. 



Now what does all this mean ? It means that the group of thoughts 

 which I call myself — my mind — and which at each instant is a group the 

 several parts of which are connected and interacting in that way that we 

 call being within one consciousness, is a group of thoughts that has 

 undergone change : that one instance of this change has been the dis- 

 continuance of the above-recited perceptions that formed part of the group 

 at breakfast-time, and that another instance has been the occurrence 

 now within this group of what is more or less an imperfect and much 

 modified repetition of some of those perceptions, accompanied by the 

 additional thought which we call being aware that they had at breakfast- 

 time occupied a place within the group in the fuller form of complete 

 perceptions. During the intervening hours none of the&e occupied any 

 place in the group either in their fuller or in their modified form : never- 

 theless, there must have been, somewhere in the autic universe, a chain 

 of causation connecting the original perceptions and the memory of them. 

 Of this chain the first link ivas a part of my mind, the last link is a part 

 of my mind, but the connecting links have been in the synergos. 



This becomes clearer when we turn to the objective or phenomenal 

 world, which is a kind of shadow thrown in a special way by the suc- 

 cession of events that occur in the autic universe (see Stoney " On the 

 Relation between Science and Ontology," Scientific Proceedings of the 

 Royal Dublin Society, vol. vi. pp. 502, 503, 504). My thoughts, which 



