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cession of Mr. Spencer, which sends us to consciousness as the 
sole and final arbiter of what it is to know, he robs it of 
all its authority by asserting that even in sensation all that we 
can know of the relation of the changes in the nervous organism 
to its related conscious activities must be learned through the 
light which is thrown upon the operations of evolution in other 
spheres of being. This is at once to set aside the final testi- 
mony of consciousness in respect to the lowest form of know- 
ledge in sense - perception, by referring the decision to a 
metaphysical or physiological theory. It is to set up a theory 
which professes to be founded on facts that are confessed to 
have no possible relation to the facts in question, to settle 
questions of fact and experience which are asserted to be 
utterly unlike those from which the induction is derived. 
What the conclusion is which he reaches from this induction 
is very clearly though very indirectly stated thus : “ Though 
accumulated observations and experiments have led us by a 
very indirect series of inferences to the belief that mind and 
nervous action are the subjective and objective forces of the 
same thing, we remain utterly incapable of seeing and even 
of imagining how the two are related” (§ 56, Principles 
of Psychology). This conclusion being reached, the author 
proceeds to show how they are related in sense-perception, i.e., 
how knowledge may be developed from or expressed in terms 
of nervous action. “ Knowing implies something acted upon 
and something acting upon it.” “ That which in the act of 
knowing is affected by the thing known, must itself be the 
substance of the mind. The substance of the mind escapes 
into some new form in recognising some form under which it 
has just existed.” He then argues that what seem to be the 
simplest sense-perceptions — i.e., alterations of the substance of 
the mind or subjective phenomena of nervous activity, as of 
sound, cannot be simple because we speak of their quality, 
timbre , volume, &c., mistaking here an ultimate or indecom- 
posable experience of consciousness for the several relations 
which it may have to other experiences or acts. As we cannot 
find in consciousness the simplest element of this really complex 
experience we must look for it elsewhere. We finally find, or 
conclude, or conjecture, that it must be akin to a simple 
“ nervous shock.” We next find or infer that many simple 
nervous shocks are the essential counterpart or objective side 
to which the simplest experience of consciousness in sensation 
corresponds. We conclude, then, that the nerve-pulses and 
the pulses of feeling clearly answer to one another, and it can 
scarcely be doubted, that they do so throughout.” If next 
we apply to the teachings of chemistry concerning matter in 
