GO 
seem to be plain facts of consciousness. He claims to have 
shown that our consciousness of Personality is a delusion, and 
that we are really nothing more than a bundle of fibres, modi- 
fications of solar force. He claims to have shown that what 
we call Conscience is the mere upgrowth of our mental and 
emotional nature evolved in us by tlie play of social forces. 
He claims to have shown that we have no real Liberty, that 
we are only aggregates of protoplasm, registering in our 
organisms all the forces that play upon us, and combining 
these according to unvarying law. 
I now proceed to deal with the first of these. 
1. Out Sense of Personality and Identity. 
If consciousness tells us any one thing, it surely assures us 
that we are persons ; it declares the existence of a self ; it says 
that our whole organisation in all its parts is unified, so that 
one ego inhabits and ranges over its entire territory. As 
stated above, Mr. Spencer claims to prove that we are only 
bundles of nerve and other matter; afferent and efferent 
threads of nerve fibre, with uniting ganglia ; a huge concourse 
of atoms, not fortuitous, but bound together under strict and 
unvarying laws. He maintains that connexions and co-ordina- 
tions have been gradually established in this organism ; that 
the deepest and greatest of such connexions have become 
structural in us by long-continued descent, so that they make 
the broad channels along which our nervous energy must go, 
in much the same way as Geology declares the course of a 
great river has been slowly but surely determined by the 
volume of water scooping out the river-bed. Hence they 
appear in us, he contends, in the shape of the Logical Laws, 
structurally embedded in our mental being. He says: — The 
universal law that, other things equal, the cohesion of psychical 
states is proportionate to the frequency with which they have 
followed one another in experience, supplies an explanation of 
the so-called forms of thought,^ as soon as it is supplemented 
by the law that habitual psychical successions entail some 
hereditary tendency to such successions, which, under per- 
sistent conditions, will become cumulative in generation after 
generation. We saw that the establishment of those com- 
pound reflex actions called instincts is comprehensible on the 
principle that inner relations are, by perpetual repetition, 
organised into correspondence with outer relations. We have 
now to observe that the establishment of those consolidated, 
those indissoluble, those instinctive mental relations consti- 
tuting our ideas of Space and Time, is comprehensible on the 
same principle.'’^ He then shows that Space and Time being 
