Thus matter may be entirely passive, and the history of nations, stories of kings, down to the smallest details in the life of individuals, be phonographed out according to predetermined marks in the æther. In that case a man would, as to his material body, correspond to certain portions of matter; as to his actions and thoughts he would be a complicated set of furrows in the æther.

Now what the man is in himself may be left undetermined; but he would be more intimately connected with the æther than with the matter of his body. And we may suppose that the æther itself is capable of movement and alteration; that it moulds itself into new furrows and marks.

Thus the old woman smoking a pipe by the wayside years ago, and whom I somehow so often remember, is not much different from me—we are both corrugations of the same æther.

Now our consciousness is limited to our bodily surroundings. Yet it may be supposed that in an action of our wills we, whatever we are (and for the present let us suppose that we are a part of the æther), we may be altering these corrugations of the æther. A single act of our wills, when we really do act, may be a universal affair with quite infinite relations. Thus it may be the immediate presentation to us of an alteration proceeding from us of all that set of corrugations which represents our future life; it may be the whole disposition and lie of events, which are prepared for the earth to phonograph out, being differently disposed. And it evidently is quite independent of the particular furrows in which such alteration first occurs. That long strip of æther which is a very humble individual may, by an act of self-configuration, affect the neighbouring long strips and produce great changes. At any rate the intrinsic value of the will is quite independent of the kind of furrows along which any material human body is proceeding.

APPENDIX II.

It is a good plan in fixing our attention to give definite names to the directions of space. Let U stand for up. Then the up direction we will call the U direction, or simply U.

Then sideways, from left to right, we will call V, so that moving in the V direction, or moving V, means moving to the right hand.

Then the away direction we will call W, so that a motion which goes away from us we call a W motion, and its direction we call W.

Then any other direction which we suppose independent of these we will call the X direction. Now the simple push or displacement takes place in direction V, or left to right. It is turned into its image by turning in the plane U V—i.e., the plane of the paper.

The wave motion takes up the directions U V, and it can be turned into its image by a turning in the plane W V—i.e., by turning out of the paper, as if the paper were folded over about the dotted line. Then finally the twisting motion takes up the directions U V W, and can be turned into its image by being turned in the plane V X. That is, if each point is turned half-way round in this plane it becomes the corresponding point in the image twist. Thus on the supposition of the preceding pages, if a positively electrified particle could be turned in 4 space, it would become a negatively electrified particle.