Still less can I allow "motion" the right to create a world-problem where none exists, and thereby to conceal the real point of attack in the investigation of reality.
I may add that some years ago I took exactly Dr. Carus's point of view, which I presented in a lecture on Psycho-physics published in 1863 in the Oesterreichische Zeitschrift für praktische Heilkunde.
With regard to Clifford I may make the following remarks. The notion "eject" pleases me very much. I have long had the idea in mind, but have not defined it because its limitation is not clear to me; nor has Clifford given me any light on the subject. Is the representation in us of the material nature of things we cannot lay hold of (the sun, the moon) to be called an eject? Are the abstract concepts of physical hypotheses, which in their very nature can never become sense-affective, ejects? Such things are abstract in widely differing degrees, and are bound up with the sensory in very unequal proportions; the impossibility of becoming sense-affective is partly absolute, partly only relative, that is, it exists for the time being.
I do not at all agree with Clifford's notion "mind-stuff"; in this I wholly concur with Dr. Carus. It is not unbiased philosophising to come down in the end to a psychological notion as comprehensive of the world,—a notion on the face of it pre-eminently one-sided.
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In connection with the subject under discussion, I might incidentally make mention of Mr. Charles S. Peirce's article "The Architecture of Theories" in the last number of The Monist. One Mr. Peirce, a mathematician,[82] has made some very valuable investigations, similar to Grassmann's. This author's view of the evolution of natural laws does not strike me as so singular. If predominance be given in our conception of the world to the spiritualistic or psychical aspect, the laws of nature may be regarded as tremendous phenomena of memory; as I attempted some years ago to set forth in a lecture of mine. The idea of their evolution is then very near at hand. Of course I do not think that for the time being we can gain much light from this view. For the present the "scientific method" in the grooves of which we have moved for three hundred years, continues to be the most fruitful. It is advisable to be very cautious in advancing beyond this. It is for this reason also that I do not think very much of the fruitfulness of the idea that the entire world is animated and feeling. We have as yet too little insight into the psychical, and still less into the connection between brain-organisation and brain-function and psychical process. Of what advantage to us is the assumption of feeling in cells in which every clue is missing by which to proceed from the psychical assumed to the physical connected with it. It seems to me that the physical and psychical investigation of sensations is for the time being the only thing that can be entered upon with any prospect of accomplishing anything. In this we shall first learn the proper formulation of questions that are to form the subject of further investigations.
[82] Mr. Benjamin Peirce, father of Mr. Charles S. Peirce.—ED.