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256 Nor may we say that the ultimate atomic states of consciousness may be, as it were, chemically united into a whole that is more than an aggregate. Physical atoms in space, if endowed with sufficiently numerous affinities, may unite into what wholes you will; but a mental fact is a mental fact, and no more. An ultimate independent unit of consciousness, conceived after the analogy of a sensation, can have to another like unit only one of three relations; it may coexist with this other unit, or it may precede or follow it in time. There is no other relation possible. Affinity, or attraction, or approach of one pain or pleasure, of one sensation of pressure or of motion to another, is a meaningless jingle of words, unless, indeed, such an expression is used to name figuratively the relations that in and for a comparing, contrasting, uniting, and separating active consciousness, two ideas are made to bear. Thus, then, this atomic monism brings us no nearer than before to the relation between the data of consciousness and the facts of physical nature. For the rest, how mechanical science can be satisfied to regard its material points as nothing but independently existing fragments of mind, whose whole being is intensive; how, out of these intensive units, space-relations are to be constructed at all — these questions we may for the present neglect. Atomic monism, a synthesis, or, rather, a jumble of physiological psychology with doctrines that are incompatible with any science whatever, has never answered these questions, and doubtless never will.

But let us not be over-hasty. There are other