nce. In principle it is
the same habitual tendency which makes me associate every element of my
world with its appropriate name. It is different in the case of other
sensations. When I am absent from Niagara I do not, in thinking of it,
primarily conceive of it as a roar of sound. I think of certain motions
of mass which, if I were present, would occasion the subjective
sensations of sound. But for the habitual tendency arising from the
universal reference to the visible I would do the same in the case of
the visual image. All I am necessitated to think is a real event--a
real, physical, dynamical transmutation--proceeding quite independently
of my perception or presence; and if I can only manage to realise that I
must, for philosophical purposes, eliminate my reference to visual as
well as to audible or other sensations, I will understand that all I am
entitled to, and all I can, without hopeless contradiction, postulate as
real thing existing independently of my perception, is a transmutation
of Energy. This energy is imperceptible, unextended, unfigured, yet it
is by no means a mere logical or mental necessity or associative
tendency. On the contrary, it is very real. It sustains my every act. By
an imperative mental necessity I am obliged, by inference from my
experiences as an active and percipient agent, to postulate the
energetic system in which I am involved, and with one particular centre
in which I am organically related.

But we recall at this point that Science says she must still postulate
Matter as the vehicle of Energy. But what does that mean except that the
subject of her studies is the sensible presentation which itself
consists of energy transmutation in part constantly changing but with
relatively permanent and recurrent elements? These more permanent
elements constitute what we call bodies. If the sensible presentation
consisted exclusively of one continuous, unchanging phenomenon, Reason
would never be stimulated, and Personality, Cause, Power would never
have been postulated or conceived. But the transmutation is constantly
"accelerated"--incessantly fluctuates and varies. Certain of these
variations I recognise as related to my own volitional activity, and I
am thus furnished with a key which enables me, by a sympathetic analogy,
to attribute all the changes in my experience to various agents, each
related to the other by the intervention of this system of physical
Energy. Some of these I can fur