identical. And such a conclusion commends itself to a thinker as
careful and scientific as Stout, who in his "Manual of
Psychology" writes as follows: "The individual consciousness,
as we know it, must be regarded as a payment of a wider whole,
by which its origin and its changes are determined. As the brain
forms only a fragmentary portion of the total system of natural
phenomena, so we must assume the stream of individual
consciousness to be in like manner part of an immaterial
system. We must further assume that this immaterial system in
its totality is related to nervous processes taking place in the
cortex of the brain."

So, too, James, in his "Varieties of Religious Experience,"
declares that "our normal waking consciousness, rational
consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of
consciousness; whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest
of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely
different. We may go through life without suspecting their
existence; but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they
are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality
and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be
final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite
disregarded."

A thinker of a very different type, Royce, in his "World and the
Individual," concurs in this idea of a wider, universal
consciousness. "We have no right whatever to speak of really
unconscious Nature, but only of uncommunicative Nature, or of
Nature whose mental processes go on at such different time-rates
from ours that we cannot adjust ourselves to a live appreciation
of their inward fluency, although our consciousness does
make us aware of their presence. . . . Nature is thus a vast
conscious process, whose relation to time varies vastly,
but whose general characteristics are throughout the
same. From this point of view evolution would be a series of
processes suggesting to us various degrees and types of
conscious processes. The processes, in case of so-called
inorganic matter are very remote from us, while in the case of
the processes of our fellows we understand them better." Again
he calls Nature "a vast realm of finite consciousness of which
your own is at once a part and an example."

A thinker of still another type, Paulsen, whose influence in
Germany was so marked, and whose death we so lately
lamented, was whole-heartedly a sympathiser with Fechner's
vie