ure arises when the natural impulses are satisfied, the
feeling of pain when they are not satisfied. Since all
material processes are composed of movements of molecules and
elementary atoms, pleasure and pain must have their seat in
these particles. . . . Thus the same mental thread runs
through all material phenomena. The human mind is nothing but
the highest development on our earth of the mental processes
which universally animate and move nature."[288:17]

According to panpsychism, then, physical nature is the manifestation of
an _appetency or bare consciousness generalized from the thinker's
awareness of his most intimate self_. Such appetency or bare
consciousness is the essential or substantial state of that which
appears as physical nature.

[Sidenote: The Inherent Difficulty in Spiritualism. No Provision for
Objective Knowledge.]

Sect. 137. We must now turn to the efforts which this doctrine has made
to maintain itself against the sceptical trend of its own epistemology.
For precisely as in the case of phenomenalism its dialectical principle
threatens to be self-destructive. Immediate presence is still the test
of knowledge. But does not immediate presence connote relativity and
inadequacy, at best; an initial phase of knowledge that must be
supplemented and corrected before objective reality and valid truth are
apprehended? Does not the individuality of the individual thinker
connote the very maximum of error? Indeed, spiritualism would seem to
have exceeded even Protagoreanism itself, and to have passed from
scepticism to deliberate nihilism. The object of knowledge is no longer
even, as with the phenomenalist, the thinker's thought, but only his
_thinking_. And if the thinker's thought is relative to him, then the
thinker's act of thinking is the very vanishing-point of relativity, the
negative term of a negating relation. How is a real, a self-subsistent
world to be composed of such? Impelled by a half-conscious realization
of the hopelessness of this situation, the exponent of spiritualism has
sought to universalize his conception; to define an _absolute or
ultimate spirit_ other than the individual thinker, though known in and
through him. But it is clear that this development of spiritualism, like
all of the speculative procedure of subjectivism, threatens to exceed
the scope of the original principle of knowledge. There is a strong
presumption against the possibili