conscious of a certain feeling of insufficiency left by the method he took to relieve them. Probably, too, many of you wished, as I did, that we might be supplied in some way with something more positive, something more satisfyingly affirmative, than the mere opening of a chance to pull ourselves together and seize upon immortal life by a tour de force of resolute belief. For this was all that our essayist could achieve by simply replying to objections, though it was no doubt all that he aimed at achieving.
Many others of you, I moreover suspect, wondered in particular if there might not be some course of thought in which that idealistic theory of our existence, suggested by his transmission-view of the functional relation between our conscious experiences and the brain, would be carried up above the region of mere hypothesis into the world of real fact. I mean the theory, that, as Professor James himself expresses it, “the whole universe of material things — the furniture of earth and choir of heaven — should turn out to be a mere surface-veil of phenomena, hiding and keeping back the world of genuine realities; . . . the whole world of natural experience, as we get it, to be but a time-mask, shattering or refracting the one infinite Thought which is the sole reality of those millions of finite streams of consciousness known to us as
