our private selves.”[1] This theory, Professor James in his argument presents as a possible supposition merely, and his logical aim is simply to show that the superficially alarming proclamation of physiological psychology, which declares all consciousness to be a function of the brain, cannot exclude the chance for this supposition, nor our rational right to make it if we will. He puts it, indeed, as an imaginative possibility rather than a scientific hypothesis, and gives it great poetic force as well as logical plausibility by his quotation of Shelley’s lines,[2] —
- Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
- Stains the white radiance of eternity.
“Suppose,” he adds, "that this were really so, and suppose, moreover, that the dome, opaque enough at all times to the full super-solar blaze, could at certain times and places grow less so, and let certain beams pierce through into this sublunary world. . . . Only at particular times and places would it seem that, as a matter of fact, the veil of Nature can grow thin and rupturable enough for such effects to occur. But in those places gleams, however finite and unsatisfying, of the absolute life of the universe, are from time to time vouchsafed. . . . Admit now
