For, if physical and mental processes are everywhere consubstantial, or identical in kind, it can make no difference whether we regard their sequences as objective or ejective, physical or spiritual. Hence, we are free to regard all causation as of a character essentially psychical. But, if so, it must be self-contained as psychical; it cannot be in any way determined by anything from without, seeing that outside itself there is nothing in the Universe. Now, if this is true of the World-eject, it must also be true of the Man-eject, as well as of the Man-subject, or Ego. If all causation is psychical, that portion of it which belongs to, or is manifested by, my own personality is not laid upon me by anything from without; it is merely the expression of my own psychical activity, as this is taking place within the circumscribed area of my own personality. And this activity is spontaneous, in the sense that it is not coerced from without. All the sequences which that activity displays within this region are self-determined, in the sense that they are determined by the self, and not by any agency external to it. The only influence which any external agency can here exert, is that of insisting that bodily action--the physical outcome of my psychical processes--shall be in accordance with the conditions imposed by the internal system of causation; but this does not influence in any degree those mental processes which do not express themselves in bodily action. Hence, it may be perfectly true that my bodily action in the past might have been different from what it actually was; for as this action was the outcome of my mentation at the time (according to the spiritual index, which is now our guide), and as this mentation was not coerced from without, it might very well have been different from what it was. Each of the mental sequences at that time was a result of those preceding and a cause of those succeeding; but behind all this play of mental causation there all the while stood that Self, which was at once the condition of its occurrence, and the _First Cause_ of its action. It is not true that that Self was nothing more than the result of all this play of mental causation; it can only have been the First Cause of it. For, otherwise, the mental causation must have been the cause of that causation, which is absurd. Who or What it was that originally caused this First Cause is, of course, another question, which I shall presently hope to show is not merely unanswerable, but unmeaning. As a matter of fact, however, we know that this Self is here, and that it can thus be proved to be a substance, _standing under_ the whole of that more superficial display of mental causation which it is able to look upon introspectively--and this almost as _impersonally_ as if it were regarding the display as narrated by another mind. I say, then, that the theory of Monism entitles us to regard this Self as the _fons et