The error proceeds from the use of concepts which cause the reality to be lost sight of. The reality shows that every phenomenon of consciousness consists in a mode of activity, an aggregate of faculties which require an object to fasten on to and so realise themselves, and that this object is furnished by matter. What we always note in intuition is the union, the incarnation of consciousness-matter. Our thoughts, our memories, our reasonings have as object sensations, images--that is to say, things which, strictly speaking, are as material as our own brains. It is therefore rather childish to put all these workings of the spirit on another plane and in another world than the workings of the brain since they are in great part of the same nature as the last named and they contain so many material elements. Now if we re-establish facts as they are, if we admit a parallelism between physical phenomena, on the one hand, and phenomena at once physical and psychical, on the other, the parallelist hypothesis loses every sort of meaning. It ceases to present to us the image of two phenomena of an absolutely different order, which are found coupled together like the two faces of a unity, the front and back of a page, the right and wrong side of a stuff. If there is anything material in the psychical part, the opposition of nature no longer exists between the two terms; they become identical. Very often, certain parallelists, after thinking they have discovered the duality of nature, endeavour to bring it back to unity by supposing that the two faces of the reality are as two effects of one unique reality, inaccessible to our senses and underlying appearances. Why go so far afield to seek unity? It is trouble in vain: for it is to be found in the phenomenon itself. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 46: I can quote two observations in support of this. M. BRIEUX, to whom I was relating this part of my argument, stopped me, saying, "You have guessed right; I represent to myself thought issuing from brain in the form of an electric gleam." Dr. SIMON also informed me, during the reading of my manuscript, that he saw "thought floating over the brain like an _ignis fatuus_."] CHAPTER IV MODERN THEORIES It may be thought that the objection taken above to parallelism and materialism is personal to myself, because I have put it forward as the consequence of my analysis of the respective shares of thought and matter in every act of cognition. This is not so. I am here in harmony with other philosophers who arrived at the same conclusions long before me, and it may be useful to quote them.