Thus, _objects_ in the sense of things presented in _my_ consciousness, my phenomena, are not the sole or chief reality; ejects are equally real and my conviction of your existence as a conscious being like myself is coeval and of equal weight with my belief in my own conscious existence. You and your feelings are strictly speaking the only things which are real outside of myself and my consciousness. For though my objects or phenomena are external to my body they are not outside my consciousness, but part and parcel thereof. Nay, more than this an individual object, i. e. an object which is mine and mine only, never exists at all, according to Clifford, in the mind of man; for with each object as it exists in my mind is bound up the thought of similar objects existing in other men’s minds. All the objects in fact of which we are ever conscious are objects of consciousness in general, are in Clifford’s phrase social objects. “A fixed habit causes an object as it is found in my mind to be formed as a social object and insensibly embodies in it a reference to the minds of other men.” This belief in ejects is moreover the root of all language and all morals:—of language, because any sound which, becoming a sign to my neighbor, becomes thereby a mark to myself, must by the nature of the case be a mark of the social object and not of the individual object: of morals, because the “first great commandment, evolved in the light of day by healthy processes wherever men have lived together, is, ‘Put yourself in his place.’” So far there is nothing to distinguish Clifford’s theory from ordinary Idealism, which denies that the universe is real except as a phenomenon or appearance before a Self conscious thereof. The future course of Clifford’s argument turns upon two assumptions. One of these, borrowed from the current physiology of the brain, is this: that the changes in my consciousness—ejective facts he calls them—run parallel with the changes in my brain, which are objective facts. The parallelism between them is one of complexity, an analogy of structure. The complex ejective facts are the same sort of complication of simple ejects as the complex motions of the brain are of simple molecular movements. Clifford illustrates the points from the relation of speech to writing, the sentence spoken is the same function of the elementary sounds as the same sentence written is of the corresponding letters. In like manner the complex human mind is the same function of simple feelings as the brain is of primary atoms.