We have next to consider Clifford’s account of the genesis out of elementary feelings of personal consciousness. The hypothesis of mind-stuff, we must remember, was framed in order to preserve the same continuity of ejective facts as we see to exist in the case of objective facts, to provide, that is, a gradual development of the human mind out of the simpler feelings of amœbæ and even of atoms. It must be denied however that the hypothesis is a success if we retain the usual meanings of the words continuity and development. Properly speaking a thing can only be said to grow or develop when it remains the same with itself all through the process and unfolds therein capacities which were anyhow latent in it to start with. Thus a tadpole develops into a frog, a grub into a butterfly, and the child grows into the man. But in the series of ejects which begins from atoms and after running through amœba and ape finally culminates in the human intelligence there is no point of identity, no community between the first and last terms. The eject which is the molecule is denied by Clifford to be either conscious or rational, nor has it even will, like the philosophical factotum of Schopenhauer or Von Hartmann. It is a purely negative conception, the abstract opposite of that mind into which it is to ultimately develop. The hiatus between our intelligence and a thing in itself, which call it feeling, or mind-stuff, or what we will, is merely all that our intelligence is not, is none the less of a hiatus, because it is, with the help of apes and amœbæ, spread out thin, so to speak. It would be better frankly to avow the chasm that exists than to gloss over it with words like evolution and development. “When a material organism,” writes Clifford, “has reached a certain complexity of nervous structure, the complex of ejective facts which goes along with its action reaches that mode of complication which is called consciousness. When a stream of feelings is so compacted together that at each instant it consists of (1) new feelings, (2) fainter repetitions of previous ones, and (3) links connecting these repetitions, the stream is called a consciousness. Consciousness is thus a relative thing, a mode of complication of certain elements, and a property of the complex so produced.” If we look into this statement we see that it only amounts to this: that feelings constitute a conscious self when they become the feelings of a conscious self and not before, for except as gathered up in the unity of a self which has memory and remains the same throughout its differences feelings can be neither new nor repeated nor joined by links. 1) That a feeling is new means that I attend to it, contrast it with former ones, and decide that I have not felt it before. 2) That a feeling is a previous feeling now repeated means that I recognise it as having already occurred.