Pollock in September, 1874, à propos of Green’s introduction to Hume, which evinces pretty clearly that Clifford did not discern the true drift of Hume’s speculations in the way Hume did himself. “I hope,” he writes, “you have seen Sidgwick’s remarks on the introduction; he points out that to prove Hume insufficient is not to do much at the present day.... Green, for instance, points out that Hume has no complete theory of the object;—to find fault with Hume for the omission is like blaming Newton for not including Maxwell’s electricity in the Principia.” Here Clifford hardly writes as if he saw that his own theory of the object as e. g. an unrelated feeling is open to exactly the same criticisms as Hume’s, as if he understood, what Hume had an inkling of, that, in proving the ego to be a relative thing instead of the heart and centre of reality, you dissipate the universe into nothing. There are several other features in Clifford’s doctrine that call for criticism. It should for example be pointed out that the entire view that ejects are the truth of objects is in the first instance a deliverance of consciousness itself. I only transcend my individual feelings, says Clifford, so far as I infer a consciousness more or less like my own to underlie them; and this underlying eject is the sole reality. “How this inference is justified, how consciousness can testify to the existence of anything outside of itself, I do not pretend to say; I need not untie a knot which the world has cut for me long ago.” (Vol. II, p. 73.) But if consciousness is but the property of a temporary conjunction of unconscious feelings, what value shall we attach to its assurances? They are certainly not valid except for itself; they do not hold good for the atomic feelings of which the world ultimately consists. But my belief that the real is in the last resort an atom of feeling is simply an extension of my conviction that ejects are the truth of my feelings. Prove this conviction an illusion—and Clifford does prove it to be such, when he declares consciousness to be a relative thing—and you prove the entire theory an illusion. Thus the tail of Clifford’s theory is bitten off by the head.