Our reasonings have assumed that the 'integration' of a thousand psychic units must be either just the units over again, simply rebaptized, or else something real, but then other than and additional to those units; that if a certain existing fact is that of a thousand feelings, it cannot at the same time be that of ONE feeling; for the essence of feeling is to be felt, and as a psychic existent _feels_, so it must _be_. If the one feeling feels like no one of the thousand, in what sense can it be said to _be_ the thousand? These assumptions are what the monists will seek to undermine. The Hegelizers amongst them will take high ground at once, and say that the glory and beauty of the psychic life is that in it all contradictions find their reconciliation; and that it is just because the facts we are considering _are_ facts of the self that they are both one and many at the same time. With this intellectual temper I confess that I cannot contend. As in striking at some unresisting gossamer with a club, one but overreaches one's self, and the thing one aims at gets no harm. So I leave this school to its devices. The other monists are of less deliquescent frame, and try to break down distinctness among mental states by _making a distinction_. This sounds paradoxical, but it is only ingenious. The distinction is that _between the unconscious and the conscious being of the mental state_. It is the sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, and of turning what might become a science into a tumbling-ground for whimsies. It has numerous champions, and elaborate reasons to give for itself. We must therefore accord it due consideration. In discussing the question: DO UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL STATES EXIST? it will be best to give the list of so-called proofs as briefly as possible, and to follow each by its objection, as in scholastic books.[177] _First Proof_. The _minimum visibile_, the _minimum audibile_, are objects composed of parts. How can the whole affect the sense unless each part does? And yet each part does so without being separately sensible. Leibnitz calls the total consciousness an '_aperception_,' the supposed insensible consciousness by the name of '_petites perceptions_.' "To judge of the latter," he says, "I am accustomed to use the example of the roaring of the sea with which one is assailed when near the shore. To hear this noise as one does, one must hear the parts which compose its totality, that is, the noise of each wave,... although this noise would not be noticed if its wave were alone. One must be affected a little by the movement of one wave, one must have some perception of each several noise, however small it be. Otherwise one would not hear that of 100,000 waves, for of 100,000 zeros one can never make a quantity."[178]