The speculations in question are
quoted from Mr. Spencer, and are as follows:--
"Mind, as known to the possessor of it, is a circumscribed aggregate of
activities; and the cohesion of these activities, one with another,
throughout the aggregate, compels the postulation of a something of which
they are the activities. But the same experiences which make him aware of
this coherent aggregate of mental activities, simultaneously make him aware
of activities that are not included in it--outlying activities which become
known by their effects on this aggregate, but which are experimentally
proved to be not coherent with it, and to be coherent with one another
(_First Principles_, Sec.Sec. 43, 44). As, by the definition of them, these
external activities cannot be brought within the aggregate of activities
distinguished as those of Mind, they must for ever remain to him nothing
more than the unknown correlatives of their effects on this aggregate; and
can be thought of only in terms furnished by this aggregate. Hence, if he
regards his conceptions of these activities lying beyond Mind as
constituting knowledge of them, he is deluding himself: he is but
representing these activities in terms of Mind, and can never do otherwise.
Eventually he is obliged to admit that his ideas of Matter and Motion,
merely symbolic of unknowable realities, are complex states of
consciousness built out of units of feeling.
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