iser than I am to answer it." Without pretending to
be wiser than Mr. Laing, we hope it will not be too presumptuous for us
to suggest that if Smith dies in a trance _believing_ himself to be
Jones, he is under a delusion, and that he really is Smith. Else it
would be very awkward for poor Jones, who in nowise believes himself to
be Smith. Mr. Laing would have to break it gently to Jones, that, "in
fact, my dear sir, Smith borrowed your personality, and unfortunately
died before returning it; and as to whether you are yourself or Smith,
as to whether you are alive or dead, 'I confess it takes some one wiser
than I am to decide.'" That a man's own name, own surroundings, own
antecedents, are all objects of his thought, and distinguished from the
_self, ego,_ or _subject_ which contemplates them, has never suggested
itself to Mr. Laing. That though Smith may mistake every one of these,
yet the term "I" necessarily and invariably means the same for him, the
one central, constant unity to which every _non-ego_ is opposed. And
this from a man who elsewhere claims an easy familiarity with Kant.
"Again what can be said of love and hate if under given circumstances
they can be transformed into one another by a magnet?" What indeed? And
how is it that the gold-fish make no difference in the weight of the
globe of water?

His conclusion to these inquiries is: "When Shakespeare said, 'We are
such stuff as dreams are made of,' he enumerates what has become a
scientific fact. The 'stuff' is in all cases the same--vibratory motions
of nerve particles." [36] Thus knowledge, self-consciousness,
free-choice, is as much a function of matter as fermentation, or
crystallisation--a mode of motion, not dissimilar from heat, perhaps
transformable therewith.

Recapitulating this farrago of nonsense on p. 188, he adds a new
difficulty which ought to make him pause in his wild career. "What is
the value of the evidence of the senses if a suggestion can make us see
the hat, but not the man who wears it; or dance half the night with an
imaginary partner? Am I 'I myself, I,' or am I a barrel-organ playing
'God save the Queen,' if the stops are set in the normal fashion, but
the 'Marseillaise' if some cunning hand has altered them without my
knowledge? These are questions which I cannot answer." He cannot answer
a question on which the value of his whole system of physical philosophy
depends; uncertain about his own identity, about the evidence of