eem to involve a diffusion of my intelligence throughout Space which is
still more inconceivable and self-contradictory. Even apart from this
implication, the assumption of the Reality of the phenomenal world
destroys itself. To assume the reality of so-called material particles
is to lay the foundation of an argument which surely leads to the
conclusion that the whole world of my consciousness is produced by and
consists in motions in that certain small group of these same molecules
which is assumed to make up my brain. The solution is only reached when
we discover that the error lies in forgetting that the Reality which is
the seat of my Presentment is itself unperceived, and that what I
commonly call a body and a brain are the phenomena occurring in my
Presentment, and which I associate with such real substratum. The real
substratum of my Presentment is a part of the energetic Universe, which
is constantly undergoing transmutations. Wherever such Energy is united,
in an organism, with consciousness these transmutations, as affecting
and perceived by such consciousness, constitute its Presentment or
sense-experience; and aided by the constructive activity of thought
expand, as it were, subjectively into a whole world of experience, as
the electric current vibrating darkly along the narrow confines of the
wire suddenly expands at the carbon point into the luminous undulations
which light a city.

We admit, therefore, to the full the actuality and objectivity of the
sensible presentation. We only deny that it is the real thing-in-itself.
The latter is not discovered by sense. My energetic organism is like a
well-fitting garment; I do not feel it at all. I feel only changes or
transmutations taking place in it. Be not alarmed, therefore, for your
common-sense world. We leave it to you intact and actual--not deducting
even a single primary quality. Allowing fully for the extent to which,
little suspected by you, it is a mentally constructed system, its
elements are still actual and objective; they are modes of Reality;
extension and the other primary qualities are qualities of these modes.
Moreover, the Ego, I, myself, as Will, as a continuously identic
intelligent agent, am not given to myself immediately in my Presentment,
any more than is the real object. The existence of my Ego, of my
cogitant self, is an inference which I am compelled to draw from the
facts of my mental activity. _Cogito, ergo sum._ Similarly, my ener