ay into the position H-O-H, they _affect
surrounding bodies differently_: they now wet our skin, dissolve
sugar, put out fire, etc., which they didn't in their former
positions. 'Water' is but _our name_ for what acts thus peculiarly.
But if the skin, sugar, and fire were absent, no witness would speak
of water at all. He would still talk of the H and O distributively,
merely noting that they acted now in the new position H-O-H.

In the older psychologies the soul or self took the place of the
sugar, fire, or skin. The lower feelings produced _effects on it_,
and their apparent compounds were only its reactions. As you tickle
a man's face with a feather, and he laughs, so when you tickle his
intellectual principle with a retinal feeling, say, and a muscular
feeling at once, it laughs responsively by its category of 'space,'
but it would be false to treat the space as simply made of those
simpler feelings. It is rather a new and unique psychic creation which
their combined action on the mind is able to evoke.

I found myself obliged, in discussing the mind-dust theory, to urge
this last alternative view. The so-called mental compounds are simple
psychic reactions of a higher type. The form itself of them, I said,
is something new. We can't say that awareness of the alphabet as
such is nothing more than twenty-six awarenesses, each of a separate
letter; for those are twenty-six distinct awarenesses, of single
letters _without_ others, while their so-called sum is one awareness,
of every letter _with_ its comrades. There is thus something new in
the collective consciousness. It knows the same letters, indeed, but
it knows them in this novel way. It is safer, I said (for I fought shy
of admitting a self or soul or other agent of combination), to treat
the consciousness of the alphabet as a twenty-seventh fact, the
substitute and not the sum of the twenty-six simpler consciousnesses,
and to say that while under certain physiological conditions they
alone are produced, other more complex physiological conditions result
in its production instead. Do not talk, therefore, I said, of the
higher states _consisting_ of the simpler, or _being_ the same with
them; talk rather of their _knowing the same things_. They are
different mental facts, but they apprehend, each in its own peculiar
way, the same objective A, B, C, and D.

The theory of combination, I was forced to conclude, is thus
untenable, being both logically nonsensical