for many different minds. I admitted that I had not space to
treat of certain possible objections in that article; but in [the last
essay] I took some of the objections up. At the end of that [essay] I
said that still more formidable-sounding objections remained; so, to
leave my pure-experience theory in as strong a state as possible, I
propose to consider those objections now.

I

The objections I previously tried to dispose of were purely logical or
dialectical. No one identical term, whether physical or psychical, it
had been said, could be the subject of two relations at once. This
thesis I sought to prove unfounded. The objections that now confront us
arise from the nature supposed to inhere in psychic facts specifically.
Whatever may be the case with physical objects, a fact of consciousness,
it is alleged (and indeed very plausibly), can not, without
self-contradiction, be treated as a portion of two different minds, and
for the following reasons.

In the physical world we make with impunity the assumption that one and
the same material object can figure in an indefinitely large number of
different processes at once. When, for instance, a sheet of rubber is
pulled at its four corners, a unit of rubber in the middle of the sheet
is affected by all four of the pulls. It _transmits_ them each, as if
it pulled in four different ways at once itself. So, an air-particle or
an ether-particle 'compounds' the different directions of movement
imprinted on it without obliterating their several individualities. It
delivers them distinct, on the contrary, at as many several 'receivers'
(ear, eye or what not) as may be 'tuned' to that effect. The apparent
paradox of a distinctness like this surviving in the midst of
compounding is a thing which, I fancy, the analyses made by physicists
have by this time sufficiently cleared up.

But if, on the strength of these analogies, one should ask: "Why, if two
or more lines can run through one and the same geometrical point, or if
two or more distinct processes of activity can run through one and the
same physical thing so that it simultaneously plays a role in each and
every process, might not two or more streams of personal consciousness
include one and the same unit of experience so that it would
simultaneously be a part of the experience of all the different minds?"
one would be checked by thinking of a certain peculiarity by which
phenomena of consciousness differ from physic