Tertium Organum

exchanging thoughts with them 
and by analogy with ourselves. Now we can add that, 
because of this 
we can only know 
about the existence of minds 
similar to ours
and can know no others, whether they exist 
or not, 
until we find ourselves on their plane. 
If we should one day feel our mind not only as it is reflected by the brain but in a 
wider sense, we would simultaneously have the possibility of discovering beings, 
analogous to ourselves, whose mind is independent of the brain, if such beings exist in 
nature. 
But do such beings exist or not? What can our thought, 
such as it is now,
tell us 
concerning this? 
Observing the world from outside, we see in it actions proceeding 
* From Frederick Myers's essay on the 'Subliminal Consciousness', as quoted in W. 
James's book 
The Varieties of Religious Experience,
New York, Longmans Green, 
1917. 

---

from rational, conscious causes, such as the work of human beings appears to 
us; and we see actions proceeding from unconscious blind forces of nature, 
such as the movement of waves, ebbing and flowing tides, the flow of rivers, 
etc., etc. 
Such a division of observed actions into rational and mechanical seems 
naive even from the positivist point of view. If we have learned something by
the study of nature, if the positivist method has given us anything at all, it is 
the conviction of the essential 
unity
of phenomena. We know, and we know 
this for certain, that things basically similar cannot result from dissimilar 
causes. And scientific philosophy knows it too. Therefore it also regards the 
above-mentioned division as naive and, aware of the impossibility of such a 
dualism - that one part of observed phenomena proceeds from rational and 
conscious causes and another part from irrational and unconscious - it finds it 
possible to explain 
everything
as proceeding from irrational and unconscious 
causes. 
Scientific observation tells us that the apparent rationality of human actions 
is nothing but illusion and self-deception. Man is a plaything in the hands of 
elemental forces. He is only a transmitting station of forces. Everything that
he thinks he 
does
is in reality done for him by external forces which enter into 
him with air, with food, with sunlight. Man does not perform a single action 
by himself. He is only a prism through which a line of action is reflected in a 
certain way. But as a ray of light does not originate from the prism, so the 
action does not originate from man's intellect. 
In confirmation of this there is advanced, among other things, the 
'theoretical experiment' of German psycho-physiologists. They assert that, if it 
were possible from the moment of birth to deprive a man of 
ALL EXTERNAL 
IMPRESSIONS
: of light, sound, touch, heat, cold and so on, and at the same time 
keep him alive, such a man would not be capable of 
ANY
, 
EVEN THE MOST 
SIGNIFICANT ACTION
. 
It follows from this that man is an automaton, similar to the 
automaton
on 
which the American physicist Tesla worked and which, obeying electric 
currents and long-distance wireless waves, was supposed to perform a whole 
series of complex movements. 
It follows that all 
man's actions 
depend on external stimuli. The smallest 
reflex requires an external irritation. A more complex action needs a whole 
series of preceding complex irritations. Sometimes there is a great lapse of 
time between the irritation and the action, and a man does not feel any 
connection between them. Consequently he regards his actions as volitional, 
whereas, in actual fact, volitional actions do not exist. A man cannot do 
anything