A CONNECTING MEDIUM which we permit ourselves to use that word, and they are not yet incorporated into physics. Till they are, they may remain more or less vague; but how or when they can be incorporated, is not for me even to conjecture. Still, it is open to a physicist to state how the universe appears to him, in its broad character and physical aspect. If I were to make the attempt, I should find it necessary, for the sake of clearness, to begin with the simplest and most fundamental ideas; in order to illustrate, by facts and notions in universal knowledge, the kind of process which essentially occurs in con- nection with the formation of higher and less familiar conceptions—in regions where the com- mon information of the race is so slight as to be useless. Primary Acquaintance with the External World. Beginning with our most fundamental sense, I should sketch the matter thus:— We have muscles and can move. I cannot analyze motion—I doubt if the attempt is wise— it is a simple immediate act of perception, a direct sense of free unresisted muscular action. We may indeed move without feeling it, and that teaches us nothing. but we may move so as to feel it, and this teaches us much, and leads to our first scientific inference—oez., space; that is, simply, room to move about. We might 7