of his memory, by quickness of sympathy and power of
suggestion, he may come very near to the truth of experience, as it has
been or might be unrolled in a human being.[9] The ideas with which Locke
operates are simply high lights picked out by attention in this nebulous
continuum, and identified by names. Ideas, in the original ideal sense of
the word, are indeed the only definite terms which attention can
discriminate and rest upon; but the unity of these units is specious, not
existential. If ideas were not logical or aesthetic essences but
self-subsisting feelings, each knowing itself, they would be insulated for
ever; no spirit could ever survey, recognise, or compare them; and mind
would have disappeared in the analysis of mind.

These considerations might enable us, I think, to mark the just frontier
of common sense even in this debatable land of psychology. All that is
biological, observable, and documentary in psychology falls within the
lines of physical science and offers no difficulty in principle. Nor need
literary psychology form a dangerous salient in the circuit of nature. The
dramatic poet or dramatic historian necessarily retains the presupposition
of a material world, since beyond his personal memory (and even within it)
he has nothing to stimulate and control his dramatic imagination save
knowledge of the material circumstances in which people live, and of the
material expression in action or words which they give to their feelings.
His moral insight simply vivifies the scene that nature and the sciences
of nature spread out before him: they tell him what has happened, and his
heart tells him what has been felt. Only literature can describe
experience for the excellent reason that the terms of experience are moral
and literary from the beginning. Mind is incorrigibly poetical: not
because it is not attentive to material facts and practical exigencies,
but because, being intensely attentive to them, it turns them into
pleasures and pains, and into many-coloured ideas. Yet at every turn there
is a possibility and an occasion for transmuting this poetry into science,
because ideas and emotions, being caused by material events, refer to
these events, and record their order.

All philosophies are frail, in that they are products of the human mind,
in which everything is essentially reactive, spontaneous, and volatile:
but as in passion and in language, so in philosophy, there are certain
comparatively st