n
Idealist who postulates an external universe as the unknown cause of
certain modifications we are conscious of within ourselves, and which,
according to his view, we never really get beyond. This species of
speculator is the commonest, but he is the least trustworthy of any; and
his fallacies are all the more dangerous by reason of the air of
plausibility with which they are invested. From first to last, he
represents us as the dupes of our own perfidious nature. By some
inexplicable process of association, he refers certain known effects to
certain unknown causes; and would thus explain to us how these effects
(our sensations) come to assume, _as it were_, the character of external
objects. But we know not "as it were." Away with such shuffling
phraseology. There is nothing either of reference, or of inference, or of
quasi-truthfulness in our apprehension of the material universe. It is
ours with a certainty which laughs to scorn all the deductions of logic,
and all the props of hypothesis. What we wish to know is, _how_ our
subjective affections can _be_, not _as it were_, but in God's truth, and
in the strict, literal, earnest, and unambiguous sense of the words, real
independent, objective existences. This is what the cosmothetical idealist
never can explain, and never attempts to explain.

4. We now come to the answer which the reader, who has followed us thus
far, will be prepared to find us putting forward as by far the most
important of any, and as containing in fact the very kernel of the
solution. A fourth man will say--"If the whole sphere of sense could only
be withdrawn _inwards_--could be made to fall somewhere _within
itself_--then the whole difficulty would disappear, and the problem would
be solved at once. The sensations which existed previous to this
retraction or withdrawal, would then, of necessity, fall without the
sphere of sense, ( see our second diagram;) and in doing so, they would
necessarily assume a totally different aspect from that of sensations.
They would be real independent objects: and (what is the important part of
the demonstration) they would acquire this _status_ without overstepping
by a hair's-breadth the primary limits of the sphere. Were such
phraseology allowable, we should say that the sphere has _understepped_
itself, and in doing so, has left its former contents high and dry, and
stamped with all the marks which can characterize objective existences."

Now the reader wi