experience by a constant reference to a Reality
beyond it--a necessity due to our association as Actors with an Energy
beyond that which is the seat of our Presentment. Such a view avoids the
incurable difficulties and contradictions involved in the theory of the
reality of extended material substance, or in any theory, indeed, which
asserts the reality--as presented--of the sensible presentation.
Physical Reality thus conceived is consistently thinkable as co-existent
with the thing-in-itself--be it ultimately Intelligence or Volition--of
which our cognitive and conative existence is a manifestation. And such
a doctrine, by explaining all phenomena as transmutations proceeding
(according to the definite mathematical laws prevailing throughout the
whole Universe of Energy) at that point in the system which is
organically related to Consciousness, accounts at once for the apparent
apriority and necessity of the qualities of Space, and at the same time
for their evident universality and objectivity.

In a word, it would rather seem as if Science, unconscious of its
pregnant possibilities, has not only formulated a theory which
co-ordinates and unifies the entire fabric of physical knowledge, but
has also at length furnished Philosophy with the key to that problem the
solution of which has, in the words of Schopenhauer, been the main
endeavour of philosophers for more than two centuries, namely, to
separate by a correctly drawn line of cleavage the Ideal--that which
belongs to our knowledge as such--from the Real, that which exists
independently of us; and thus to determine the relation of each to the
other.

To us it seems not strange that Philosophy should in the end be indebted
to Science for this solution--nor should Science, in the hour of her
greatest speculative victory, object too hastily to the assistance which
the thinker, trained to the study of the process of thought, can render
in clarifying and restating in its metaphysical aspects a theory which,
if profoundly conceived, and formulated by men of science from Rumford
and Davy to Stewart, Tait, and Kelvin, was partially anticipated by the
metaphysician who conceived the world as will and idea.

We maintain, therefore, that the presentation of sense, the continuum
or manifold, or what you will, consists in the transmutations of a real
substance itself unextended and unperceived; that the laws of these
transmutations are what constitute the geometric all-conta