and
the _entitas ipsa_ of the mind. We slouchy modern thinkers dislike to
talk in Latin,--indeed, we dislike to talk in set terms at all; but at
bottom our own state of mind is very much like this whenever we
uncritically abandon ourselves: You believe in objective evidence, and
I do. Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we know
that we do know. There is something that gives a click inside of us, a
bell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swept
the dial and meet over the meridian hour. The greatest empiricists
among us are only empiricists on reflection: when {14} left to their
instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes. When the Cliffords
tell us how sinful it is to be Christians on such 'insufficient
evidence,' insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind.
For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other
way. They believe so completely in an anti-christian order of the
universe that there is no living option: Christianity is a dead
hypothesis from the start.

VI.

But now, since we are all such absolutists by instinct, what in our
quality of students of philosophy ought we to do about the fact? Shall
we espouse and indorse it? Or shall we treat it as a weakness of our
nature from which we must free ourselves, if we can?

I sincerely believe that the latter course is the only one we can
follow as reflective men. Objective evidence and certitude are
doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and
dream-visited planet are they found? I am, therefore, myself a
complete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes. I
live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on
experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our
opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them--I absolutely do
not care which--as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible,
I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude, and I think that the
whole history of philosophy will bear me out. There is but one
indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic
scepticism itself leaves {15} standing,--the truth that the present
phenomenon of consciousness exists. That, however, is the bare
starting-point of knowledge, the mere admission of a stuff to be
philosophized about. The various philosophies are but so many attempts
at expressing what this stuff really is. And