n at all. A
brief excursion into that much abused subject, the psychology of
perception, may here serve to remind us of the great work which the
budding intellect must long ago have accomplished unawares.

[Sidenote: Difficulties in conceiving nature.]

Consider how the shocks out of which the notion of material things is to
be built first strike home into the soul. Eye and hand, if we may
neglect the other senses, transmit their successive impressions, all
varying with the position of outer objects and with the other material
conditions. A chaos of multitudinous impressions rains in from all sides
at all hours. Nor have the external or cognitive senses an original
primacy. The taste, the smell, the alarming sounds of things are
continually distracting attention. There are infinite reverberations in
memory of all former impressions, together with fresh fancies created in
the brain, things at first in no wise subordinated to external objects.
All these incongruous elements are mingled like a witches' brew. And
more: there are indications that inner sensations, such as those of
digestion, have an overpowering influence on the primitive mind, which
has not learned to articulate or distinguish permanent needs. So that to
the whirl of outer sensations we must add, to reach some notion of what
consciousness may contain before the advent of reason, interruptions and
lethargies caused by wholly blind internal feelings; trances such as
fall even on comparatively articulate minds in rage, lust, or madness.
Against all these bewildering forces the new-born reason has to
struggle; and we need not wonder that the costly experiments and
disillusions of the past have not yet produced a complete
enlightenment.

[Sidenote: Transcendental qualms.]

The onslaught made in the last century by the transcendental philosophy
upon empirical traditions is familiar to everybody: it seemed a
pertinent attack, yet in the end proved quite trifling and unavailing.
Thought, we are told rightly enough, cannot be accounted for by
enumerating its conditions. A number of detached sensations, being each
its own little world, cannot add themselves together nor conjoin
themselves in the void. Again, experiences having an alleged common
cause would not have, merely for that reason, a common object. Nor would
a series of successive perceptions, no matter how quick, logically
involve a sense of time nor a notion of succession. Yet, in point of
fact, when s