ht is an expedient of finite minds, and that representation is a
ghostly process which we crave to materialise into bodily possession. We
may grow sick of inferring truth and long rather to become reality.
Intelligence is after all no compulsory possession; and while some of us
would gladly have more of it, others find that they already have too
much. The tension of thought distresses them and to represent what they
cannot and would not be is not a natural function of their spirit. To
such minds experience that should merely corroborate ideas would prolong
dissatisfaction. The ideas must be realised; they must pass into
immediacy. If reality (a word employed generally in a eulogistic sense)
is to mean this desired immediacy, no ideal of thought can be real. All
intelligible objects and the whole universe of mental discourse would
then be an unreal and conventional structure, impinging ultimately on
sense from which it would derive its sole validity.

There would be no need of quarrelling with such a philosophy, were not
its use of words rather misleading. Call experience in its existential
and immediate aspect, if you will, the sole reality; that will not
prevent reality from having an ideal dimension. The intellectual world
will continue to give beauty, meaning, and scope to those bubbles of
consciousness on which it is painted. Reality would not be, in that
case, what thought aspires to reach. Consciousness is the least ideal
of things when reason is taken out of it. Reality would then need
thought to give it all those human values of which, in its substance, it
would have been wholly deprived; and the ideal would still be what lent
music to throbs and significance to being.

[Sidenote: Mens naturaliter platonica.]

The equivocation favoured by such language at once begins to appear. Is
not thought with all its products a part of experience? Must not sense,
if it be the only reality, be sentient sometimes of the ideal? What the
site is to a city that is immediate experience to the universe of
discourse. The latter is all held materially within the limits defined
by the former; but if immediate experience be the seat of the moral
world, the moral world is the only interesting possession of immediate
experience. When a waste is built on, however, it is a violent paradox
to call it still a waste; and an immediate experience that represents
the rest of sentience, with all manner of ideal harmonies read into the
whole in