these phenomena not based on some inherent "tendency
to feign." The analysis which was in truth legitimising and purifying
knowledge seemed to them absolutely to blast it, and the closer they
came to the bed-rock of experience the more incapable they felt of
building up anything upon it. Self-knowledge meant, they fancied,
self-detection; the representative value of thought decreased as thought
grew in scope and elaboration. It became impossible to be at once quite
serious and quite intelligent; for to use reason was to indulge in
subjective fiction, while conscientiously to abstain from using it was
to sink back upon inarticulate and brutish instinct.

In Hume this sophistication was frankly avowed. Philosophy discredited
itself; but a man of parts, who loved intellectual games even better
than backgammon, might take a hand with the wits and historians of his
day, until the clock struck twelve and the party was over. Even in Kant,
though the mood was more cramped and earnest, the mystical
sophistication was quite the same. Kant, too, imagined that the bottom
had been knocked out of the world; that in comparison with some
unutterable sort of truth empirical truth was falsehood, and that
validity for all possible experience was weak validity, in comparison
with validity of some other and unmentionable sort. Since space and time
could not repel the accusation of being the necessary forms of
perception, space and time were not to be much thought of; and when the
sad truth was disclosed that causality and the categories were
instruments by which the idea of nature had to be constructed, if such
an idea was to exist at all, then nature and causality shrivelled up and
were dishonoured together; so that, the soul's occupation being gone,
she must needs appeal to some mysterious oracle, some abstract and
irrelevant omen within the breast, and muster up all the stern courage
of an accepted despair to carry her through this world of mathematical
illusion into some green and infantile paradise beyond.

[Sidenote: Misconceived role of intelligence.]

What idea, we may well ask ourselves, did these modern philosophers
entertain regarding the pretensions of ancient and mediaeval metaphysics?
What understanding had they of the spirit in which the natural organs of
reason had been exercised and developed in those schools? Frankly, very
little; for they accepted from ancient philosophy and from common-sense
the distinction between re