ality and appearance, but they forgot the
function of that distinction and dislocated its meaning, which was
nothing but to translate the chaos of perception into the regular play
of stable natures and objects congenial to discursive thought and valid
in the art of living. Philosophy had been the natural science of
perception raised to the reflective plane, the objects maintaining
themselves on this higher plane being styled realities, and those still
floundering below it being called appearances or mere ideas. The
function of envisaging reality, ever since Parmenides and Heraclitus,
had been universally attributed to the intellect. When the moderns,
therefore, proved anew that it was the mind that framed that idea, and
that what we call reality, substance, nature, or God, can be reached
only by an operation of reason, they made no very novel or damaging
discovery.

Of course, it is possible to disregard the suggestions of reason in any
particular case and it is quite possible to believe, for instance, that
the hypothesis of an external material world is an erroneous one. But
that this hypothesis is erroneous does not follow from the fact that it
is a hypothesis. To discard it on that ground would be to discard all
reasoned knowledge and to deny altogether the validity of thought. If
intelligence is assumed to be an organ of cognition and a vehicle for
truth, a given hypothesis about the causes of perception can only be
discarded when a better hypothesis on the same subject has been
supplied. To be better such a hypothesis would have to meet the
multiplicity of phenomena and their mutations with a more intelligible
scheme of comprehension and a more useful instrument of control.

[Sidenote: All criticism dogmatic.]

Scepticism is always possible while it is partial. It will remain the
privilege and resource of a free mind that has elasticity enough to
disintegrate its own formations and to approach its experience from a
variety of sides and with more than a single method. But the method
chosen must be coherent in itself and the point of view assumed must be
adhered to during that survey; so that whatever reconstruction the novel
view may produce in science will be science still, and will involve
assumptions and dogmas which must challenge comparison with the dogmas
and assumptions they would supplant. People speak of dogmatism as if it
were a method to be altogether outgrown and something for which some
non-assertive