ut of the facts, nor leading to a
satisfactory reaction upon them, either in contemplation or in practice.

[Sidenote: Critics disguised enthusiasts.]

Now this is in truth exactly the conviction which those malicious
psychologists secretly harboured. Their critical scruples and
transcendental qualms covered a robust rebellion against being fooled by
authority. They rose to abate abuses among which, as Hobbes said, "the
frequency of insignificant speech is one." Their psychology was not
merely a cathartic, but a gospel. Their young criticism was sent into
the world to make straight the path of a new positivism, as now, in its
old age, it is invoked to keep open the door to superstition. Some of
those reformers, like Hobbes and Locke, had at heart the interests of a
physical and political mechanism, which they wished to substitute for
the cumbrous and irritating constraints of tradition. Their criticism
stopped at the frontiers of their practical discontent; they did not
care to ask how the belief in matter, space, motion, God, or whatever
else still retained their allegiance, could withstand the kind of
psychology which, as they conceived, had done away with individual
essences and nominal powers. Berkeley, whose interests lay in a
different quarter, used the same critical method in support of a
different dogmatism; armed with the traditional pietistic theory of
Providence he undertook with a light heart to demolish the whole edifice
which reason and science had built upon spatial perception. He wished
the lay intellect to revert to a pious idiocy in the presence of Nature,
lest consideration of her history and laws should breed "mathematical
atheists"; and the outer world being thus reduced to a sensuous dream
and to the blur of immediate feeling, intelligence and practical faith
would be more unremittingly employed upon Christian mythology. Men would
be bound to it by a necessary allegiance, there being no longer any
rival object left for serious or intelligent consideration.

The psychological analysis on which these partial or total negations
were founded was in a general way admirable; the necessary artifices to
which it had recourse in distinguishing simple and complex ideas,
principles of association and inference, were nothing but premonitions
of what a physiological psychology would do in referring the mental
process to its organic and external supports; for experience has no
other divisions than those it cre