be outgrown.

[Sidenote: Megalomania.]

What practically survives in these systems, when their mysticism and
naturalism have had time to settle, is a clear enough standard. It is a
standard of inclusion and quantity. Since all is needful, and the
justifying whole is infinite, there would seem to be a greater dignity
in the larger part. As the best copy of a picture, other things being
equal, would be one that represented it all, so the best expression of
the world, next to the world itself, would be the largest portion of it
any one could absorb. Progress would then mean annexation. Growth would
not come by expressing better an innate soul which involved a particular
ideal, but by assimilating more and more external things till the
original soul, by their influence, was wholly recast and unrecognisable.
This moral agility would be true merit; we should always be "striving
onward." Life would be a sort of demonic vortex, boiling at the centre
and omnivorous at the circumference, till it finally realised the
supreme vocation of vortices, to have "their centre everywhere and their
circumference nowhere." This somewhat troubled situation might seem
sublime to us, transformed as we too should be; and so we might reach
the most remarkable and doubtless the "highest" form of
optimism--optimism in hell.

[Sidenote: Chaos in the theory of mind.]

Confusing as these cross-currents and revulsions may prove in the field
where mechanism is more or less at home, in the field of material
operations, they are nothing to the primeval chaos that still broods
over the other hemisphere, over the mental phase of existence. The
difficulty is not merely that no mechanism is discovered or acknowledged
here, but that the phenomena themselves are ambiguous, and no one seems
to know when he speaks of mind whether he means something formal and
ideal, like Platonic essences and mathematical truths, or reflection and
intelligence, or sensation possessing external causes and objects, or
finally that ultimate immediacy or brute actuality which is
characteristic of any existence. Other even vaguer notions are doubtless
often designated by the word psychical; but these may suffice for us to
recognise the initial dilemmas in the subject and the futility of trying
to build a science of mind, or defining the relation of mind to matter,
when it is not settled whether mind means the form of matter, as with
the Platonists, or the effect of it, as with the