ndividuals, or the refraction of things in sense, a very important or
edifying subject for study. In time, however, sentience had its revenge.
As each man's whole experience is bound to his body no less than is the
most trivial optical illusion, the sphere of sense is the transcendental
ground or _ratio cognoscendi_ of every other sphere. It suffices,
therefore, to make philosophy retrospective and to relax the practical
and dogmatic stress under which the intellect operates, for all the
discoveries made through experience to collapse into the experience in
which they were made. A complete collapse of objects is indeed
inconvenient, because it would leave no starting-point for reasoning and
no faith in the significance of reason itself; but partial collapses,
now in the region of physics, now in that of logic and morals, are very
easy and exciting feats for criticism to perform.

Passions when abstracted from their bodily causes and values when
removed from their objects will naturally fall into the body's mind, and
be allied with appearances. Shrewd people will bethink themselves to
attribute almost all the body's acts to some preparatory intention or
motive in its mind, and thus attain what they think knowledge of human
nature. They will encourage themselves to live among dramatic fictions,
as when absorbed in a novel; and having made themselves at home in this
upper story of their universe, they will find it amusing to deny that it
has a ground floor. The chance of conceiving, by these partial reversals
of science, a world composed entirely without troublesome machinery is
too tempting not to be taken up, whatever the ulterior risks; and
accordingly, when once psychological criticism is put in play, the
sphere of sense will be enlarged at the expense of the two rational
worlds, the material and the ideal.

[Sidenote: The rise of scepticism.]

Consciousness, thus qualified by all the sensible qualities of things,
will exercise an irresistible attraction over the supernatural and ideal
realm, so that all the gods, all truths, and all ideals, as they have no
place among the sufficing causes of experience, will be identified with
decaying sensations. And presently those supposed causes themselves will
be retraced and drawn back into the immediate vortex, until the sceptic
has packed away nature, with all space and time, into the sphere of
sensuous illusion, the distinguishing characteristic of which was that
it changed