with the changes in the human body. The personal idealists
will declare that all body is a part of some body's mind. Thus, by a
curious reversion, the progress of reflection has led to hopeless
contradictions. Sense, which was discovered by observing the refraction
and intermittence to which appearances were subject, in seeming to be
quite different from what things were, now tries to subsist when the
things it was essentially contrasted with have been abolished. The
intellect becomes a Penelope, whose secret pleasure lies in undoing its
ostensible work; and science, becoming pensive, loves to relapse into
the dumb actuality and nerveless reverie from which it had once
extricated a world.

The occasion for this sophistication is worth noting; for if we follow
the thread which we have trailed behind us in entering the labyrinth we
shall be able at any moment to get out; especially as the omnivorous
monster lurking in its depths is altogether harmless. A moral and truly
transcendental critique of science, as of common sense, is never out of
place, since all such a critique does is to assign to each conception or
discovery its place and importance in the Life of Reason. So
administered, the critical cathartic will not prove a poison and will
not inhibit the cognitive function it was meant to purge. Every belief
will subsist that finds an empirical and logical warrant; while that a
belief is a belief and not a sensation will not seem a ground for not
entertaining it, nor for subordinating it to some gratuitous assurance.
But a psychological criticism, if it is not critical of psychology
itself, and thinks to substitute a science of absolute sentience for
physics and dialectic, would rest on sophistry and end wholly in
bewilderment. The subject-matter of an absolute psychology would vanish
in its hands, since there is no sentience which is not at once the
effect of something physical and the appearance of something ideal. A
calculus of feelings, uninterpreted and referred to nothing ulterior,
would furnish no alternative system to substitute for the positive
sciences it was seeking to dislodge. In fact, those who call ordinary
objects unreal do not, on that account, find anything else to think
about. Their exorcism does not lay the ghost, and they are limited to
addressing it in uncivil language. It was not idly that reason in the
beginning excogitated a natural and an ideal world, a labour it might
well have avoided if app