ential
in one's self, it describes at best the possible in others. The thoughts
of men are incredibly evanescent, merely the foam of their labouring
natures; and they doubtless vary much more than our trite
classifications allow for. This is what makes passions and fashions,
religions and philosophies, so hard to conceive when once the trick of
them is a little antiquated. Languages are hardly more foreign to one
another than are the thoughts uttered in them. We should give men credit
for originality at least in their dreams, even if they have little of it
to show elsewhere; and as it was discovered but recently that all
memories are not furnished with the like material images, but often
have no material images whatever, so it may have to be acknowledged that
the disparity in men's soliloquies is enormous, and that some races,
perhaps, live content without soliloquising at all.

[Sidenote: Experience a reconstruction.]

Nevertheless, in describing what happens, or in enforcing a given view
of things, we constantly refer to universal experience as if everybody
was agreed about what universal experience is and had personally
gathered it all since the days of Adam. In fact, each man has only his
own, the remnant saved from his personal acquisitions. On the basis of
this his residual endowment, he has to conceive all nature, with
whatever experiences may have fallen there to the lot of others.
Universal experience is a comfortable fiction, a distinctly ideal
construction, and no fund available for any one to draw from; which of
course is not to deny that tradition and books, in transmitting
materially the work of other generations, tend to assimilate us also to
their mind. The result of their labours, in language, learning, and
institutions, forms a hothouse in which to force our seedling fancy to a
rational growth; but the influence is physical, the environment is
material, and its ideal background or significance has to be inferred by
us anew, according to our imaginative faculty and habits. Past
experience, apart from its monuments, is fled for ever out of mortal
reach. It is now a parcel of the motionless ether, of the ineffectual
truth about what once was. To know it we must evoke it within ourselves,
starting from its inadequate expressions still extant in the world. This
reconstruction is highly speculative and, as Spinoza noted, better
evidence of what we are than of what other men have been.

[Sidenote: The hone