ental because they all deviate from
the realities to be ultimately conceived. To call the immediate mental
is therefore correct and inevitable when once the ultimate is in view;
but if the immediate were all, to call it mental would be unmeaning.

The visual image of a die, for instance, has at most three faces, none
of them quite square; no hired artificer is needed to produce it; it
cannot be found anywhere nor shaken in any box; it lasts only for an
instant; thereafter it disappears without a trace--unless it flits back
unaccountably through the memory--and it leaves no ponderable dust or
ashes to attest that it had a substance. The opposite of all this is
true of the die itself. But were no material die in existence, the image
itself would be material; for, however evanescent, it would occupy
space, have geometrical shape, colour, and magic dynamic destinies. Its
transformations as it rolled on the idea of a table would be
transformations in nature, however unaccountable by any steady law. Such
material qualities a mental fact can retain only in the spiritual form
of representation. A representation of matter is immaterial, but a
material image, when no object exists, is a material fact. If the
Absolute, to take an ultimate case, perceived nothing but space and
atoms (perceiving itself, if you will, therein), space and atoms would
be its whole nature, and it would constitute a perfect materialism. The
fact that materialism was true would not of itself constitute an
idealism worth distinguishing from its opposite. For a vehicle or locus
exists only when it makes some difference to the thing it carries,
presenting it in a manner not essential to its own nature.

[Sidenote: Approach to irrelevant sentience.]

The qualification of being by the mental medium may be carried to any
length. As the subject-matter recedes the mental datum ceases to have
much similarity or inward relevance to what is its cause or its meaning.
The report may ultimately become, like pure pain or pleasure, almost
wholly blind and irrelevant to any world; yet such emotion is none the
less immersed in matter and dependent on natural changes both for its
origin and for its function, since a significant pleasure or pain makes
comments on the world and involves ideals about what ought to be
happening there.

Mental facts synchronise with their basis, for no thought hovers over a
dead brain and there is no vision in a dark chamber; but their tenure