consciousness,
has the puzzling character of any clever pun, that suspends the fancy
between two incompatible but irresistible meanings. The art of such
sophistry is to choose for an axiom some ambiguous phrase which taken in
one sense is a truism and taken in another is an absurdity; and then, by
showing the truth of that truism, to give out that the absurdity has
also been proved. It is a truism to say that I am the only seat or locus
of my ideas, and that whatever I know is known by me; it is an absurdity
to say that I am the only object of my thought and perception.

[Sidenote: Reality is the practical made intelligible.]

To confuse the instrument with its function and the operation with its
meaning has been a persistent foible in modern philosophy. It could thus
come about that the function of intelligence should be altogether
misconceived and in consequence denied, when it was discovered that
figments of reason could never become elements of sense but must always
remain, as of course they should, ideal and regulative objects, and
therefore objects to which a practical and energetic intellect will tend
to give the name of realities. Matter is a reality to the practical
intellect because it is a necessary and ideal term in the mastery of
experience; while negligible sensations, like dreams, are called
illusions by the same authority because, though actual enough while they
last, they have no sustained function and no right to practical
dominion.

Let us imagine Berkeley addressing himself to that infant or animal
consciousness which first used the category of substance and passed from
its perceptions to the notion of an independent thing. "Beware, my
child," he would have said, "you are taking a dangerous step, one which
may hereafter produce a multitude of mathematical atheists, not to speak
of cloisterfuls of scholastic triflers. Your ideas can exist only in
your mind; if you suffer yourself to imagine them materialised in
mid-air and subsisting when you do not perceive them, you will commit a
great impiety. If you unthinkingly believe that when you shut your eyes
the world continues to exist until you open them again, you will
inevitably be hurried into an infinity of metaphysical quibbles about
the discrete and the continuous, and you will be so bewildered and
deafened by perpetual controversies that the clear light of the gospel
will be extinguished in your soul." "But," that tender Peripatetic might
answer