of things merely in the gross, because
they fall in with some divine plan and produce, unaccountably enough,
some interesting harmony. Empirical idealists, on the contrary, in
making a metaphysics out of psychology, hardly know what they do. The
laws of experience which they refer to are all laws of physics. It is
only the "possibilities" of sensation that stand and change according to
law; the sensations themselves, if not referred to those permanent
possibilities, would be a chaos worse than any dream.

Correct and scrupulous as empiricism may be when it turns its face
backward and looks for the seat, the criterion, and the elements of
knowledge, it is altogether incoherent and self-inhibited when it looks
forward. It can believe in nothing but in what it conceives, if it would
rise at all above a stupid immersion in the immediate; yet the relations
which attach the moments of feeling together are material relations,
implying the whole frame of nature. Psychology can accordingly conceive
nothing but the natural world, with its diffuse animation, since this is
the only background that the facts suggest or that, in practice, anybody
can think of. If empiricism trusted the intellect, and consented to
immerse flying experience in experience understood, it would become
ordinary science and ordinary common sense. Deprecating this result, for
no very obvious reason, it has to balance itself on the thin edge of an
unwilling materialism, with a continual protestation that it does not
believe in anything that it thinks. It is wholly entangled in the
prevalent sophism that a man must renounce a belief when he discovers
how he has formed it, and that our ancestors--at least the remoter
ones--begin to exist when we discover them.

When Descartes, having composed a mechanical system of the world, was
asked by admiring ladies to say something about the passions, what came
into his mind was characteristically simple and dialectical. Life, he
thought, was a perpetual conflict between reason and the emotions. The
soul had its own natural principle to live by, but was diverted from
that rational path by the waves of passion that beat against it and
sometimes flooded it over. That was all his psychology. Ideal entities
in dramatic relations, in a theatre which had to be borrowed, of course,
from the other half of the world; because while a material mechanism
might be conceived without minds in it, minds in action could not be
conceived