n object of
knowledge. Science furnishes this setting; the jewel--precious or
false--must be supplied by imagination. Romance, dramatic myth, is the
only instrument for knowing this sort of "reality." A flying moment, if
at all _understood_ or underpinned, or if seen in its context, would be
not known absolutely as it had been felt, but would be known
scientifically and as it lay in nature. But dramatic insight, striving
to pierce through the machinery of the world and to attain and repeat
what dreams may be going on at its core, is no science; and the very
notion that the dreams are internal, that they make the interior or
substance of bodies, is a crude materialistic fancy. Body, on the
contrary, is the substance or instrument of mind, and has to be looked
for beneath it. The mind is itself ethereal and plays about the body as
music about a violin, or rather as the sense of a page about the print
and paper. To look for it _within_ is not to understand what we are
looking for.

Knowledge of the immediate elsewhere is accordingly visionary in its
method, and furthermore, if, by a fortunate chance, it be true in fact,
it is true only of what in itself is but appearance; for the immediate,
while absolutely real in its stress or presence, is indefinitely
ignorant and false in its deliverance. It knows itself, but in the worst
sense of the word knowledge; for it knows nothing of what is true about
it, nothing of its relations and conditions. To pierce to this blind
"reality" or psychic flux, which is nothing but flying appearance, we
must rely on fortune, or an accidental harmony between imitative fancy
in us now and original sentience elsewhere. It is accordingly at least
misleading to give the name of "reality" to this appearance, which is
entirely lost and inconsequential in its being, without trace of its own
status, and consequently approachable or knowable only by divination, as
a dream might call to another dream.

[Sidenote: The conditions and objects of sentinence, which are not
sentinence, are also real.]

It is preferable to give a more Platonic meaning to the word and to let
"reality" designate not what is merely felt diffusely but what is true
about those feelings. Then dramatic fancy, psychology of the sympathetic
sort, would not be able to reach reality at all. On the other hand
scientific psychology, together with all other sciences, would have
reality for its object; for it would disclose what really was