st maxim does not contradict the existence of external
objects in space; the second contradicts every conception that
the human mind can ever form, the most airy no less than the
grossest. No idealist can go so far as to deny that his memory
represents his past experience by inward similarity and
conscious intention, or, if he prefers this language, that the
moments or aspects of the divine mind represent one another
and their general system. Else the idealist's philosophy
itself would be an insignificant and momentary illusion.

CHAPTER V--NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED

[Sidenote: Man's feeble grasp of nature.]

When the mind has learned to distinguish external objects and to
attribute to them a constant size, shape, and potency, in spite of the
variety and intermittence ruling in direct experience, there yet remains
a great work to do before attaining a clear, even if superficial, view
of the world. An animal's customary habitat may have constant features
and their relations in space may be learned by continuous exploration;
but probably many other landscapes are also within the range of memory
and fancy that stand in no visible relation to the place in which we
find ourselves at a given moment. It is true that, at this day, we take
it for granted that all real places, as we call them, lie in one space,
in which they hold definite geometric relations to one another; and if
we have glimpses of any region for which no room can be found in the
single map of the universe which astronomy has drawn, we unhesitatingly
relegate that region to the land of dreams. Since the Elysian Fields and
the Coast of Bohemia have no assignable latitude and longitude, we call
these places imaginary, even if in some dream we remember to have
visited them and dwelt there with no less sense of reality than in this
single and geometrical world of commerce. It belongs to sanity and
common-sense, as men now possess them, to admit no countries unknown to
geography and filling no part of the conventional space in three
dimensions. All our waking experience is understood to go on in some
part of this space, and no court of law would admit evidence relating to
events in some other sphere.

This principle, axiomatic as it has become, is in no way primitive,
since primitive experience is sporadic and introduces us to detached
scenes separated by lapses in our senses and attention. These scenes do