case, what thought aspires to reach. Consciousness is the least ideal
of things when reason is taken out of it. Reality would then need
thought to give it all those human values of which, in its substance, it
would have been wholly deprived; and the ideal would still be what lent
music to throbs and significance to being.

[Sidenote: Mens naturaliter platonica.]

The equivocation favoured by such language at once begins to appear. Is
not thought with all its products a part of experience? Must not sense,
if it be the only reality, be sentient sometimes of the ideal? What the
site is to a city that is immediate experience to the universe of
discourse. The latter is all held materially within the limits defined
by the former; but if immediate experience be the seat of the moral
world, the moral world is the only interesting possession of immediate
experience. When a waste is built on, however, it is a violent paradox
to call it still a waste; and an immediate experience that represents
the rest of sentience, with all manner of ideal harmonies read into the
whole in the act of representing it, is an immediate experience raised
to its highest power: it is the Life of Reason. In vain, then, will a
philosophy of intellectual abstention limit so Platonic a term as
reality to the immediate aspect of existence, when it is the ideal
aspect that endows existence with character and value, together with
representative scope and a certain lien upon eternity.

More legitimate, therefore, would be the assertion that knowledge
reaches reality when it touches its ideal goal. Reality is known when,
as in mathematics, a stable and unequivocal object is developed by
thinking. The locus or material embodiment of such a reality is no
longer in view; these questions seem to the logician irrelevant. If