to receive them 'first on his father and mother, secondly on some other
patient listener, thirdly on his dog,' he finds that he only differs from
the rest of mankind in the use of a word. He had once hoped that by
getting rid of the solidity of matter he might open a passage to worlds
beyond. He liked to think of the world as the representation of the divine
nature, and delighted to imagine angels and spirits wandering through
space, present in the room in which he is sitting without coming through
the door, nowhere and everywhere at the same instant. At length he finds
that he has been the victim of his own fancies; he has neither more nor
less evidence of the supernatural than he had before. He himself has
become unsettled, but the laws of the world remain fixed as at the
beginning. He has discovered that his appeal to the fallibility of sense
was really an illusion. For whatever uncertainty there may be in the
appearances of nature, arises only out of the imperfection or variation of
the human senses, or possibly from the deficiency of certain branches of
knowledge; when science is able to apply her tests, the uncertainty is at
an end. We are apt sometimes to think that moral and metaphysical
philosophy are lowered by the influence which is exercised over them by
physical science. But any interpretation of nature by physical science is
far in advance of such idealism. The philosophy of Berkeley, while giving
unbounded license to the imagination, is still grovelling on the level of
sense.

We may, if we please, carry this scepticism a step further, and deny, not
only objects of sense, but the continuity of our sensations themselves. We
may say with Protagoras and Hume that what is appears, and that what
appears appears only to individuals, and to the same individual only at one
instant. But then, as Plato asks,--and we must repeat the question,--What
becomes of the mind? Experience tells us by a thousand proofs that our
sensations of colour, taste, and the like, are the same as they were an