Now what justifies my critic in being as lenient as this? This
singularly inadequate consciousness of mine, made up of symbols
that neither resemble nor affect the realities they stand for,--how
can he be sure it is cognizant of the very realities he has himself
in mind?

He is sure because in countless like cases he has seen such
inadequate and symbolic thoughts, by developing themselves,
terminate in percepts that practically modified and presumably
resembled his own. By 'developing' themselves is meant obeying their
tendencies, following up the suggestions nascently present in them,
working in the direction in which they seem to point, clearing up
the penumbra, making distinct the halo, unravelling the
fringe, which is part of their composition, and in the midst of
which their more substantive kernel of subjective content seems
consciously to lie. Thus I may develop my thought in the
Paley direction by procuring the brown leather volume and bringing
the passages about the animal kingdom before the critic's eyes. I
may satisfy him that the words mean for me just what they mean for
him, by showing him IN CONCRETO the very animals and their
arrangements, of which the pages treat. I may get Newton's works and
portraits; or if I follow the line of suggestion of the wig, I may
smother my critic in seventeenth-century matters pertaining to
Newton's environment, to show that the word 'Newton' has the same
LOCUS and relations in both our minds. Finally I may, by act and
word, persuade him that what I mean by God and the heavens and
the analogy of the handiworks, is just what he means also.

My demonstration in the last resort is to his SENSES. My thought