spiritual life would, without an objective material world, be a mere blank. What does even Kant say, he who was so anxious to reestablish the claims of pure reason to her ancient possessions against the levelling tendencies of Locke and Hume: 'Concepts without intuitions are empty,' he says; 'intuitions without concepts are blind 1,' that is to say, Without our senses our mind would be empty, without our mind our senses would be blind.' To compare and weigh mind against sense, to call the one sublime, the other low, would be absurd. The one is as necessary as the other; only while what the senses bring to us, whether you call it divine or diabolic or neither, is certainly beyond all human comprehension, what the mind makes of it is perfectly intelligible.

The working of our mind.

Let us look into the workshop of what we call our mind. What is brought in? Sensations, or something which we feel.

We may go a step further, and ask what is meant by sensation, and our answer would be that feeling in the highest sense is resisting. In the fight of all against all, or, as others call it, under the pressure of the universe, resistance produces what may be called vibration, a coming and going, a yielding and returning, according to the pressure which impinges upon us and is repelled by us. Our very existence has been called by Schopenhauer resistance or will. There are different kinds of pressure. Some may pass us without being even perceived, others may crush and almost annihilate us. Our first sensations

1 Science of Thought, p. 143.

may be simply sensations of pain or pleasure, according as we have to resist the impacts made upon us with violent effort, or are able to acquiesce in them without any effort. But there are also many kinds of pressure which give neither pain nor pleasure, but which produce in us a rhythmic movement, a yielding at first and then a corresponding recovery, a kind of swing-swang, which we call vibration, and which, in a sensuous and self-conscious being, is sensation in the widest sense of the word, though not yet perception. We may stare at the blue sky, the green forest, the red flowers; we may watch the flight of the clouds and listen to the song of birds; or we may be startled by a clap of thunder, frightened by a flash of lightning, and driven away by the terror of falling trees. We may be in a state of perturbation or of rest, and we may act under the influence of what we thus see and hear. We may even be said to act rationally, just as a dog is said to act rationally when, on seeing his master raise his whip, he runs away.

No percept without language. Helmholtz.

But, though we may imagine such a state, and though I do not like to contradict collectors of psychological curiosities who maintain they have actually experienced it, I hold myself as strongly as ever that not until we have a name and concept of sky, can we truly be said to see the sky; not till we have a name for blue, do we know that the sky is blue. Philosophers have long known this, but the best students of physical science also, some of the highest authorities on optics and acoustics, have at last come to see the same. Only after the per

ceptions of the senses have become fixed by language, are they, (the senses), that is to say, are we brought to a conscious possession and a real understanding of them 1.' These are not the speculations of a metaphysician or of a student of language, they are the ipsissima verba of one who stands foremost among experimental philosophers, and who in England as well as in Germany is recognised as one of the highest authorities on optics and acoustics, that is, on the sensuous perceptions of sight and hearing-they are quoted from Professor Helmholtz.

Perceptions always finite.

Let us now consider the general character of our percepts. There is one characteristic which is common to all of them, and therefore to all our concepts and names,—to all we know,—they are always finite in themselves; or, if you like, the objects to which they refer are taken as finite. Some critics have objected to the term finite, and maintained that I ought to have used definite instead.

Finite and definite.

I see no objection whatever to using definite instead of finite; my only reason for preferring finite was that it seemed to me wider than definite, which is frequently used in the restricted sense of what has been defined by logical terms. The important point, however, is not the name, so long as we see clearly that all objects which we perceive and afterwards conceive and name must be circumscribed, must have been separated from their surroundings, must be measur

1 Science of Thought, p. 151.

able, and can thus only become perceivable and knowable and namable.

And this applies not only to finiteness in space and time, but also to finiteness in quality. We know now that all shades of colour, even those which our unassisted eye cannot distinguish, are due to so many and no more vibrations of ether within a given time. They are therefore finite in their very nature. The same applies to every tone which we hear. It consists of a finite or definite, i. e. a limited, or countable number of vibrations in a second. And as our perceptions of material objects, such as stones or trees. or animals, must be outlined, must have a beginning and an end, our concepts and names also are possible only with well defined groups, or, at all events, with groups that ought to be well defined, if they are to answer their purpose. It is for this reason that concepts can be represented, as they have been by Euler and others, by spheres of greater or smaller extent, the definition determining the extension of a concept, as a circumference determines the extension of a sphere.

The finite implies the infinite.

But if finiteness is thus a necessary characteristic of our ordinary knowledge, it requires but little reflection to perceive that limitation or finiteness, in whatever sense we use it, always implies a something beyond. We are told that our mind is so constituted, whether it is our fault or not, that we cannot conceive an absolute limit. Beyond every limit we must always take it for granted that there is something else. But what is the reason of this? The reason why we can

not conceive an absolute limit is because we never perceive an absolute limit; or, in other words, because in perceiving the finite we always perceive the infinite also. Descartes, who has so often been called the founder of modern philosophy, declares without any hesitation: 'I ought not to think that I perceive the infinite only by the negation of the finite, as I perceive rest and darkness by negation of motion and light; on the contrary, I clearly perceive that there is more of reality in infinite substance than in finite, and therefore that, in a certain sense, the idea of the infinite is prior to me to the finite.'

The infinite in space.

I do not go quite so far as Descartes, but it seems to me beyond the reach of doubt, that even in our earliest and simplest perceptions we always perceive the finite and the infinite simultaneously, though it takes a long time before we clearly conceive and name the two as simply finite and infinite. If we perceive a square we can only perceive it by perceiving at the same time the space beyond the square. If we perceive the horizon, we perceive at the same time that which hems in our senses from going beyond the horizon. There is no limit which has not two sides, one turned towards us, the other turned towards what is beyond; and it is that Beyond which from the earliest days has formed the only real foundation of all that we call transcendental in our perceptual as well as in our conceptual knowledge, though no doubt it has also been peopled with the manifold creations of our poetic imagination. To the early nations the West, the setting of the sun,