difference between truth as necessarily known and truth as known by experience: all truth is found out: the question is, what is it that is found out, and what the manner of the finding?

We go on continually finding out, we may say, two things, though really they are but one, namely the bearing of the knowledge which we have already, and the circumstances of our environment, or what we consider such: and constantly, as a matter of fact, one thing may come to our knowledge either way, or both, one confirming the other, so far as either is the better for confirmation. The thinker, evolving all knowledge from his consciousness, is the exact pendant, on the one side of our knowledge, to the inattentive wanderer on the other, brought into contact with, and to such experience of, innumerable phenomena, and noticing nothing. Consciousness, abstracted from attention to the occasions of our sensation, is sterile on the one side, as unnoticed communication is sterile on the other: neither is knowledge. But each interpretation of an occasion of sensation is full of bearing in all possible directions, if we prefer rather to follow out these bearings than to proceed to interpret a new occasion of sensation. The difference between necessary and experimental truth is a difference, and very likely an accidental difference, in our manner of arriving at truth, and not a difference in truth itself. And the urging it on either side as if anything of importance depended on it seems to me to arise from a misapprehension. The experiential is not really, or in itself, fragmentary and desultory, though the effort to make its bounds appear as wide as possible seems generally accompanied with a perverse pleasure in the considering it such, and though the same notion of it is entertained on the other side with opposite feelings. Its appearing so is an accident, not of anything that can be properly called our intelligence or our faculties of knowledge, but of certain circumstances of these, namely our sensive powers and our corporeal frame. Our reason is reason of all intelligence, but our sensive communication with the universe is that of the animal man, or rather we might say more generally, of typical terrestrial animalhood, for eyes, for instance, or communication with distant bodies by means of light, belong to all animals, whereas there is in none a special sensive

instrument to communicate with bodies by means of magnetism, or various other agencies as real as light. Our knowledge therefore gained by experience or sense is, as such, incoherent, not on account of anything in the nature of the things known, but because our powers of sensive communication do not constitute a consistent and universal physiometer, so to call it: they put us into communication with some things, leaving what we understand to be gaps and can partially, but partially only, fill up, with the important provision however that we have from the first an intelligence or reason which presents to us the universe as a whole, a frame to be filled up, so that we never rest satisfied with the incoherence.

Our sensive power for space is all the variety of our motor nerves, or in fact we may say our whole body, and consequently our sensation of it is full and intimate to a degree to which some of our sensive powers offer no sort of parallel. And in proportion to this fullness and intimateness is the less doubt about its particular informations, and the less need of repeated experience for the testing of them. I find it hard to understand the controversy, whether a geometrical axiom (as that two straight lines cannot enclose a space) is a truth necessary or experiential, in this way: those who hold the latter I suppose do not mean that it is an accident of space: those who hold the former do not I suppose mean that we could have known it without ever having moved our body, or had space suggested to us: the questions on the point are really two: is space itself suggested to us by experience? and can space be suggested to us without distance and the singleness of distance, being so? I think the latter must be answered in the negative: the question then is as to the general nature of space. The answer which I give, a little anticipating what is to follow, is this: that meaning or purpose in a thing (which is really mind or intelligence invested or deposited in phenomena) time, space, force, light, oxygen, are all equally real with the different meanings which reality must take in application to them, all equally matters of experience because they are what we successively find out, but all parts of one universe of which if we have got hold of any portion we have got some hold (little or much) upon the whole, a piece of preg

nant and developable knowledge already, from which will come truth (such as it may be) without fresh experience. One sensation of space, so full and intimate, is almost indefinitely developable-one sensation of light, communicating only with the optic nerve and retina, may carry us but a very little way along the road of knowledge there.

But enough of this: I proceed in the next chapter, in continuing the subject of sensation, to the sensation of power.

CHAPTER III.

SENSATION, INTELLIGENCE, AND WILL.

As I have begun to speak of resistance it is fit that I should notice the corresponding and companion feeling to the sensation of it, which feeling may be called the sensation of power.

It is not altogether correct to say, that, in its nature, desire, at least so far as we conceive desire to be the result of experienced pleasure or pain, is the necessary foundation, parent, antecedent of volition, and in this way to subordinate our active nature to our susceptible. Impulse to action or rudimentary irritability is, I should think we may consider, something as original to us as susceptibility to pleasure and pain, and the disposition to exert will exists not as a principle, so to speak, intimate and necessary to us in the second degree only—that is, as a remedy owing to our being subject to pain, and an aid owing to our being capable of pleasure-but as something as intimate and necessary to us as our susceptibility or proper sensibility. I do not know but that we can conceive as easily individualities which in the first instance can act only, and feel nothing but such pleasure as is taken in the action, as individualities which can feel only, without ability to act. With us, the two things from the first go together.

This seems to me an important thing to bear in mind. Of its application to Ethics this is not the place to speak. But it is of importance also in regard of the distinction which I am at present endeavouring to elucidate, between the phenomenalist view and the philosophical, whether this latter be regarded as a wider view or as a companion abstraction. The phenomenalist view considers us as beings (or rather as something) susceptible of knowledge, considers knowledge as coming to us (which gives the point to the term 'sensation' as used by Locke and afterwards by most philosophers in the last century), considers such

activity as there is, or the spring of movement, to reside in the supposed object of knowledge, so that, before we can form ideas (supposing us to do so) we must have received impressions, we must have been somehow affected: there must therefore be supposed in the object of knowledge, in matter (for instance) some power, or activity in this way to impress and affect us, and it is on that side that the process begins. Hence while the whole run of language, evincing the human natural understanding, is we see, we hear, we perceive, we think, the language of the portion of philosophy which I am now speaking of is, that objects begin and impress themselves upon our sense, and that their impressions, transformed or modified in whatever way, constitute knowledge: in ruder or rougher philosophy of the same kind they have been supposed to send forth actual emanations or physical images which did this: this was because a thing could not act where it was not, and it was supposed that it was matter, not we, that acted in perception.

The phenomenalist view rests on a supposition, one way of putting which is that we are thus passive in knowledge (though of course we must be careful about the language). As good an idea perhaps as can be gained of the phenomenalist scheme of knowledge may be gained in this way: the one physical fact which we know to take place in knowledge is that there is, as I have said, communication between particular natural agents and particular parts of our body, i. e. that there is, in such a place and body, sensation, so far as physics can conceive sensation. At this communication we are present, as it were, or in the French use, 'assist': the communication between the matter on the one side and the matter on the other is accompanied by a feeling on our part, and that is knowledge. Further, in this way, than there is communication, there is no knowledge. The knowledge and the communication are coextensive. The communication, which in respect of the particular portions of it is called 'sensation', is often in respect of the whole of it called 'experience'. The extension of knowledge, in this view, is the extension of this communication. There are all kinds of abbreviations and summarizations by the help of language, through the means of which we may multiply our communication in a manner otherwise quite impossible; and