t make worldly interests loom larger and might
induce mankind, against the evidence of their senses and the still small
voice in their hearts, to live as if their worldly interests were absolute
and must needs dominate the spirit.

Morally this system thus came to sanction a human servitude to material
things such as ancient materialists would have scorned; and theoretically
the system did not escape the dogmatic commitments of common sense against
which it protested. For far from withdrawing into the depths of the
private spirit, it professed to describe universal experience and the
evolution of all human ideas. This notion of "experience" originally
presupposed a natural agent or subject to endure that experience, and to
profit by it, by learning to live in better harmony with external
circumstances. Each agent or subject of experience might, at other times,
become an object of experience also: for they all formed part of a
material world, which they might envisage in common in their perceptions.
Now the criticism which repudiates this common material medium, like all
criticism or doubt, is secondary and partial: it continues to operate with
all the assumptions of common sense, save the one which it is expressly
criticising. So, in repudiating the material world, this philosophy
retains the notion of various agents or subjects gathering experience; and
we are not expected to doubt that there are just as many streams of
experience without a world, as there were people in the world when the
world existed. But the number and nature of these experiences have now
become undiscoverable, the material persons having been removed who
formerly were so placed as to gather easily imagined experiences, and to
be able to communicate them; and the very notion of experience has been
emptied of its meaning, when no external common world subsists to impose
that same experience on everybody. It was not knowledge of existing
experiences _in vacuo_ that led common sense to assume a material world,
but knowledge of an existing material world led it to assume existing, and
regularly reproducible, experiences.

Thus the whole social convention posited by empirical idealism is borrowed
without leave, and rests on the belief in nature for which it is
substituted.

VIII

Page 21. _The literary psychologist may come very near to the truth of
experience._

Experience cannot be in itself an object of science, because it is
essentially invi