ressure of the world, and build their paradise apart, simple, and hidden
in the wilderness; while all the ultimate hopes and assurances of the
spirit escape altogether into the silent society of nature, of truth, of
essence, far from those fatuous worldly conventions which hardly make up
for their tyranny by their instability: for the prevalent moral fashion is
always growing old, and human nature is always becoming young again.
World-worship is the expedient of those who, having lost the soul that is
in them, look for it in things external, where there is no soul: and by a
curious recoil, it is also the expedient of those who seek their lost soul
in actual consciousness, where it also is not: for sensations and ideas
are not the soul but only passing and partial products of its profound
animal life. Moral consciousness in particular would never have arisen and
would be gratuitous, save for the ferocious bias of a natural living
creature, defending itself against its thousand enemies.

Nor would knowledge in its turn be knowledge if it were merely intuition
of essence, such as the sensualist, the poet, or the dialectician may rest
in. If the imagery of logic or passion ever comes to convey _knowledge_,
it does so by virtue of a concomitant physical adjustment to external
things; for the nerve of real or transcendent knowledge is the notice
which one part of the world may take of another part; and it is this
momentous cognisance, no matter what intangible feelings may supply terms
for its prosody, that enlarges the mind to some practical purpose and
informs it about the world. Consciousness then ceases to be passive sense
or idle ideation and becomes belief and intelligence. Then the essences
which form the "content of consciousness" may be vivified and trippingly
run over, like the syllables of a familiar word, in the active recognition
of things and people and of all the ominous or pliable forces of nature.
For essences, being eternal and non-existent in themselves, cannot come to
consciousness by their own initiative, but only as occasion and the subtle
movements of the soul may evoke their forms; so that the fact that they
are given to consciousness has a natural status and setting in the
material world, and is part of the same natural event as the movement of
the soul and body which supports that consciousness.

There is therefore no need of refuting idealism, which is an honest
examination of conscience in a reflect