has been unceasingly stigmatised as holding that there is no
material world, merely because he exposed a self-contradiction in the
mode of viewing it, common to the vulgar and to philosophers, and
suggested a mode of escaping the contradiction by an altered rendering
of the facts. The case is very peculiar. The received and
self-contradictory view is exceedingly simple and intelligible in its
statement; it is well adapted, not merely for all the commoner purposes
of life, but even for most scientific purposes. The supposition of an
independent material world, and an independent mental world, created
apart, and coming into mutual contact--the one the objects perceived,
and the other the mind perceiving--expresses (or over-expresses) the
division of the sciences into sciences of matter and sciences of mind;
and the highest laws of the material world at least are in no respect
falsified by it. On the other hand, any attempt to state the facts of
the outer world on Berkeley's plan, or on any plan that avoids the
self-contradiction, is most cumbrous and unmanageable. A smaller, but
exactly parallel instance of the situation is familiar to us. The daily
circuit of the sun around the earth, supposed to be fixed, so exactly
answers all the common uses that, in spite of its being false, we adhere
to it in the language of every-day life. It is a convenient
misrepresentation, and deceives nobody. And such will, in all
likelihood, be the usage regarding the external world, after the
contradiction is admitted, and rectified by a metaphysical circumlocution.
Speculators are still only trying their hand at an unobjectionable
circumlocution; but we may almost be sure that nothing will ever
supersede, for practical uses, the notion of the distinct worlds of Mind
and Matter. If, after the Copernican demonstration of the true position
of the sun, we still find it requisite to keep up the fiction of his
daily course; much more, after the final accomplishment of the
Berkeleyan revolution (to my mind inevitable), shall we retain the
fiction of an independent external world: only, we shall then know how
to fall back upon some mode of stating the case, without incurring the
contradiction.

* * * * *

IV. To return to the Will. The fact that we have to save, and to
represent in adequate language, is this:--A voluntary action is a
sequence distinct and _sui generis;_ a human being avoiding the cold,
searching for