jective confronting one another; the former
likening the universe to the works of men's hands; the latter likening
it to man himself; the former taking its metaphors from the artificer
shaping his material according to a preconceived plan for a definite
purpose; the latter, from the thinking and willing self considered as
the creator of its own personal experience.

There is enough uniformity of plan throughout the animal body to make
any one part of the organism a likeness of the whole--the eye, the
heart, or the hand. And so, presumably, there is hardly any unity we can
think of in our own little corner of experience that does not offer some
similitude of the universal unity. But to take this as an adequate
explanation; to force the metaphor to its logical consequences, to the
exclusion of every other reasonable though non-rational assent, is the
commonest but most fatal form of intellectual provincialism and
narrowness. Our mind is essentially limited not merely in that it cannot
know everything, but in that its mode of knowledge is imperfect and
analogical in regard to all that is greater than itself. It is broad
only when conscious of its narrowness.

The first difficulty into which idealism gets itself is that of
solipsism. According to its rigidly argued principles, "mind is
separated from mind by a barrier which is, not figuratively, but
literally impassable. It is impossible for any _ego_ to leap this
barrier and enter into the experience of any other _ego_." It is not an
abstract self-in-general, but my one solitary concrete self for which
all experience exists. There is no room for any other person. But this
philosophy does not account for our common-sense belief in Nature as
existing independently of self and of other selfs; or in those other
selfs with their several and distinct spheres of experience.

The unification it effects when treated rigorously as a complete
philosophy leaves out of account the best part of what it was bound to
account for. In spite of idealism, the idealist goes on _believing_ in
other persons or spheres of experience, and in Nature as the experience
of a Divine Person. But since, on his principles, persons are mutually
exclusive, and none can enter the sphere of another's experience, to see
with his eyes, or to feel with his nerves, since,

Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe
Our hermit spirits dwell and range apart,

we are thrown back on a disconnected plurality