blance to its cause than one of Bach's fugues has to the
person who is playing it; or than a piece of poetry has to the mouth and
lips of a reciter. It is enough for all the practical purposes of human
existence if we find that our trust in the representations of
consciousness is verified by results; and that, by their help, we are
enabled "to walk surefootedly in this life."

Thus the method, or path which leads to truth, indicated by Descartes,
takes us straight to the Critical Idealism of his great successor Kant.
It is that Idealism which declares the ultimate fact of all knowledge to
be a consciousness, or, in other words, a mental phenomenon; and
therefore affirms the highest of all certainties, and indeed the only
absolute certainty, to be the existence of mind. But it is also that
Idealism which refuses to make any assertions, either positive or
negative, as to what lies beyond consciousness. It accuses the subtle
Berkeley of stepping beyond the limits of knowledge when he declared
that a substance of matter does not exist; and of illogicality, for not
seeing that the arguments which he supposed demolished the existence of
matter were equally destructive to the existence of soul. And it refuses
to listen to the jargon of more recent days about the "Absolute," and
all the other hypostatized adjectives, the initial letters of the names
of which are generally printed in capital letters; just as you give a
Grenadier a bearskin cap, to make him look more formidable than he is by
nature.

I repeat, the path indicated and followed by Descartes which we have
hitherto been treading, leads through doubt to that critical Idealism
which lies at the heart of modern metaphysical thought. But the
"Discourse" shows us another, and apparently very different, path, which
leads, quite as definitely, to that correlation of all the phaenomena of
the universe with matter and motion, which lies at the heart of modern
physical thought, and which most people call Materialism.

The early part of the seventeenth century, when Descartes reached
manhood, is one of the great epochs of the intellectual life of mankind.
At that time, physical science suddenly strode into the arena of public
and familiar thought, and openly challenged, not only Philosophy and the
Church, but that common ignorance which passes by the name of Common
Sense. The assertion of the motion of the earth was a defiance to all
three, and Physical Science threw down her