ignness, be exorcised
from other things and leave them unitary like the space they fill?
Could this be done, the philosophic kingdom of heaven would be at hand.

But the moment we turn to the material qualities {267} of being, we
find the continuity ruptured on every side. A fearful jolting begins.
Even if we simplify the world by reducing it to its mechanical bare
poles,--atoms and their motions,--the discontinuity is bad enough. The
laws of clash, the effects of distance upon attraction and repulsion,
all seem arbitrary collocations of data. The atoms themselves are so
many independent facts, the existence of any one of which in no wise
seems to involve the existence of the rest. We have not banished
discontinuity, we have only made it finer-grained. And to get even
that degree of rationality into the universe we have had to butcher a
great part of its contents. The secondary qualities we stripped off
from the reality and swept into the dust-bin labelled 'subjective
illusion,' still _as such_ are facts, and must themselves be
rationalized in some way.

But when we deal with facts believed to be purely subjective, we are
farther than ever from the goal. We have not now the refuge of
distinguishing between the 'reality' and its appearances. Facts of
thought being the only facts, differences of thought become the only
differences, and identities of thought the only identities there are.
Two thoughts that seem different are different to all eternity. We can
no longer speak of heat and light being reconciled in any _tertium
quid_ like wave-motion. For motion is motion, and light is light, and
heat heat forever, and their discontinuity is as absolute as their
existence. Together with the other attributes and things we conceive,
they make up Plato's realm of immutable ideas. Neither _per se_ calls
for the other, hatches it out, is its 'truth,' creates it, or has any
sort of inward community with it except that of being comparable {268}
in an ego and found more or less differing, or more or less resembling,
as the case may be. The world of qualities is a world of things almost
wholly discontinuous _inter se_. Each only says, "I am that I am," and
each says it on its own account and with absolute monotony. The
continuities of which they _partake_, in Plato's phrase, the ego,
space, and time, are for most of them the only grounds of union they
possess.

It might seem as if in the mere 'partaking' there lay a c