nscrupulous as to the
means he employed; that _indifferentism_ is the true outcome of every
view of the world which makes infinity and continuity to be its
essence, and that pessimistic or optimistic attitudes pertain to the
mere accidental subjectivity of the moment; finally, that the
identification of contradictories, so far from being the
self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a
self-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, and
terminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood
of vertiginous amazement at a meaningless infinity.

[1] Reprinted from Mind, April, 1882.

[2] The seeming contradiction between the infinitude of space and the
fact that it is all finished and given and there, can be got over in
more than one way. The simplest way is by idealism, which
distinguishes between space as actual and space as potential. For
idealism, space only exists so far as it is represented; but all
actually represented spaces are finite; it is only possibly
representable spaces that are infinite.

[3] Not only for simplicity's sake do we select space as the paragon of
a rationalizing continuum. Space determines the relations of the items
that enter it in a far more intricate way than does time; in a far more
fixed way than does the ego. By this last clause I mean that if things
are in space at all, they must conform to geometry; while the being in
an ego at all need not make them conform to logic or any other manner
of rationality. Under the sheltering wings of a self the matter of
unreason can lodge itself as safely as any other kind of content. One
cannot but respect the devoutness of the ego-worship of some of our
English-writing Hegelians. But at the same time one cannot help
fearing lest the monotonous contemplation of so barren a principle as
that of the pure formal self (which, be it never so essential a
condition of the existence of a world of organized experience at all,
must notwithstanding take its own _character_ from, not give the
character to, the separate empirical data over which its mantle is
cast), one cannot but fear, I say, lest the religion of the
transcendental ego should, like all religions of the 'one thing
needful,' end by sterilizing and occluding the minds of its believers.

[4] Journal of Speculative Philosophy, viii. 37.

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WHAT PSYCHICAL RESEARCH HAS ACCOMPLISHED.[1]

"The great field for new discoveries,"