contraction out of conscious inference seems to justify this use of
language, even apart from the fact that the nervous processes in the two
cases are pretty certainly the same.

[151] If we turn from the region of physical to that of moral ideas, we
see this historical collision between common and individual conviction
in a yet more impressive form. The teacher of a new moral truth has
again and again been set down to be an illusionist by a society which
was itself under the sway of a long-reigning error. As George Eliot
observes, "What we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of
past and present realities--a willing movement of a man's soul with the
larger sweep of the world's forces."

[152] To make this account of the philosophic problem of the
object-world complete, I ought to touch not only on the distinction
between the vulgar and the scientific view of material things, but also
on the distinction, within physical science, between the less and the
more abstract view roughly represented by molar and molecular physics.

[153] For an excellent account of the distinction between the scientific
and the philosophic point of view, see Mr. Shadworth Hodgson's
_Philosophy of Reflection_, Bk. I. chs. i. and iii.; also Bk. III. chs.
vii. and viii.

[154] I hold, in spite of Berkeley's endeavours to reconcile his
position with that of common sense, that the popular view does at least
tend in this direction. That is to say, the every-day habit, when
considering the external world, of abstracting from particular minds,
leads on insensibly to that complete detachment of it from mind in
general which expresses itself in the first stage of philosophic
reflection, crude realism. The physicist appears to me, both from the
first essays in Greek "nature-philosophy," as also from the not
infrequent confusion even to-day between a perfectly safe "scientific
materialism" and a highly questionable philosophic materialism, to share
in this tendency to take separate consideration for separate existence.
Each new stage of abstraction in physical science gives birth to a new
attempt to find an independent reality, a thing-in-itself, hidden
further away from sense.

[155] See the interesting autobiographical record of the growth of
philosophic doubt in the _Premiere Meditation_ of Descartes.

[156] The appeal is not, as we have seen, invariably from sight to
touch, but may be in the reverse direction, as in the recognitio